Thailand: A Short History
March 4, 2010 | In: Books
Product Description
This highly acclaimed book, the standard history of Thailand for almost twenty years, has now been completely revised by the author. David K. Wyatt has also added new sections examining the social and economic changes that have transformed the country in the past two decades…. More >>
5 Responses to Thailand: A Short History
B. Pua
March 4th, 2010 at 9:52 am
The author has a writing style which is best suited for college or graduate school dissertation perhaps. But as a history book for the rest of us, it’s tediously boring! Reading this 307-page book felt like reading a 1000 pages of statistics.
Rating: 1 / 5
Thomas Veil
March 4th, 2010 at 10:49 am
David Wyatt has written a well-researched and extremely detailed history of Thailand. Due to the complexity of the topic and the vast span of years he covers, this book can occasionally be a bit confusing. The chapters covering the last two centuries however are quite good and go a long way toward explaining Thailand’s exceptional status in its region. I strongly recommend this book to all people interested in the country.
Rating: 4 / 5
Icarus Falls
March 4th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
I bought this book a few months before a planned trip to Thailand hoping to learn more about their origins. I did not get anything from this book. I thought that it was terribly unreadable. I have two major complaints:
1. It reads as though it is a grocery list. Sentence after sentence is bogged down with unpronouncable names that don’t add anything to the major concepts. (I would love to give a quote as an example, but I seem to have lost the book; apparently I thought so little of it that I didn’t even deem it worthy enough for the bookshelf)
2. There are not nearly enough maps, especially in the beginning chapters. Wyatt is constantly refering to cities and places in their geographical relationships, but he doesn’t provide any pictures of what he is trying to convey. So you just end up with a jumble of names that are somewhere in Asia. And with the constantly changing political boundaries in the early history, a few maps would seem obligatory, but there aren’t any.
Overall, I was very, very disappointed with this book. I couldn’t even finish it because it was so dull and hard to read. (Mr. Wyatt, not every history book needs to be like this.) Don’t waste your time or money. Instead, go with a general south Asian history book; you’ll pick up the important things and leave behind the excruciating details.
Rating: 1 / 5
Y. Sageev
March 4th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
It is, of course, impossible to cover every aspect of a nation’s history to everyone’s satisfaction in a single volume, or in any series of volumes for that matter. My expectation of Wyatt’s effort was that it would narrate the origins and development of the Tai and Thailand on a general level. Wyatt did an admirable job of fullfilling my expectations. For those who bother to read prefaces, the author begs forgiveness from other scholars who would balk at the necessary incompleteness such an outline implictly entails.
Wyatt’s history focuses predominantly on the rise and fall of various Tai states from the influence of early Nan-Chao to modern Thailand’s awkward internal pressures of democracy, authoritarianism, tradition and reform. He deals primarily with top-level political contests — successions to the throne, conflicts between the Tai, Shan, Mon, Burmese, Khmer, and Lao ethnic civilizations, the pyramidal control structures typical of various Tai empires, and so on. What emerges then is a reliable gestalt of how Tai history unfolded from the earliest days to the present.
I found Wyatt’s history to be sufficiently readable and engaging. One problem is the sometimes tedious litany of dynastic struggles and successions. Also regrettably absent is a more involved elucidation of the specific nature of Tai Buddhism beyond its broad political roles in Tai history.
“Thailand: A Short History” is ultimately more a political, material, and especially, a territorial history and somewhat less a cultural one. However, without Wyatt’s effort most of us would need to settle for no familiarity with Tai history whatsoever. The author is to be applauded not only for his erudition and high-quality writing, but for enduring the anguish of omission that a short history necessarily demands.
Rating: 4 / 5
Anonymous
March 4th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Unfortunately, there aren’t many (any?) other books on the market that cover the history of Thailand. This one is unquestionably complete, but in its completeness lies its greatest weakness. Wyatt seems to sacrifice ease of reading in favor of completeness. For example, the majority of the book up to the age of King Mongkut (about half the book) reads like a list of kings of various city-states in the region, with minimal text between the names. The history of the area has been rife with war and intra-region political conflict and intrigue, and yet somehow this is one of the most boring books I have ever read. If you’re looking for early (up to the nineteenth century) history of the region encompassing and surrounding present-day Thailand, this book is pretty much your only option. But if you’re looking for something more modern, you could learn as much by watching “Anna and the King” and then reading through Lonely Planet Thailand and a modern-day rundown of Thai politics (there are several of these), as you could from reading the treatment of this recent period in Wyatt’s book.
Rating: 2 / 5