Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Perang Kemerdekaan Indonesia.

Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David van Reybrouck

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After making Majaphait one of the last reads of last years Cannonball Read, I decided to keep with my South East Asian history roll with Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David van Reybrouck. As you can see, I’m also continuing with my long standard interest in Australia’s immediate northern neighbor. It just boggles the mind that such a large, diverse country has such a small impact on the public consciousness. I think a lot of this has to do with […]

The Hindu-Buddhist Empire You’ve Never Heard Of.

Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia's Greatest Empire by Herald van der Linde

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I mentioned this one in the best and worst books round up at the end of the year so now I feel obliged to post a review before we actually hit the end of the year. While it’s often said that history is written by the victors, I think  reality is a little more complex than that. A great empire celebrated in one era may fade into obscurity in the next. Geopolitical shifts can suppress the stories of past triumphs, and without visible monuments or […]

“Oh wretched little one—just like evildoers, the wretched don’t die easy.”

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

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From the very first page: “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst. It all started with a noise coming from an old gravesite with an unmarked tombstone covered in knee-high grass, but […]

The past is never past

Beauty is a Wound: A Novel by Eka Kurniawan

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Cbr15bingo Asia & Oceania I have never before read a novel quite like Beauty is a Wound. It is a combination of history, myth, magic, spiritualism, violence and absurdity. Set in the fictional Indonesian town Halimunda, Beauty is a Wound is the story of three generations of a family and of Indonesia under Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, and the political strife that followed WWII. It is about the greed and selfishness that allows individuals and nations to dominate, use and abuse the objects of their […]

“Towards the end of my first time in Indonesia I stayed in a house on the edge of the jungle and dreamed the worst nightmares I have known since I was a child.”

In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos by Richard Lloyd Parry

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CBR15Bingo: Asia & Oceania (all about Indonesia and experiencing the uprising that unseated Suharto) I picked this up because I loved The People Who Eat Darkness, Parry’s later work about trying to catch a murderer in Japan. It is such a great book that I’ve been wanting to read other work by him, so I was happy to find out that he’d written this part memoir, part on the spot reporting about the time he’d spent in Indonesia as a young journalist. I didn’t know […]

So, Do You Like Knives?

The Martial Arts of Indonesia: A Guide to Pencak Silat, Kuntao and Traditional Weapons by Donn F. Draeger

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  Yes, I am really amusing myself here for picking a ‘sportsball’ book where balls don’t really feature in the sports of focus. To make up for that though—as I discovered—nearly everything else that you could think of has been used as a weapon in an Indonesian martial art at some point. This includes knives, more knives, swords, shields, sticks, more knives, whips, chains, and teeth. And the knives? More knives than spam in Monty Python. Some of these people folks really love their knives. […]



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