Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

Notes from the Hard Shoulder by James May

Traded in recently @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

Top Gear presenter James May brings together another brilliant collection of his most controversial and humorous writing.

From tales of motoring adventures through India, Russia and Iceland, to classic articles on essential subjects such as driving songs and haunted car parks, these gems from the number one car connoisseur will take readers on a motoring journey that will amuse and entertain in equal measure.

[Daveo]

The Lao: Gender, Power, and Livelihood

By Carol Ireson-Doolittle & Geraldine Moreno-Black..

Traded in recently with Diving in Thailand @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

The Lao discusses culture and village life in Laos, exploring topics of kinship and family, gender relations, households, religion, livelihood strategies, and ethnicity.

In particular, the effects of recent development projects on the relative power of men and women in rural Lao society, and the responses of women to those changes, are highlighted.

Ireson-Doolittle and Moreno-Black not only provide a description of life on the ground but also explore how local affairs are connected to the wider world, and how the Lao people preserve traditions while also responding to change.

[Daveo]

Sex and Borders: Gender, National Identity, and Prostitution Policy in Thailand - by Leslie Ann Jeffrey. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

Prostitution in Thailand has been the subject of media sensationalism for decades.

Bangkok's brothels have become international icons of Third World women's exploitation in the global sex trade. Recently, however, sex workers have begun to demand not pity, but rights as workers in the global economy. This book explores how prostitution policy is linked to the disciplining of Thai national identity and gender.

Jeffrey asserts that certain images of The Prostitute have silenced discourses of prostitution as work, while fostering the idea of the peasant woman as the embodiment of national culture.

This idea, coupled with a will to shape the modern state through the behavior of middle-class men, has been a main concern of Thai prostitution policy.

Gender, the author argues, has become the mechanism through which states respond to the contradictory pressures of globalization and nation-building. Based on interviews conducted in Thailand, as well as material from the media, government, and nongovernmental organizations, the discussion stretches from the semicolonial period, through the democracy movement of the 1960's and 1970's, to the present day.

[Daveo]

Reporter: Forty Years Covering Asia by John McBeth. . .

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Reporter is an account of John McBeth's 40-year journey through Asia,more than half of that time as a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the venerable magazine long regarded as the region's English language Bible on political and economic affairs.

While necessarily a memoir, the book is more a reflection of the lives of a small group of foreign journalists who came to Asia on a wing and a prayer and in McBeth's case by ship and stayed on as fascinated witnesses to a region going through turbulent times and historic change.

Part-history, part-analysis, part storytelling and, in a smaller way, part commentary on the salad days of print journalism and its steady decline under the onslaught of television and the Internet, Reporter introduces us to a diverse cast of journalists, diplomats, officials, politicians and generals McBeth meets and befriends along the way.

The book deals with the five coups and attempted coups McBeth covered during his 16 years in Thailand; the Khmer Rouge reign of terror; the Indochinese refugee invasion; and the dramatic democratic transitions in South Korea and Indonesia, which helped change the face of once authorian Asia.

[Daveo]

Spy Master: The Betrayal of MI5 Mass Market by William J. West. . .

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Uncovers the role of Sir Roger Hollis, the knighted head of British intelligence from 1956 to 1965 - in a plot to undermine the British government.

[Daveo]

Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson..

We have a good selection of Clarkson @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

Jeremy Clarkson gets under the skin of 12 countries by looking at the cars people drive and how they drive them. Hilarious travel writing.

[Daveo]

Underbelly by John Silvester & Andrew Rule.

In the true crime section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

As the world goes about its daily business, criminals and cops engage in a deadly battle of wits.

This book delves into the crimes that police have to deal with day after day. Murderers, hitmen, kidnappers, and drug dealers all feature in this collection of true crime stories.

Take the drug dealer who walked out of a restaurant bragging that he's killed a man, unaware that his fellow diner was an undercover policeman.

Or the young mother, whose death was written off as suicide, but which subsequent investigation proved to be something much more sinister.

[Daveo]

Weapons of Mass Destruction: The No-Nonsense Guide to Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons Today by Robert Hutchinson. . . .

