Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

No Time for Fear: How a shark attack survivor beat the odds

by Paul de Gelder......

IMPROVISE.

ADAPT.

OVERCOME.

These three words - the mantra of the Australian Army - resonated with Paul de Gelder the first time he heard them.

Paul chased adventure wherever he could find it, from his wild ride as a hoodlum teen and his drug-and-alcohol fuelled stint working in a strip club to hauling his way up to the elite echelons of the defence forces.

But trouble hunted him down in the form of a brutal shark in February 2009. Paul lost two limbs, and his career as a daredevil navy clearance diver was flung into jeopardy.

Drawing on everything his eventful life had taught him, Paul left nothing to chance in his recovery.

He fought through excruciating pain, smashing challenge after challenge, and amazing the medical staff with his will to succeed. His inspiring story takes ‘never say die’ to a whole new level.

[Daveo]

These and many more from at Canterbury Tales Bookshop - Book exchange Pattaya... we ship books all over Thailand.

[Daveo]

[Daveo]

Terrify No More : Young Girls Held Captive and the Daring Undercover Operation to Win Their Freedom by Gregg Hunter and Gary A. Haugen..

[Daveo]

Hearts of Stone by Simon Scarrow..

1938.

A perfect summer on the Greek island of Lefkas for three young people untroubled by the simmering politics of Europe.

Peter, visiting from Germany while his father leads an archaeological dig, has become close friends with locals Andreas and Eleni.

As the world slides towards conflict and Peter is forced to leave, they swear to meet again.

1943: Andreas and Eleni have joined the partisan forces resisting the German invasion.

Peter has returned - now a dangerously well-informed enemy intelligence officer.

A friendship formed in peace will turn into a desperate battle between enemies sworn to sacrifice everything for the countries that they love.

2013. Dieter asks Anna to find out about her gran's past in Greece.

Can they meet for coffee, or a meal when he visits from Germany? She pus him off, but asks Eleni Moss what happened.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Daveo

[Daveo]

A Woman of Bangkok by Jack Reynolds..

Acknowledged as one of the most memorable novels about Thailand, “A Woman of Bangkok” was first published to critical acclaim in London and New York in the 1950's and is a classic of Bangkok fiction.

Set in 1950's Thailand, this is the story of an Englishman’s infatuation with a dance-hall hostess named Vilai.

No ordinary prostitute, Vilai is one of the most memorable in literature’s long line of brazen working girls

[Daveo]

Brother Number One: A Political Biography Of Pol Pot

by David P. Chandler..

In the tragic recent history of Cambodia - a past scarred by a long occupation by Vietnamese forces and by the preceding three-year reign of terror by the brutal Khmer Rouge - no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot.

As secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) since 1962 and as prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), he has been widely blamed for trying to destroy Cambodian society.

By implementing policies whose effects were genocidal, he oversaw the deaths of more than one million of his nation’s people.

The political career of Saloth Sar, better known by his nom de guerre Pol Pot, forms a critical but largely inaccessible portion of twentieth-century Cambodian history.

What we know about his life is sketchy: a comfortable childhood, three years of study in France, and a short career as a schoolteacher preceded several years - spent mostly in hiding - as a guerrilla and the commander of the victorious army in Cambodia’s civil war.

His career reached a climax when he and his associates, coming to power, attempted to transform their country along lines more radical than any attempted by a modern regime.

Driven into hiding in 1979 by invading Vietnamese forces, Pol Pot maintained his leadership of a Khmer Rouge guerrilla army in exile, remaining a power and a threat.

In this political biography, David P. Chandler throws light on the shadowy figure of Pol Pot - basing his study on interviews and on a wide range of sources in English, Cambodian, and French, the author illuminates the ideas and behavior of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post–World War II events, providing a key to understanding this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history.

In this edition, Chandler provides new information on the state of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge following the death of Pol Pot in 1997.

[Daveo]

Patpong Sisters: An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World by Cleo Odzer...

