The Food They Ate

For the traveler sampling a long series of feasts on the move, from the deserts of Arabia to the jungles of Sumatra, the palate may be as powerful as the palette in creating lasting memories of places visited  and experiences  had - for taste and smell are among the most powerful of cognitive cues. 

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Image: Flickr/Library of CongressIN  HIS EPONYMOUS MEMOIR, Ernest Hemingway observed “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” I wasn’t fortunate enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, but I’ve visited the City of Lights on several occasions over the years. My memories, no doubt, reflect what must be a common enough experience: there is a woman (or a man) – there is art, there is wine, and there is food.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do; when in France, if you find a particularly good wine, by all means save the cork. The best Beaujolais I ever had the pleasure of drinking was the house red in a small café in Montmartre, as I, my brother, and his future wife waited for my sister Ami to have her portrait done by a street artist. It was also the first Beaujolais I ever sampled, and I erroneously assumed that all wines of this varietal would taste as marvelous. Everywhere else I went in Paris, I ordered the Beaujolais, but I never found one to match that first bottle. I did find bread, and cheese, and butter and ham, and could survive quite nicely on nothing else. Omar Khayyam, one imagines, could have been writing of the delights of the simplest of Parisian cuisine when he penned his immortal verse “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.”

Humans are extremely visual creatures, and where once visions of foreign lands were captured with paint and canvas, the modern explorer is now more likely to render such scenes in digital photos. But for the traveler experiencing distant countries, sampling a long series of feasts on the move from the deserts of Arabia to the jungles of Sumatra, the palate may be as powerful as the palette in creating lasting memories of places visited  and experiences  had - for taste and smell are among the most powerful of cognitive cues. 

I will always equate the food of Arabia, for example, with a particular form of camaraderie: sitting around a massive plate heaped with steaming rice topped with meat – sometimes roasted chicken or fish, but most often mutton. The plate would sit on the cloth on the ground, and we would sit, six or eight men to a plate, legs crossed or folded beneath us, scooping up rice with right hand, never the left – tearing hunks of meat from the bone (which is tricky, one-handed) – handing out particularly succulent portions in friendship, and washing it all down with 7-Up or Pepsi. Afterwards, the bitter, greenish-yellow, cardamom-flavored Arabic coffee in tiny brass cups, followed by Lipton tea, sweet and scalding in similarly Lilliputian glass mugs, accompanied by a shisha pipe, fragrant tobacco smoke filtered through bubbling water.

Japan provided a cultural counterpoint to Arabia. In the desert, no one requires more than carpet, cushions, and coffee-set to entertain guests. In the Land of the Rising Sun, you will never be invited into someone’s home, as it will be thought to be insufficiently magnificent. Instead, you will dine out, feasting on shabu-shabu - thin slices of meat dipped into a pot of boiling broth - or sitting around a low table at an izakaya restaurant, eating an assortment of finger-foods and washing them down with copious quantities of cold beer and hot sake. A more extravagant event, not to be missed, is a traditional kaiseki dinner, usually found at traditional hotels called ryokan. Here hostesses clad in full kimono serve green tea and then the food begins to flow – tiny dishes of fresh and pickled vegetables, seafood, meat, tofu – always arranged elegantly, blooming like little flowers on beds of porcelain.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in Southeast Asia, where the moveable feasts really do move. Carts pushed by street vendors abound, carrying the cheap, mundane and delicious nasi goreng (fried rice) sold on the streets of Jakarta, and the strange, cheap and tasty fried insects and frogs of Bangkok. Then there’s the Padang-style meal in Sumatra– the waitress will bring a dozen dishes to your table- some filled with fried meats, both familiar (chicken legs) and disconcerting (small, whole eels with toothy, gaping mouths) – others with stews, vegetables, and white rice. The plates are so heavily laden, no healthy person could eat more than a fraction of it all. That is, in fact, how it works: the waitress calculates how much you’ve eaten by eyeballing the diminished piles of food, and you pay for what you ate – a buffet in reverse. The rest goes back to the kitchen to await the next hungry customer. 

Somerset Maugham, another of my favorite authors, and himself an old Asia hand, wrote “Men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay...” Too true. So eat well, my friends, and eat widely.

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Edward Carpenter is a US Marine Corps Foreign Area Officer currently stationed in Jakarta.