In the War section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

When Tom Lehrer sang 'We'll all go together when we go', the world was gripped by fear of nuclear holocaust.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat was assumed to have gone away.

But Libya, Iraq, Iran and North Korea and others are building weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological and chemical - and terrorists like bin Laden are trying to get their hands on them too.

The next live Scud missile launch could signal the next Hiroshima.

Russia has enough weapons grade plutonium in poorly guarded facilities to make 20,000 atomic bombs.

Osama bin Laden only needs one - chemical weapons remain the 'poor man's nuke'. Saddam believed his chemical weapons saved him in the first Gulf War. Islamic fundamentalists have been preparing to use ricin for mass poisoning in London.

A Japanese doomsday cult used sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground.

Robert Hutchinson's measured account provides a straightforward guide to the weapons that threaten civilisation.

[Daveo]

We have a good selection of Peter James books @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_James_(writer)

[Daveo]

Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse,

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Black Rain is a novel by Japanese author Masuji Ibuse. Ibuse began serializing Black Rain in the magazine Shincho in January 1965.

The novel is based on historical records of the devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

[Daveo]

Waterloo The Aftermath Paul O'Keeffe. . . .

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TWO HUNDRED YEARS AFTER ONE OF HISTORY'S MOST PIVOTAL BATTLES and a dramatic retelling of its devastating aftermath.

After midnight, 19 June 1815...

On the battlefield more than 50,000 men and 7,000 horses lie dead and wounded; the wreckage of a once proud French Grande Armée struggles in abject disorder to the Belgian frontier pursued by murderous Prussian lancers; and Napoleon Bonaparte, exhausted and stunned at the scale of his defeat, rode through the darkness towards Paris, abdication and captivity.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, news of the battle shaped the consciousness of an age.

Drawing on a multiplicity of contemporary voices and viewpoints, Paul O’Keeffe brings into focus as never before the sights, sounds and smells of the battlefield, of conquest and defeat, of celebration and riot.

[Daveo]

The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J. Evans..

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the seventy years since the demise of the Third Reich, there has been a significant transformation in the ways in which the modern world understands Nazism.

In this brilliant and eye-opening collection, Richard J. Evans, the acclaimed author of the Third Reich trilogy, offers a critical commentary on that transformation, exploring how major changes in perspective have informed research and writing on the Third Reich in recent years. Drawing on his most notable writings from the last two decades, Evans reveals the shifting perspectives on Nazism's rise to political power, its economic intricacies, and its subterranean extension into postwar Germany. Evans considers how the Third Reich is increasingly viewed in a broader international context, as part of the age of imperialism; discusses the growing emphasis on the larger economic and cultural circumstances of the era; and emphasizes the development of research into Nazi society, particularly in the understanding of Nazi Germany as a political system based on popular approval and consent. Exploring the complex relationship between memory and history, Evans also points out the places where the growing need to confront the misdeeds of Nazism and expose the complicity of those who participated has led to crude and sweeping condemnation, when instead historians should be making careful distinctions.

Written with Evans' sharp-eyed insight and characteristically compelling style, these essays offer a summation of the collective cultural memory of Nazism in the present, and suggest the degree to which memory must be subjected to the close scrutiny of history.

[Daveo]

Football - Bloody Hell!: The Biography of Alex Ferguson. . . by Patrick Barclay

This book Asia books costs 545 baht our price 180 baht @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange...plus the 50% trade in for credit when you finished with it..

Sir Alex Ferguson is without doubt the most controversial and compelling figure in football today.

For many he ranks as the greatest manager of all time.

He is certainly the most successful, his reign at Manchester United has seen him win every major footballing honour. And then win them again. It’s been over ten years since that unforgettable night in Barcelona when Ferguson’s embattled players triumphed over Bayern Munich in the dying seconds of the Champions League final.

