The coverage in this book is genuinely refreshing: from dim origins of the various ethnic and linguistic groups of Indochina; through the fascinating but frustratingly scant data on pre-Angkorean times; to the glory of Angkor itself; and then into the welcome light of more ample documentation, be it Chinese, European, Siamese or Vietnamese; and finally, of course, colonization, modern war, and the staggering horror of the Khmer Rouge. I believe that history--all history--is the mother of insight, and Chandler's work serves to bolster this opinion. Even the pre-Angkorean chapters--which, as I noted, are cursed by a paucity of evidence--fired my mind: I am now fascinated by the "indianization" of Southeast Asia that occurred in the first millenium AD. It struck me that it was one of the few times where a civilization spread its culture in a big way without either much violence or emigration. [Are there parallels with the contemporary global spread of American culture? True, American ascendance has not been without a torrent of violence--as amply recounted in this book--but I would submit that force has, if anything, hindered rather than advanced the adoption of American cultural norms.] This book is also a welcome antidote to the myriad histories of Southeast Asia that treat all the events before European colonization as the merest of preambles. We learn, for instance, that well before Cambodia became a disposable pawn in bloody post-war neo-imperialist games, it was long an important prize in a previous bipolar arena of gruesome geopolitical struggle--that between Vietnam and Siam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus the tragedy of modern Cambodia does not lie in Western, patronizing visions of the Cambodians as innocent children, but rather in the story of a wordly civilization that had endured and survived so many depradations from outsiders, only to all but self-destruct in our own time.
