Bookshelf news

Time for a sneak preview into what books are coming out, or one's that I've missed and are already in the public domain. Let's look first at the travel guidebooks on Cambodia and I see that the National Geographic Traveller Cambodia book, a first edition and edited by Trevor Ranges, will be out in February 2010 - 320 pages. Resisting the temptation to put Angkor Wat on the book cover, Nat Geo look to have gone for the ever-popular monk shot! The following month the first Frommer's Cambodia and Laos guidebook, edited by Daniel White will be published. 352 pages. Both editors live in Thailand I believe - couldn't they find anyone in Cambodia itself? A new historical fiction piece, about the US Navy's involvement in Cambodia in the early 70s, has been self-published by HL Serra via AuthorHouse. It's called NILO Ha Tien: A novel of Navy Intelligence in Cambodia. 400 pages, published this month. Another July release is Joshua Hallsey's 120 page attempt to produce a coherent narrative of US policies here titled US Foreign Policy in Cambodia 1945-1993. Last month, Isabelle Chan's 148-page thesis was published, titled Rethinking Transtitional Justice: Cambodia, Genocide, and a Victim-Centered Model. Another new book which most likely won't find its way to my bookshelf is Beyond Democracy in Cambodia: Political Reconstruction in a Post-conflict Society by Joakim Ojendal and Mona Lilja, only because I won't have time to read it.

A few books that I missed when they were published. In April, Tola Ferris, a high school student in the US, published her 85 page effort called My Life Far Away: Adventures in Cambodia, about her recollections from growing up in her homeland. In October 2008 Bangkok-based photographer Mat Roe self-published Dear Cambodia, 108 pages of his pictures documented from over a dozen trips here. Last but not least is a book by Jay Eric Kanter, a real life explorer and adventurer in the Indiana Jones mould (yeah right). In December of last year he published via Pre Saa press his 165 page book, Way Beyond Angkor: Exploring the Lost Temples of Cambodia in which he makes his way around Cambodia discovering a series of ancient temples, alongwith meeting various odd-balls en route. Talking of odd-balls, I'm surprised I've never bumped into him on my own travels. By the way he lives in New Jersey and Thailand when he's not unearthing all these temples in Cambodia.