12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Magisterial Work, July 2, 2003
By A Customer
In a style that ranges from academic to personal, objective to emotional, Friend presents an incisive exploration of Indonesia: its history, its people and culture. It is a remarkable synthesis of historical description and theoretical explanation drawing on many primary sources and departments of knowledge: geography, economics, social theory.
If you ever wanted to understand Indonesia holistically-not simply through the lens of economics or religion, this book should be on your list.
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eye opening even for Indonesians, October 10, 2003
By A Customer
This book is the most comprehensive and yet not-too-hard read on Indonesian independence history that I have found. With detailed accounts of important events, vivid descriptions, and personal experience, Theodore Friend is able to weave together a compelling story about the complexity of the Indonesian history since independence. The crucial facts and theories are insightful if not eye-opening, especially for Indonesians who have not been exposed to the nation's history from an outsider perspective.
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18 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing..., September 11, 2004
After seeing all the raving reviews of this book, I was excited to have a look myself.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be a major disappointment. Its coverage of Indonesia is largely focussed on Java, with very little attention paid to other islands. What is worse, I often found the style to be very much of populist journalism, aimed at uninformed readers, based on catchy phrases and anecdotes rather than hard facts. This is particularly evident when the author does deal with the outer islands, about which his knowledge seems to be, err, limited...
To give just 2 examples:
In the chapter on Aceh, the author makes a lot of fuss about how the Grand Mosque in Banda Aceh, with its very "un-Javanese", Indian style expresses the orientation of the Acehnese towards West, rather than towards Java and the rest of Indonesia. What a poor example! He obviously failed to realize that the beautiful mosque in question was actually built by the Dutch colonialists (designed by an Italian architect), after they had destroyed the original, typically "Javanese-looking" Acehnese mosque previously standing there during their bloody conquest of Aceh, and is therefore an example of the westward orientation of the Dutch, not of the Acehnese!
In the chapter on the conflict in Ambon and the rest of Maluku, he puts much of the blame on the breakdown of traditional values due to westernization, claming the coming of cell-phones and McDonalds (among others) paved the way to the bloody events there. Oh dear... anyone familiar with Ambon (I was there in 1999 when the troubles started) will know that neither cell-phones nor McDonalds had made it to that remote island back then, so while the real roots of that conflict will probably never be fully revealed, they were certainly something rather more serious - and political.
Information from Indonesian policy-makers themselves? Well, the description of the one meeting he had with president Megawati described in the book tells us pretty much nothing besides the fact that Megawati could actually speak English!
I admit that having read such silly stuff and finding the style so populist, I put the book down without reading the whole lot.
I really think there are far better books on the history of Indonesia by more serious authors available even on Amazon, notably those by Kingsbury, Ricklefs, Taylor, and Bertrand - to name just a few.
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