front cover of Bangkok
Bangkok
William Warren
Reaktion Books, 2002
William Warren’s Bangkok is an informal portrait of this most vibrant and perplexing of modern cities. Divided into two parts, the first is a selective history, showing how Bangkok has developed over the last 200 years, while the second explores the contemporary face of the city through a series of personal impressions.

The author explains how the charms of Bangkok and its people outweigh the disadvantages of pollution, traffic and stifling heat. He also introduces celebrities, such as the early kings of Thailand’s present dynasty and Anna Leonowens, heroine of The King and I, as well as Jim Thompson, the US-born silk entrepreneur and art collector who mysteriously vanished in the jungles of Malaysia.

Bangkok provides a much needed history of the city, but is also imbued with the warmth of Warren’s love affair with its frenetic way of life.
[more]

front cover of Bangkok
Bangkok
Angelic Illusions
Barry Bell
Reaktion Books, 2003
Cities today, especially those undergoing rapid growth and transformation, seem to defy traditional principles of urbanism and urban analysis. Bangkok, the City of Angels, the capital of Thailand, and an international metaphor of development gone wrong, presents an extreme version of this condition. Indeed, Bangkok, a barely stable setting for its (approximately) twelve million inhabitants, challenges our perceptions of what a city is, or should be. Yet in spite of its chaotic state Bangkok also presents moments of arresting beauty and social intensity. These fragments suggest a potential other city, resting latent within the cacophonous distractions of daily life. The resultant urban mirage is a compelling provocation.

Bangkok: Angelic Allusions uses the tangible artifacts of the city, its topography, streets and monuments, as vehicles for speculating on Bangkok and its central mythologies. Significant in themselves, these physical objects or categories also bring structure to other more perceptual observations and speculations. Ultimately the book links the city’s hectic urban sensibility to its more elusive and mysterious character, the dream of Bangkok which lurks within its physical reality.
[more]

front cover of Sounding the Center
Sounding the Center
History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Performance
Deborah Wong
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Sounding the Center is an in-depth look at the power behind classical music and dance in Bangkok, the capital and sacred center of Buddhist Thailand. Focusing on the ritual honoring teachers of music and dance, Deborah Wong reveals a complex network of connections among kings, teachers, knowledge, and performance that underlies the classical court arts.

Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, Wong lays out the ritual in detail: the way it is enacted, the foods and objects involved, and the people who perform it, emphasizing the way the performers themselves discuss and construct aspects of the ceremony.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter