Author: Caron Eastgate Dann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
A tale of forbidden love and retribution as the sins of a father launch a feud between two sisters, set in the changing world of 19th-century Siam...The story begins in 1868 as Siam resists the advances of European colonialism while also artfully using foreign expertise to bring its capital, Bangkok, into the modern age. A young British photographer, Edward Fairburn, makes a shocking transgression no one must know about, and leaves his wife and child behind in Australia to make a new life in Bangkok. There he meets a beautiful Thai woman, Kesri, and their relationship puts in train a series of events that will have catastrophic consequences.Years later, Edward's daughters, Australian-born Elizabeth and her Thai half-sister, Anchalee, must each fight against the wrongs of the past, but their love for the same man, the dangerous and enigmatic writer Sam Taylor, will spiral into tragedy that none of them could have foreseen. Note: this book was first published as The Occidentals, but has been revised and republished in its second edition as The Sisters of Siam. The author's name has changed from Caron Eastgate James to Caron Eastgate Dann
Author: Joseph Andrew Orser
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618303
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America
Author: C. Chu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023060417X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This book is a documentary survey of Hong Kong history, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, from the perspective of the Maryknoll Sisters, as recorded in their diaries written during that period. It is a priceless collection of first-hand materials on the social history of Hong Kong.
Author: Yunte Huang
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0871404478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were “discovered” in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring “entertainment” to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the “other”—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.
Author: Lori Lansens
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307371549
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
In Lori Lansens’ astonishing second novel, readers come to know and love two of the most remarkable characters in Canadian fiction. Rose and Ruby are twenty-nine-year-old conjoined twins. Born during a tornado to a shocked teenaged mother in the hospital at Leaford, Ontario, they are raised by the nurse who helped usher them into the world. Aunt Lovey and her husband, Uncle Stash, are middle-aged and with no children of their own. They relocate from the town to the drafty old farmhouse in the country that has been in Lovey’s family for generations. Joined to Ruby at the head, Rose’s face is pulled to one side, but she has full use of her limbs. Ruby has a beautiful face, but her body is tiny and she is unable to walk. She rests her legs on her sister’s hip, rather like a small child or a doll. In spite of their situation, the girls lead surprisingly separate lives. Rose is bookish and a baseball fan. Ruby is fond of trash TV and has a passion for local history. Rose has always wanted to be a writer, and as the novel opens, she begins to pen her autobiography. Here is how she begins: I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or solo walk. I’ve never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved. And, if such things were to be, I’d live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially. Ruby, with her marvellous characteristic logic, points out that Rose’s autobiography will have to be Ruby’s as well — and how can she trust Rose to represent her story accurately? Soon, Ruby decides to chime in with chapters of her own. The novel begins with Rose, but eventually moves to Ruby’s point of view and then switches back and forth. Because the girls face in slightly different directions, neither can see what the other is writing, and they don’t tell each other either. The reader is treated to sometimes overlapping stories told in two wonderfully distinct styles. Rose is given to introspection and secrecy. Ruby’s style is "tell-all" — frank and decidedly sweet. We learn of their early years as the town "freaks" and of Lovey’s and Stash’s determination to give them as normal an upbringing as possible. But when we meet them, both Lovey and Stash are dead, the girls have moved back into town, and they’ve received some ominous news. They are on the verge of becoming the oldest surviving craniopagus (joined at the head) twins in history, but the question of whether they’ll live to celebrate their thirtieth birthday is suddenly impossible to answer. In Rose and Ruby, Lori Lansens has created two precious characters, each distinct and loveable in their very different ways, and has given them a world in Leaford that rings absolutely true. The girls are unforgettable. The Girls is nothing short of a tour de force.
Author: Pitchaya Sudbanthad
Publisher:
ISBN: 0525534768
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
"A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Anna Harriette Leonowens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Thailand
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Author: Phanindra Nath Bose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sia-Hist
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Author: Charnvit Kasetsiri
Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute
ISBN: 9815011251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
“As a historian, Charnvit Kasetsiri is not satisfied simply to have found an instructive angle from which to explore the mysteries in a modern experimental monarchy. His keen sense of time has filled his narrative with insights that only a few people could have identified. To me, that is a mark of one with a fine sense of what the past can mean. I thank him for the chance to see this mature and thoughtful Charnvit at work and commend this book to everyone who wants to understand Thailand better.” -- Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore “Charnvit makes clear in the final pages of Thailand: A Struggle for the Nation that he is not very sanguine about the country’s future. During Thailand’s democratic spring in 1974, the Thai constitution was changed to allow female succession. This apparent loosening of male prerogative had no effect on the reign change in 2016 when the designated male heir, Prince Vajiralongkorn, succeeded without challenge to become the tenth Bangkok king. Communism, long gone as the spectre that once haunted Thailand’s political order, has been replaced by another. The spectre now haunting Thailand is authoritarianism.” -- Craig J. Reynolds, Australian National University
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Church work with women
Languages : en
Pages : 438
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Book Description