Letter From Monrovia: The Ravages of Poverty

I don’t know how Augustine made it to our clinic. Before the days of antibiotics, his health condition, Noma, claimed the life of about 90% of those diagnosed with it. Noma is also known as Cankrum Oris, a flesh-eating infection: normal germs in the mouth take advantage of a weakened immune system, often a result of malnutrition. Then the germs do just that, eating the flesh until large portions of the face are gone, requiring multiple, difficult reconstructive surgeries that are usually unavailable or unaffordable in the poverty-stricken countries in which the condition most commonly occurs.

It took two weeks for Augustine and his father to get to our dental clinic outside Liberia’s capital city of Monrovia, much of which might have been simply the time it took to raise the money from friends and family to pay for the trip. The five year old Augustine also has the physical stature of a child two years younger, and had received no treatment from the hospital closest to his home. Noma, no medication, 90% mortality rate, two weeks: he should have been dead by this point. His father’s prayers seemed to have worked.

The poverty of Augustine, of Liberia, and of the rest of the developing world is extremely complex. Seven years of work in some of the world’s poorest countries has taught me that it can also be very frustrating, as Nicholas Kristof highlighted not too long ago with his example of a father who states he cannot afford the meagre tuition needed to educate his son, yet spends a far greater amount on alcohol and cigarettes. 

If I had a large sum of money to put into Liberia’s development, I’m not sure what I would do with it. Building schools is great, but they are only as good as the teachers in them. Teachers in Liberia and surrounding countries primarily have students learn purely by memorisation, meaning there is very little “learning” actually taking place. Even "reading" is often achieved by memorising the appearance of words. So it seems more logical to put the money into teacher training. When my wife led teacher training classes, however, she found that most teachers were not interested in altering their methods, or taking advantage of the new resources and knowledge at their disposal.

A transportation fund available for those who need urgent medical care far from home would be a great idea, but anyone who has experienced the corruption of a developing nation knows this type of resource is likely to end up in the wrong pockets. 

I could build hospitals or offer funding to hire more providers. But does an increased number of providers necessarily mean better health care? Any provider, even a nurse, in Augustine’s local hospital should have known how to administer antibiotics, but I’ve found that inadequate treatment isn't always due to a lack of training - and training is no guarantee of improved practices and conditions.

How do we account for the failings, then? It is a multifaceted problem, familiar to any Western professional who has worked in a Liberian hospital. Rote learning results in a lack of critical thinking and problem-solving skills. There is also a palpable lack of compassion and motivation. Like everyone else in the country, healthcare providers are in survival mode. They are worried about themselves, whether they and their families will eat that day, never mind how others are faring. Augustine's infection that required antibiotics, but because it was an infection rarely or never before seen, it was assumed to be untreatable. 

It’s enough to make you throw your hands up and retreat into the world of “normal” jobs, sheltering from the misery and frustration. But I've only described the empty part of the cup, and it is filling up. Despite the dismal conditions, many individuals in this field have found things that work. They have found their niche where they can make an impact on an impoverished country, or even on the world. The biggest contribution is always time. We may give $50 here or $100 there, but imagine the value of six months of someone’s life and expertise shared with a developing nation. Never mind the monetary value of what that time is worth, what makes the contribution priceless is the decision to stay long enough to figure out what the needs really are and how to address them; to find out who wants to learn and grow, and how best to teach them.

Figuring out the true needs of a community, much less a nation, takes months if not years. That may be why many projects fail: inadequate time is invested prior to their foundation. For some, investing that sort of energy has revealed new ways to help, illuminating options beyond the immediate and the obvious. My profession of dentistry was one of those. I was surprised to find something to give in that regard. Liberia has over three million people sharing six licensed dentists. Despite the complexity of poverty, I know that people need (and most of the time, want) the services I can offer. Our clinic, Trinity Dental Clinic, sees over 360 new patients per month, nearly all of whom have a toothache. When I worked in the U.S., 50 new patients was considered a great month. And about every other week at Trinity, we see a condition that would rarely, if ever, be seen in the developed world.

I’m glad to report that Augustine walked out of our clinic in reasonable health about two weeks after his arrival with no infection, better nourished, and on the road to better health. Full recovery from his condition, however, including reconstruction of his damaged face, will have to wait for the gift of someone’s time. Those gifts do come, their value,  for people like Augustine and his father, beyond description.

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Keith Chapman served as chief dental officer for Mercy Ships for four years before moving to Liberia and founding the Trinity Dental Clinic, a long way from his original home in Texas. He is also an avid surfer and helps to promote surf tourism and development in Liberia through Surf Liberia.