Since then Ferguson has presided over the rise and fall and rise again of José Mourinho, the arrival and departure of the world’s best player, Ronaldo, the removal of one English talisman – Beckham – and the irresistible instalment of another – Rooney. He has been instrumental in making the Premier League the most successful competition in football, and he has endured while the mountains of cash have turned to valleys of debt. It is only now, as Ferguson nears the end of his career, that conclusions can be drawn about this fascinating man. From Ferguson’s combative working class youth in Govan to his role in ushering in the debt-laden Glazer era, award-winning journalist Patrick Barclay has been pitch-side and spoken to all those who know Ferguson best: fellow managers, former players, colleagues and commentators. Barclay reveals Ferguson to be a relentless character whose ability to intimidate, control, cajole and encourage has driven his unparalleled success. In the pages of Football – Bloody Hell! the game’s biggest living legend is finally laid bare.

[Daveo]

Successful Living in Thailand by Roger Welty.

These books and more @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Capture the essence of how to adjust, understand and get the most out of living in Thailand.

This guide to the practicalities of living and working in Thailand will help transform readers from being 'outsiders' to being and 'insider' by providing a unique resource on how to make a success of your day to day life in Thailand not only for first time expats and visitors but also for long term foreign residents of the country

[Daveo]

Lambs To The Slaughter by Richard Glyn Jones. . .

Find this in the true crime section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

[Daveo]

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami. .

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It was a clear spring day, Monday, March 20, 1995, when five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo conducted chemical warfare on the Tokyo subway system using sarin, a Poison gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide.

The unthinkable had happened, a major urban transit system had become the target of a terrorist attack. In an attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakami, internationally acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and arguably Japan’s most important contemporary novelist, talked to the people who lived through the catastrophe - from a Subway Authority employee with survivor guilt, to a fashion salesman with more venom for the media than for the perpetrators, to a young cult member who vehemently condemns the attack though he has not quit Aum.

Through these and many other voices, Murakami exposes intriguing aspects of the Japanese psyche. And as he discerns the fundamental issues leading to the attack, we achieve a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere. Hauntingly compelling and inescapably important, Underground is a powerful work of journalistic literature from one of the world’s most perceptive writers.

[Daveo]

Jungle Rules: A True Story of Marine Justice in Vietnam by Charles Henderson. . .

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From the author of the military classics Marine Sniper and Silent Warrior comes the riveting tale of a dramatic military trial and a war within a war, where the fight is not for victory, but survival... In Vietnam, there’s the way things are supposed to be done and the way they actually get done.

Playing by “Jungle Rules,” the U.S. military tries to keep control of whatever situation arises, often allowing convenience to outweigh justice.

This is the battlefield Captain Terry O’Connor of the JAG Corps is stepping onto and the battle is about to start with a murder. After a long day in the boonies, Private Celestine Anderson returned to base, only to come under fire from a group of racist white marines.

He apparently snapped, and buried his field axe in the skull of one of his tormentors.

The inexperienced O’Connor has been assigned to defend him in a trial that seems to begin as an open-and-shut case, but ends up pulling O’Connor into the heart of the Vietnam conflict, where bullets overrule books and death is the final judge.

This recounting of a true story of brutality and justice continues Charles Henderson’s tradition of bringing readers into the heart of the American experience in Vietnam.

[Daveo]

No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money by David Lough.. .

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The fascinating story of Winston Churchill's lifetime of tangled personal finances

Meticulously researched by a senior private banker now turned historian, No More Champagne reveals for the first time the full extent of the iconic British war leader's private struggle to maintain a way of life instilled by his upbringing and expected of his public position.

Lough uses Churchill's own most private records, many never researched before, to chronicle his family's chronic shortage of money, his own extravagance, and his recurring losses from gambling or trading in shares and currencies.

Churchill tried to keep himself afloat by borrowing to the hilt, putting off bills, and writing "all over the place"; when all else failed, he had to ask family or friends to come to the rescue. Yet within five years of the war, he had taken advantage of his worldwide celebrity to transform his private fortunes with the same ruthlessness as he waged war, reaching 1945 with today's equivalent of £3 million in the bank. His lucrative war memoirs were still to come.

Throughout the story, Lough highlights the threads of risk, energy, persuasion, and sheer willpower to survive that link Churchill's private and public lives. He shows how constant money pressures often tempted him to short-circuit the ethical standards expected of public figures in his day before usually pulling back to put duty first-except where the taxman was involved.