Patpong, in the heart of Bangkok, teems with bars and sex shows, catering mainly to farangs - foreigners. Cleo Odzer, a young anthropologist, spent three years studying the area.

Gaining the confidence of the bar girls and bar boys, she interviewed them at length, lived among them, accompanied several back to their families in remote villages.

She also got to know their customers, those in for a night or in forever (many fell in love and stayed on in Patpong).

From Odzer's account emerges a far different picture from the cliched image of the prostitute.

Many of the Patpong girls, smart and enterprising, use their profession for self-liberation and to support their impoverished families back home.

Warm and personal, Patpong Sisters reveals the truth about the $4 billion Bangkok economy of sex.

[Daveo]

Trafalgar & Josh by Terence Teasdale..

Gay story..

It is spring in Sydney. Dr Trafalgar Trayson, a celebrated psychiatrist working overseas returns to Australia. After twenty years of marriage and three children, he sacrifices his career, marriage, and family by falling in love with Josh, a young Maltese man separated from his parents. It is a story of turmoil and love and heart-wrenching consequences: a love that has a devastating end.

Trafalgar and Josh is an eagerly-awaited first novel from Terence Teasdale, who juggles a complicated intense tempestuous story of a co-dependent love-at-first-sight relationship between a successful psychiatrist, Dr Trayson, and Josh, a beautiful but damaged young man, and the psychiatrist's brittle on-going affiliation with an estranged bitter wife and his ambivalent adult children, and the fighting acceptance of a collapsed career.

PETER RODGERS: A pacy, moving tale of self-discovery...and heartbreak. Trafalgar Trayson confronts those forces which are all too human and which change his life forever.

OUT MAGAZINE: Terence Teasdale has performed a wondrous feat with Trafalgar & Josh. His first novel vibrates with truth and authenticity that is compelling. Don't wait for the holiday to read it.

[Daveo]

 

Not Far Enough From Worries by Colin Devonshire ...

A drug lord fathers his lesbian niece’s child, but not in the usual way!

Set in Thailand, late 1980's.

Action, fun, romance, and tears. Breathtaking violence and tender moments add to a fast-paced read - two young and gullible Englishmen move to Hua Hin to start a new life in the tropical heat.

Along the way, they meet a dodgy Dutch ship's engineer, two lovely French girls who are more interested in dogs than romance.

A tall Welsh man with a chequered history of drug abuse, but a unique skill of mixing things to make other things. This talent gets the attention of seriously evil people.

A lesbian newspaper reporter rides a powerful motorbike has an important family secret.

The whole story unfolds in an action-packed finale.

[Daveo]

The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity

by Tariq Ali..

The aerial attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, a global spectacle of unprecedented dimensions, generated an enormous volume of commentary.

The inviolability of the American mainland, breached for the first time since 1812, led to extravagant proclamations by the pundits.

It was a new world-historical turning point. The 21st century, once greeted triumphantly as marking the dawn of a worldwide neo-liberal civilization, suddenly became menaced.

The choice presented from the White House and its supporters was to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against terrorism or be damned.

Tariq Ali challenges these assumptions, arguing instead that what we have experienced is the return of History in a horrific form, with religious symbols playing a part on both sides: ‘Allah’s revenge,’ ‘God is on Our Side’ and ‘God Bless America.’

The visible violence of September 11 was the response to the invisible violence that has been inflicted on countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine and Chechnya.

Some of this has been the direct responsibility of the United States and Russia. In this wide-ranging book that provides an explanation for both the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and new forms of Western colonialism, Tariq Ali argues that many of the values proclaimed by the Enlightenment retain their relevance, while portrayals of the American Empire as a new emancipatory project are misguided

[Daveo]

Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade

by Robert Sabbag - Howard Marks (Introduction)

Called "a triumphant piece of reporting" Snowblind is an all-out, nonstop, and now classic look at the cocaine trade through the eyes of smuggler Zachary Swan.

