Saturday 22 September 2007

'Where Monsoons Meet' back in print


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:

MarhaenX said...

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!

an--ew said...

Thanks for signing my copies of you books the other day.

xenobiologista said...

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.