Tl;dr? Student? Teacher? Fairly new to Thailand? You don't want this book. You need David K Wyatt's Thailand: A Short History. Which is longer and more thorough than this mess. Wyatt even covers the origin and range of Tai people if you're curious about the Shan, Tai Daeng, Lao, Tai Lu and their relatives. Genuine footnotes and bibliography too. Follow that with Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as Modern Nation State by Charles Keyes and The King Never Smiles by Paul Handley.
* Echoes of Seattle’s undone business resound in UN trade conference
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan voiced the views of ministers from the developing world when he said the “main losers in today’s unequal world” weren’t people who had been over-exposed to globalization, but those who had been excluded from it.
* A wayward Marxist state of mind
It’s still a terrific country for tourists. Laotians are chatty and relaxed, with neither the rapacity of the Vietnamese nor the trip-wire tempers of the Cambodians. Perhaps inspired by the American journalist Bob Woodward, Kremmer claims to have extracted the fatal details from a Pathet Lao cadre during a fantastic meeting deep in the heart of the Lao gulag. For anyone familiar with Laos, the telecommunications and logistics required for such a meeting are inconceivable.
Susan J Cunningham 