In a brief Roman-candle career, Swan served an elegant clientele, traveling between Bogota and the nightclubs of New York, inventing intricate scams to outmaneuver the feds.

Creating diversions that were characteristically baroque, surviving on ingenuity and idiot's luck, he discovered in the process a hip, dangerous, high-velocity world that Robert Sabbag evokes with extraordinary power and humor.

"One of the best books about drugs ever written." - Robert Stone "A flat-out ballbuster.

It moves like a threshing machine with a fuel tank full of ether...." - Hunter S. Thompson "One of the first books about the cocaine trade and it is still among the best." - Norman Mailer

[Daveo]

Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison by Jordan Belfort..

[Daveo]

The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez by Philip Carlo..

The definitive account of the notorious California serial killer examines the psychology of a murderer, his crimes, and his cult following

Decades after Richard Ramirez left thirteen dead and paralyzed the city of Los Angeles in the 1980's, his name is still synonymous with fear, torture, and sadistic murder.

Philip Carlo’s classic The Night Stalker, based on years of meticulous research and extensive interviews with Ramirez, revealed the killer and his horrifying crimes to be even more chilling than anyone could have imagined.

From watching his cousin commit murder at age eleven to his nineteen death sentences to the juror who fell in love with him, the story of Ramirez is a bizarre and spellbinding descent into the very heart of human evil.

After The Night Stalker was first published, thousands of women from all over the world contacted Carlo, begging to be put in touch with the killer. Carlo interviewed them and presents their disturbing stories in this updated edition along with an exclusive death row interview where the killer himself gives his thoughts on the “Ramirez Groupies” and what he thinks they really want.

[Daveo]

The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire by Khassan Baiev.

When Chechen rebels took Moscow theatergoers hostage in October 2002, it tragically highlighted the ongoing conflict between Russia and its breakaway republic, Chechnya - a war that has claimed an estimated 200,000 Chechen lives in the past decade.

Yet the true nature of the debacle lies behind the headlines. In The Oath, a heroic Chechen doctor relates his harrowing experiences in the line of fire to bear witness to this international calamity, and illuminates his remarkable people and their culture.

In 1994, when fighting threatened to break out in Chechnya, Baiev left his promising career in Russia to aid his countrymen.

First, he worked in a Grozny hospital until it was destroyed by Russian shelling. Returning to his hometown of Alkhan Kala, he and his fellow villagers restored a clinic with his own funds, and he soon found himself the only doctor for 80,000 residents in six villages and 5,000 refugees.

During the next six years, he worked without gas, electricity, or running water, with only local anesthetics, and at one point dressed wounds with sour cream or egg yolks when supplies ran out.

He often donated his own blood for surgeries, and on one occasion performed sixty-seven amputations in forty-eight hours.

Although he mainly treated civilians, Baiev also cared for Russian soldiers and Chechen fighters alike, never allowing politics to interfere with his commitment to the Hippocratic oath.

He harbored Russian deserters and Chechen rebels at great personal risk and single-handedly rescued a Russian doctor who was scheduled to be executed. For this, Baiev was nearly killed by both the Russian special forces and Chechen extremists.

Only when the Russian Army ordered him arrested for treating a wounded rebel warlord did Baiev finally flee Chechnya.

Echoing through his memoir is the history of Chechnya, a Muslim nation the size of Connecticut with a population of one million.

Baiev explains the roots of the Chechen- Russian conflict, dating back 400 years, and he brings to life his once-beautiful ancestral home of Makazhoi where his family clan goes back generations, steeped in ancient traditions that are an intriguing blend of mountain folklore - including blood vendettas, arranged marriages, the authority of village elders and Muslim religious rituals.

And he writes frankly about the challenges of assimilating into western culture and about the post-traumatic stress disorder that has debilitated him since the war began.

The Oath is an important eyewitness account of the reality of the Chechen-Russian conflict, in which countless atrocities have been committed against average Chechens in stark contrast to the Kremlin's portrayal of the conflict.

