Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow [Paperback]

Brian Fawcett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1986

In this disturbing collection of investigative fictions, Brian Fawcett asserts that the informational white noise of the Global Village is creating a cultural and intellectual breakdown that will eventually lead to the disappearance of local and individual identity. He argues that under the glitzy surfaces of television and the information “revolution” lie the same intentions that ran amok in Khmer Rouge Cambodia: the extermination of memory and imagination.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title essay--a rambling meditation on the U.S., Cambodia and Southeast Asia--runs across the bottom third of each page of this "peculiar collection." Sitting astride this text are 13 offbeat essays and stories, which PW found "slight," adding that "the odd layout is pointless and annoying."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Brian Fawcett
Born in 1944 in Prince George, B.C., Brian Fawcett has written poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Talonbooks has published My Career With the Leafs & Other Stories (1992), The Secret Journal of Alexander MacKenzie (1985), Capital Tales (1984) and Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (1986) by Brian Fawcett.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Talonbooks (January 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0889222371
• ISBN-13: 978-0889222373
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,851,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a very important, very understandable, very brilliant book, March 10, 1999

By 

alex jager - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow (Paperback)

If you're ever haunted by the countless examples of mans inhumanity to man, please read this book. It explores a writers struggles to become an artist in a worldful of atrocities. Fawcett explores the creative process, the global village, the mass man and Cambodia. He convincingly links the global village to Cambodia: the kamer Rough killed anyone with knowledge of the 20th century world just as the computer chip, albeit more subtley, erradicates the need for memory and ultimately for any kind of genuine human contact....well, anyways that's how I interpret Fawcetts message. His brilliant essay on Cambodia runs through the bottom half of the book, as subtext. I would recomend you read the essay first and then read the short stories which are on the top. This is such an important book it should be required reading at the universities...or at least be stocked in every library. Written in 1985,86, it's short term fate may be oblivion but in the long run it'll find an audience. Lastly, when Orwell wrote of a totalitarian regime in his book 1984 he made it appear too bleak...fawcett shows how that regime can exist at Disney World withn a happy face on it. Once more this book gets my highest praise.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, still in print!!! A Masterpiece!, April 11, 2007

By 

P. Oski (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow (Paperback)

I read this book when it first came out and have revisited it several times since. Each time, there is a special resonance between the ideas in the book and the events of the times in which I read it. This is an important, passionate book that is that rarest of rare finds: surgically precise intellectually without being pretentious or opaque.

The parallel construction of the two stories, the Cambodian genocide and the assault on communication and community by our homogenizing consumer culture and thought-deadening media is audacious and brilliant.

This book is a disturbing, inspiring and challenging. For those who would like to follow the workings of an eclectic passionate intellect grappling with the deepest roots of the disease eating away modern North American culture, this is the book for you.

Way ahead of his time and tuned into visions of the future that were intimated by the state of the world in the 1980's, Fawcett's vision anticipates the rise of George W. Bush, with his renditions, his suspension of habeus corpus, Guantanamo and the primary role of his maintream media to erase history in service of the fantasies of those who would seek to dehumanize all who deviate from the True Path.

Brian Fawcett warned us about it twenty years ago. This book is perhaps more relevant now than when it was written.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Universal chicken, January 18, 2003

By 

E. B Rush - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow (Paperback)

I am an avid reader of books about Cambodia. This book, altough not a direct work on Cambodia, made me realize the inter-connectedness of our post-modern world. I had never hear of Brian Fawcett before buying this book. He rekindled my rebellious spirit against where-ever it is that we are headed! His insightfulness about the inter-connectedness of our modern times is witty and disheartening. I would recommend this book to all global thinkers.