[Daveo]

The Good German by Joseph Kanon . .

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With World War II finally ending, Jake Geismar, former Berlin correspondent for CBS, has wangled one of the coveted press slots for the Potsdam Conference.

His assignment: a series of articles on the Allied occupation.

His personal agenda: to find Lena, the German mistress he left behind at the outbreak of the war.

When Jake stumbles on a murder - an American soldier washes up on the conference grounds - he thinks he has found the key that will unlock his Berlin story.

What Jake finds instead is a larger story of corruption and intrigue reaching deep into the heart of the occupation. Berlin in July 1945 is like nowhere else, a tragedy, and a feverish party after the end of the world.

As Jake searches the ruins for Lena, he discovers that years of war have led to unimaginable displacement and degradation.

As he hunts for the soldier's killer, he learns that Berlin has become a city of Secrets, a lunar landscape that seethes with social and political tension.

When the two searches become entangled, Jake comes to understand that the American Military Government is already fighting a new enemy in the east, busily identifying the "good Germans" who can help win the next war.

And hanging over everything is the larger crime, a crime so huge that it seems, the worst irony - beyond punishment.

At once a murder mystery, a moving love story, and a riveting portrait of a unique time and place, The Good German is a historical thriller of the first rank.

[Daveo]

The Backpacker by John Harris

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For fans of Alex Garland's The Beach, a true story of out-of-control travel

"Leaving the blinding sand for the cool shade of the trees, I walked carefully through the undergrowth to where Dave, using two twigs as chopsticks, was picking up a freshly severed human finger . . . "

John's trip to India starts badly when his girlfriend, with whom he is traveling, returns home.

Left to his own devices, he soon finds himself looking at the sharp end of a knife in a train station cubicle.

But his life is saved and turned upside down by Rick, an enigmatic fellow traveler who persuades John to question his mundane plans for the future, risking it all for much, much more.

Fast forward to the Thai island of Koh Pha-Ngan, where John, Rick, and their new friend Dave pose as millionaire aristocrats in a hedonistic Eden of beautiful women, free drugs, and wild beach parties.

However, when they find themselves hotly pursued by the Thai Mafia, they embark on adrenaline-fueled journeys to Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, and Hong Kong, facing danger at every turn.

This is not travel writing for the faint of heart: this is an unbelievable true story of the hunt for excess, at any cost.

[Daveo]

The Pilgrim's Progress in Modern English by John Bunyan.

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First published in 1678, this book has been called "the greatest allegory ever written."

It is just as relevant today as it was when John Bunyan wrote it from his prison cell.

The Pilgrim's Progress is a story every Christian can relate to.

From Christian's first stirrings of the Holy Spirit beckoning him to follow Christ, to his final arrival in the Celestial City of God - you will feel as if it is you reliving your spiritual journey.

[Daveo]

The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksman by Brandon Webb..

 

In the War section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

 

The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksman

[Daveo]

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer...

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This extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities, where some 40,000 people still practice polygamy.

Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith.

Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

[Daveo]

City Psychos: From The Monte Carlo Mob to the Silver Cod Squad: Four Decades of Terrace Terror by Shaun Tordoff. . . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

[Daveo]

Mem Cries by Trevor M Brindley. . .

This book Asia books costs 345 baht our price 120 baht @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange...plus the 50% trade in for credit when you finished with it..

Mem Cries tells the story of the extraordinary mid-life crisis experienced by an average guy – just like you and me.

He awakes one day to find himself divorced from his wife, estranged from his new girlfriend, prematurely removed from his career and totally confused as to what to do next. Three years earlier, he enjoyed an adventure holiday in the Southern hemisphere that eventually took him to Thailand, where in Ao Nang, Krabi, he met two beguiling characters called Mem and Ice.

On December 26th 2004 whilst enjoying family festivities at home in England, he witnessed the disturbing television reports of the devastating Tsunami that struck the region he had such fond memories of.

Fate and destiny play their parts in the tale of his quest to track down Mem and Ice and his search to find some alternative and more meaningful form of existence.