Indonesian Food

Title: Indonesian Food
Author: Sri Owen
Publisher: Pavilion, London
Year Published: 2008

In this landmark book, renowned author Sri Owen provides a unique insight into the ancient, exotic, and varied cuisine of the Indonesian archipelago. Over 120 mouthwatering and easy-to-follow recipes take us from staples and basics to food for festivals and special occasions, with fascinating introductions that place the dishes in their regional and cultural settings.

Sri offer enchanting recollections of the food and cooking of her youth, while delving into the historical role of food in the region’s culture and society. The recipes are accompanied by detailed explanations of ingredients and techniques, notes on availability and substitutions, and discussions of development over time. Filled with beautiful photography by Gus Filgate, this book captures all aspects of Indonesia’s diverse culinary culture and represents a lifetime’s research into both traditional and modern cooking methods.

Hard Times

Title: Hard Times (299 p)
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Peacock Books
Year Published: 2008 (first published: 1854)

The novel is set in the imaginary industrial town of Caketown. With a typically unforgettable cast of characters - the hard-headed fact-worshiper Professor Gradgrind, the heartless factory owner Bounderby, the warmly endearing Sissy Jupe and eternally noble Stephen Blackpool -Hard Times carries uniquely powerful message and remains one of the most widely read of Dickens' major novels. It is a bitter expose of capitalist exploitation during the Industrial Revolution - and a fierce denunciation of the philosophy of materialism, which threatens the human imagination in all times and places.

Midnights's Children

Title: Midnights's Children (533p)
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Books
Year Published: 1991

Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India's independence, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences Saleem is not prepared for: telephatic powers that connect him with 1000 other "midnight's children" -all born in the initial hour of India's independence- and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out dangers others can't perceive. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's biography is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India as its most impossible and glorious.

Het Paradijs van Java

Title: Het Paradijs van Java (68 pages of photography)
Author: Wernand Kerkhoff

Het Paradijs van Java is a photographic album of the most easterly section of the Soemedang at Preanger land (West Java, Indonesia) on the early of 20th century that called by tourist at that time as “Italy of the East.” Here, too, the beauty of nature reigns supreme. There is, however, still much to enjoy here. It is here that the Sundanese live; here one meets a group of the native community which is interesting from all aspects. The Soemedang district with its industrious population, with its fertile rice fields, with its shady roads and its impressive mountain range of the Tampomas, is most a beautiful place which enraptures travelers who have visited the loveliest on our beautiful earth. A visit to the market or to one of the many villages lying scattered about in the landscape is a feast to the eyes. For these people to love color; their raiment is richly coloured and worn with grace, so that every scene from the life of the people has a wonderful charm. (Abridged from the preface of Het Paradijs van Java by Johan Koning entitled The Indies Beautiful and Interesting…..Wherever One Turns One’s Eye…..)

The Time Machine

Title: The Time Machine (120p)
Author: H.G. Wells
Publisher: Peacock Books
Year Published: 2008 (first published: 1895)

The Time Machine is a social allegory, set in the year 802701 A.D., describing a society divided into two classes, the subterranean workers, called Morlocks, and the decadent Eloi. The central character, referred to throughout as the Time Traveller, tells a group of friends that he has invented a machine which can travel through time, enabling him to investigate the destiny of the human species. In the year 802701, where he is temporally stranded, he finds the meek and beautiful Eloi living in apparently idyllic circumstance, but discovers that they are the prey of the degenerate Morlocks, descendants of labourers who have lived underground for centuries. In the later era he sees the life-forms which survive the extinction of man, and thirty million years hence he is witness to the world’s final decline as the sun cools.

50 Facts that Should Change the World

Title: 50 Facts that Should Change the World (346 p)
Author: Jessica Williams
Publisher:Icon Books,
Year Published: 2004

From the inequalities and absurdities of the so-called developed West to the vast scale of suffering wreaked by war, famine and Aids in developing countries, this book paints a picture of shocking contrasts. Hunger, poverty and all kinds of material and emotional deprivation are recurring themes, alongside human rights abuses we may have hoped had been left behind in the 20th century. Read about unimaginable wealth, the decline of religion and the unstoppable rise of consumerism, mental illness, the drugs trade, corruption, gun culture, the abuse of our environment and much more. Each fact is followed by explanation and lively analysis. some will make you rethink things you thought you knew. some illustrate long term, gradual changes in our society. Others concern local issues that people face in their everyday lives. Jessica Williams reminds us that our world is deeply interconnected - and that civilisation is a fragile concept.