It is also a searing, unforgettable memoir that is certain to become a classic in the literature of war.

[Daveo]

Mr. Nice by Howard Marks..

During the mid 1980's Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines, and owned 25 companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios, or offshore banks, all were money laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing.

Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford, but soon he was moving much larger quantities.

At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to 50 tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada and had contact with organizations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA, and the Mafia.

This is his extraordinary story.

[Daveo]

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (American Lectures)

by Robert Hughes.....

The author of The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, and Barcelona here delivers a withering polemic aimed at the heart of recent American politics and culture.

Culture of Complaint is a call for the re-knitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America - a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed wit and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center.

To the right, Hughes fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and especially Ronald Reagan ("with somnambulistic efficiency, Reagan educated America down to his level.

He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies").

To the left, he skewers political correctness ("political etiquette, not politics itself"), Afrocentrism, and academic obsessions with theory ("The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell").

PC censoriousness and 'family-values' rhetoric, he argues, are only two sides of the same character, extrusions of America's puritan heritage into the present - and, at root, signs of America's difficulty in seeing past the end of the Us-versus-Them mentality implanted by four decades of the Cold War.

In the long retreat from public responsibility beaten by America in the 80's, Hughes sees "a hollowness at the cultural core" - a nation "obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its language corroded by fake pity and euphemism."

It resembles "late Rome...in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives."

Culture of Complaint is fired by a deep concern for the way Hughes sees his adopted country heading. But it is not a relentless diatribe. If Hughes lambastes some aspects of American politics, he applauds Vaclav Havel's vision of politics "not as the art of the useful, but politics as practical morality, as service to the truth."

And if he denounces PC, he offers a brilliant and heartfelt defence of non-ideological multiculturalism as an antidote to Americans' difficulty in imagining the rest of the world--and other Americans.

Here, then, is an extraordinary cri de coeur, an outspoken call for the reconstruction of America's ideas about its recent self.

It is a book that everyone interested in American culture will want to read.

[Daveo]

Murder at the Horny Toad Bar: & Other Outrageous Tales of Thailand by Dean Barrett..

Among several exotic and erotic tales of Thailand, readers are introduced to Bangkok's sexiest, most daring and least principled detective, Harry Boroditsky, who solves not one but two bizarre cases including, Murder at the Horny Toad Bar.

Hard Bones Haggerty makes his appearance in a haunting tale of the Vietnam War, and, in Obsession, a man obsessed with his Thai girlfriend seeks revenge. In the non-fiction section of the book, the author writes of searching Bangkok for his Vietnam War-era barracks; he describes his encounters with the Khmer Rouge in western Thailand including a meeting with a beautiful Cambodian woman searching a refugee camp for her mother, and his need to flee a Vietnamese Army; and what happens when a traveler boards the wrong train in southern Thailand.

In the section, "Memoirs of an Oversexed Farang," the author writes of his several decades of encounters with the often enigmatic but, always lovely, ladies of Thailand.

[Daveo]

The Village by Francis J. "Bing" West Jr.

In Black Hawk Down, the fight went on for a day. In We Were Soldiers Once & Young, the fighting lasted three days. In The Village, one Marine squad fought for 495 days-half of them died.

Few American battles have been so extended, savage and personal. A handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village.

Such "Combined Action Platoons" (CAPs) are now a lost footnote about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers remain to bear witness.

This is the story of fifteen resolute young Americans matched against two hundred Viet Cong; how a CAP lived, fought and died. And why the villagers remember them to this day.

[Daveo]

The Last Siamese by Teddy Spha Palasthira..

The social and political landscape of Thailand changed forever after three momentous events in the last century.

The first happened in 1932 when the world knew our country as Siam, a group of young army officers and officials seized power and forced King Prajadhipok, Rama VII, to give up his absolute powers and accept a constitutional monarchy.

It was the nation’s first coup d’etat.

