A few months ago I wrote two articles for my NST column.
The paper refused to print the longer one (since plagiarism is a touchy issue there) but printed the shorter one.
It was about Where Monsoons Meet: A People's History of Malaya, an illustrated book (reminiscent of those A Beginner's Guide to ... thingies) that looks at our country's history through a Marxist, progressive type of lens. There are many historical books coming out now, but none takes quite the same approach. At the time I wrote it, the book had been out of print for over a decade.
Imagine my surprise when, after reading my article, a publisher called me up to say that he intended to bring the book back into print in time for Merdeka.
He appears to have been a few days late but ... here it is now, and also in bookshops, and it includes my article as Foreword.
3 comments:
It's a fabulous book, being an owner myself. But somehow it's harder to read when compared with the older version. I think it's all that typewriter type that looks both too cramped and too report-like. It could have been better :)
But it's just good to have the book back in circulation. Get it now!
Thanks for signing my copies of you books the other day.
My parents got the book when I was rather young and I didn't realize it was communist until rereading it in college =D It was a great break from the dry-as-dust history in the Form One curriculum.
IMHO the storytelling is very good but the artwork (both drawings and photomontages) could have been better. In particular, a lot of the photos weren't converted from grayscale to black and white properly and are hard to see.
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