Customer Reviews

Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow

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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.

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.

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.

Do you have a sense that national governments are just one level above the slave populations they are trying to delude. That there is a hierarchy to all pervasive control. Fawcett writes one of the most important books of our time as we enter into the next phase of on-line/media dominated mania. As humanity, freedom and sanity gradual slip away Fawcett chart the course of our demise.

One of the most thought provoking books of our time. This book will awake the curiosity, not just about Cambodia, but the way we should live in this world. And, especially, how everything is connected, especially media to the way we live.

What happened in Cambodia, unfortunately, did not matter as much as it should have at the time. And this is the crux of what this book is about, for it mattered then, and it matters now, and will always matter. Books like this remind us.

As a poet, Brian Fawcett seeks to understand life in the way that grasps all that is out there. He is only a bit older than I am, so it is easy for me to sympathize with his regret that we are in an underworld, destroying so many things that might be appreciated by those who are yet to be born. Like animals that have become extinct, institutions engaging in regimentation for uniformity attempt to impose a herd morality fitting into a scheme of increasing complexity, but the fundamental flaws in marginal thinking cannot sustain what it was never possible to become. This book is an opportunity for others to join in the way I hate myself for saying things that other people never think.