Oeroeg

Title: Oeroeg (144p)
Author: Hella Haasse
Publisher: Gramedia
Year Published: 2009

This Hella Haasse’s novel first published in 1948. Oeroeg based on the experience of the Hella Haasse when she was growing up in Dutch Indonesia. Oeroeg captures the dilemma of those caught between the pretensions and culture of their Dutch homeland and their respect and affection for the native people of the colonies, and it has became a classic, with many editions printed. In this story, Johan, a European boy grows up on a plantation running and playing with his best friend, the son of the foreman, a native boy called Oeroeg. He is only barely aware of the gulf that divides them, but gradually becomes more aware of it as he leaves to study back in the Netherlands. When he comes home, it is as a soldier in the army, who are in Indonesia to put down the local independence movement. Not only is Johan grieved to be taking arms against Indonesians in general, and distressed at the racism of his colleagues, but he has reason to believe that his old friend is now a leader in the forces he is obliged to fight. He goes on a mission into the jungle to find him.

Imperialism

Title: Imperialism (vii+183p)
Author: George Lichtheim
Publisher: Praeger
Year Published: 1971

George Lichtheim represents a vanishing species –a truly cultivated journalist, with an elegantly perceptive mind, whose forays into scholarship can put to rout professionals on their own ground.

Lichtheim trace imperialism’s diverse historical manifestations up through the present postwar period. En route, he provides a cogent explication of those concepts –nationalism, capitalism, liberalism, among others–that have often mistakenly been identified as integral to imperialism. With the deftness and lucidity that mark all his work, Lichtheim explores the writings on imperialism of such major thinkers as Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg and ends with a scathing attack on the New Left, especially the Maoist. Condemning them for their naïveté and theoretical ineptitude, Lichtheim concludes “Marxism is too important to be left to the post-Leninist sects –tiny ferocious creatures devouring each other in a drop of water.”

Illuminations; Essays and Reflections

Title: Illuminations; Essays and Reflections (278p)
Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Schocken Books
Year Published: 1985

Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940), a German-Jewish man of letters, was known to the discerning few as one of the most original critical and analytical minds of his time. He achieved posthumous fame when a collected edition of his writings appeared in Germany fifteen years after his death.

Illumination includes Benjamin’s views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht’s Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a cultural assessment of the interrelation of art, technology, and mass society; an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode; and his theses on the philosophy of history.

Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaced them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin’s personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in the dark times.

Walden and the Famous Essay on “Civil Disobedience”

Title: Walden and the Famous Essay on “Civil Disobedience”
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Publisher: A Mentor Book
Year Published:

This volume contains two of the best works of one of the great American writers and personalities, Henry David Thoreau. Walden is the record of a famous experiment in essential living, the time Thoreau spent by Walden Pond living a life bare of creature comforts and shorn of superficialities, but rich in contemplation.

The essay on “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau’s classic protest against government’s interference with individual liberty, has been added to this book to give the reader a complete view of a noted individualist and sage.

Human Types; An Introduction to Social Anthropology

Title: Human Types; An Introduction to Social Anthropology
Author: Raymond Firth
Publisher: A Mentor Book
Year Published: 1958

Sexual taboos and social status
Manners and morals
Religion, magic and ritual
Marriage and the family

These are some of the fundamental aspects of culture explored by the noted anthropologist, Raymond Firth, in this stimulating and provocative book which is based on extensive field work and profusely illustrated with photographic and line drawings.

From New Zealand to Iceland, from Africa to New England –this comprehensive and concise analysis of the deeply rooted differences in customs and habits between “primitive” and “civilized” societies offers a basic understanding of the diverse forms of human behavior.