The second event was the Second World War, in particular the Japanese attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, bringing the war to the shores of Southeast Asia, and the third was when Thailand became a staunch anti-communist ally of the United States, culminating in the Vietnam War in 1965.

At the turn of each event, the Thai people were forced to take sides.

This book tells the stories of a select group of people in Siam in the last century who witnessed these events and how their lives were affected, and how some of them unwittingly ended up on opposing sides.

The stories in this book cover a span of a century and a broad swath of events – from an era when the young people of Siam were brought up in a world heavily dominated by class, monarchy and religion, to an era when Western imperialism was coming to an end and finally to the post-Second World War when America became the dominant global power.

"The Last Siamese" , this is not a history book nor a collection of biographies, but entertaining essays on diverse individuals.

What they have in common is that each person led an uncommon life and each chapter is an exciting adventure that took place in exciting and tumultuous times.

"Teddy Spha Palasthira" the author rightly calls this book "Journeys in War and Peace" .

The author has chosen to help us remember some of these events. We hope that this book will help younger readers become aware of our nation’s recent past and better understand the way we were.

[Daveo]

Two Tales of the East Indies: "The Last House in the World" and "The Counselor" (Library of the Indies)

by Beb Vuyk - H. J. Friedericy & André Lefevere...

For centuries, women who have lived in inhospitable regions have displayed enormous courage, resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and determination in their daily lives.

The Last House in the World is an autobiographical novel based on the author's life on the island of Buru in the Moluccas. Beb Vuyk lived in a very remote area, in a house so isolated that it seemed at the edge of the world.

Vuyk is particularly effective in describing the loneliness of frontier existence for women and the emotional cost of daily confrontations with what in more civilized areas would be considered extraordinary events and dangers.

Ultimately, although the protagonist feels physically and emotionally constrained by her regenerative powers (i.e., the ability to conceive and nurture life), it is these very powers that enable her to be victorious in life's most awesome confrontation, the struggle with death.

The author of many fictional stories, Vuyk published her first novel, Thousand Islands, in 1937.

Writing from personal experience, H. J. Friedericy provides in The Counselor a rare glimpse of life in the outlying districts, an existence that was quite different from that on Java.

Friedericy entered the colonial service in the Dutch East Indies at the age of twenty-one, and held a number of administrative positions.

All his writings concern southern Celebes, where he was stationed during the first years of his career.

Written in 1958, The Counselor is Friedericy's last work of fiction. It recalls life on Celebes during the 1920's, when the Dutch were struggling to impose what they considered an enlightened colonial administration on the remnants of a feudal system they had nearly destroyed.

The novel is written in a style of detached curiosity and portrays the relationship of a young Dutch government official with an older and wiser administrator - the Counselor of the title.

The story describes the numerous events and crises that confront the younger man in the course of his duties.

[Daveo]

The Lake House by James Patterson..

The memorable story begun in When the Wind Blows continues in this thrilling novel, and it's one that really soars! Frannie O'Neil, a Colorado veterinarian, knows a terrible secret that will change the history of the world.

Kit Harrison, an FBI agent under suspension has seen things that no one in his right mind would believe.

A twelve-year-old girl named Max and five other incredible children have powers we can only dream of. These children can fly.

And the only place they will be safe is the Lake House. Or so they believe...

Books like these from 60 baht each...

[Daveo]

What Is the What by Dave Eggers..

From the bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys - was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom.

When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges.

Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.

[Daveo]

Fire from Heaven (Alexander the Great #1) by Mary Renault...a True Classic.. Find this in our classic section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop - Pattaya....

 

Alexander’s beauty, strength, and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king.

His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son’s loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle.

His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle’s tutoring provoked his mind and Homer’s Iliad fueled his aspirations.

Killing his first man in battle at the age of twelve, he became regent at sixteen and commander of Macedon’s cavalry at eighteen, so that by the time his father was murdered - Alexander’s skills had grown to match his fiery ambition.

[Daveo]

We have a great selection of Ian's books.