The Indonesian Tragedy

Title : The Indonesian Tragedy (xvii+438p)
Author : Brian May
Publisher : Graham Brash
Year Published: 1978

After four years as Agence-Presse correspondent in Indonesia, Brian May became convinced that the nation’s social and economic progress was blocked, perhaps permanently, by a strong cultural barrier. Although he details Western-aided despotism, with its thousand of political prisoners, its murders, and its general acts of repression, he does not consider the suffering of the people to be the main ‘tragedy’ of Indonesia. For him, it lies in the ruling Junta’s blind attempt to force a Western economic model on a backward and superstitious people, whose culture and psychology are unsuited to it.

The concept of ‘developing’ countries is dismissed as a cruelly misleading euphemism. The much talked of economic ‘take-off’ cannot take place in countries like Indonesia, where a bazaar mentality dominates commerce. Her population of about 135 million 135 million in 1977 is likely to rise by the year 2000 to 280 million by which time she will be unable to feed herself. Optimistic theories of development, and facile blaming of Dutch imperialism, hide the reality of chronic socio-economic stagnation. These will have to be discarded if the problem of Indonesia is to be understood, let alone solved.

The author demonstrates the ‘Indonesian Tragedy’ not so much by argument, as by depicting the country as he experiences it from day to day. In developing his conclusion, he draws on history, and the works of sociologist, some of whom he disagrees with. In this way he sheds light on the predicament of Indonesia and helps to illuminate a problem common to much of the Third World

A Brief History of Time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Title: A Brief History of Time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes
Author: Stephen W. Hawking
Publisher: Bantam Books
Year Published: 1990

For two decades Stephen Hawking has been responsible for ideas which have transformed the way we view our universe. With A Brief History of Time he fulfils a long – held ambition and opens his astonishing insights to a wider audience, offering the non-scientific layman a unique opportunity to participate in perhaps the greatest intellectual adventure of our age.

Was there a beginning of time? Could time run backwards? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? These are just some of the devastating questions considered in a clear and accessible book which begins by reviewing the great theories of the cosmos from Newton to Einstein, before delving into the secrets which still lie at the heart of space and time.

Since Eve Ate Apples; Quotations on Feasting, Fasting,&Food from the Beginning

Title: Since Eve Ate Apples; Quotations on Feasting, Fasting,&Food from the Beginning
Author : March Egerton
Publisher : Tsunami
Year Published: 1994

This is a book of quotation all about food. Referred to the note from the author for the reader, the quotations are divided into 161 categories, which are listed in the table of contents and arranged alphabetically. Within each category, quotations are listed chronologically, with anonymous entries and proverbs placed at the end of each category.

Rambles in Java and the Straits in 1852

Title: Rambles in Java and the Straits in 1852
Author: Bengal Civilian (Charles Walter Kinloch)
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
Year Published: 1987 (first published in 1853)

When ‘Bengal Civilian’ (Charles Walter Kinloch) visited Penang, Singapore, and Java in 1852 his tracks and has already been well beaten by European explorers, adventurers, colonizers, and traders. ‘Bengal Civilian’ travelled for no other purpose than to recuperate from illness and he must therefore have been one of the first tourist and certainly the first to write a book about his travels. Published in 1853 as De Zieke Reiziger (The Invalid Traveller) and now reissued inder its subtitle, Rambles in Java and the Straits in 1852, the book offers a graphic and amusing account of the numerous privations and occasional enjoyments of travelling in South-East Asua 135 years ago.

The reader has to pity ‘Bengal Civilian’ and his wife battling against the climate (in Singapore ‘too hot and depressing’, inedible food (‘Dutch cooking… is disgusting’) below standard accommodation (there was no hotel ‘where a gentleman could venture to show himself, much less a lady’ in Penang), uncomfortable carriage journeys and even two near disasters on boats. However, the author’s observations are perceptive and tart, whether on monuments visited or the conditions of the local population or on British and Dutch society and colonial government. In an age of mass tourism, the experiences of ‘Bengal Civilian’ are as readable today as when they were first published and will provide today’s traveler with a great deal of pleasure. The reprint includes 23 attractive colour plates and a map.