Letter From Patong

Social alientation, Thai-style: finding the “essence” of a nation in the package of cultural archetypes presented to tourists - for a price.

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Though I definitely passed through customs and back, it’s hard to know whether I traveled to a country called Thailand these past two weeks or whether I was actually just in one of those many outposts of globalization where a multi-national cacophony of Western tourists connect superficially with caricatures of a place’s pre-globalized culture. At the invitation of an old friend who largely controlled the itinerary, I found myself on beaches and in bars, on dive boats and in spas, but never far from the American muzak and English-language-dominant service industry of Patong, never forced to navigate or speak in a local tongue, dis-incentivized to take seriously local governance, culture and politics except where it could be commodified, and mostly encouraged to have fun instead of thinking or talking too much about the place in which I found myself.

As a political scientist, what interested me most was hearing local opinions about the recent instability that had caused my friends and family to urge me to cancel my trip. But it was hard to find anyone to talk to. No one in Patong was very interested in the topic – perhaps the revolution in Bangkok seemed distant and unimportant, or perhaps it was just considered bad business to go on about politics with tourists. By sneaking opportunities to skim the Letters section of the Bangkok Post over coffee in the early mornings before my hosts whisked me away on sea-canoe tours, I got the impression that many Thai were more grateful for the government crackdown than the leftist Western press would indicate. Letter-writers routinely denigrated the “Red Shirts” as violent extremists and took particular umbrage at the International Crisis Group report that was released on the week of my stay, calling for reconciliation and an end to the state of emergency. When I engaged cab drivers or the young men running the beach parasail about events in Bangkok, however, they were interested mostly in how it all had affected business in Patong. If anything, business was booming this year, they told me – rather than being scared away from Thailand entirely, tourists were re-routing to Phuket from Bangkok.

And business is booming: post-disaster development aid appears to have transformed Patong over the past six years.  My other traveling companion, a brother who missed the tsunami by a week in 2004, described the contrast: then, he said, the area was filled with girly bars; today, the new oceanfront is more developed, more Westernized, more family friendly, sporting numerous beach resorts and hillside mansions, one allegedly owned by Brad Pitt. And as predicted by Robert McCrum in a book I perused while soaking up some sun, despite Thailand’s history of resisting colonization some variant of Anglo-American is spoken nearly everywhere. If we were not in authentic Thailand per se, we were definitely in the space of globalization, which is probably what tourists are really seeking when they leave their own shores. (I may not like tourist traps, but I do like globalized space. You know you’re no longer in the United States when you can glance up at the latest NSW/QLD rugby match playing on the lobby television; the World Cup finals feel different when watched in a bar filled with Dutch, Australian, Irish and Korean ex-pats.) But beyond this vague sense of “abroad-ness,” how far is it possible to experience the flavor of any country by interfacing with its tourist economy? 

I grappled with this question throughout my trip, wishing for a chance to see the bustle of Bangkok or the northern temples of Chang Mai, wishing for impossible opportunities to befriend Thai locals the way we so easily befriended other tourists. I spent some time observing my daughter’s reaction to this experience of resort life, so different from her previous excursions abroad with me to Norway, Japan, Italy, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Those had been research trips rather than holidays, time spent living in trains, meeting rooms and hostels and connecting with host families and local professionals, often struggling with the local language or soaking up the culture of everyday life through the guidance of an interpreter. Here, the trappings of everyday life were kept carefully at bay by a resort economy designed to enable us to do nothing but relax. Communicative ease was handed to us on a platter by the efforts of the locals to speak our tongue. Culture was dished out to us on stages, street corners and in endless bowls of Tom Yum soup. Our connections to the Thai people took place largely through the service economy, and none of the ex-pats around us were interested in talking about what they did in the real world. I feared my daughter’s impressions of Thailand would boil down to domesticated elephant trekking, the coconut shakes, and the cross-dressers who patrolled the streets of Patong at night. Would this be the Thailand she remembered?

Of course, my question itself bears examination. How far can anyone understand the essence of a country, no matter where one goes, in a visit of only a week? Do nations actually possess such an “essence”? I found myself biased in favor of the view that whatever that “essence” was, it was not to be found in the package of cultural archetypes presented to tourists, for a price, in such places as Patong or Koh Phi Phi. On the other hand, what are nations but those archetypes, as presented to outsiders? Beyond that, in any locale there is less of a monolithic country than a conglomeration of individuals linked by citizenship but divided by class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion and political ideology. Perhaps it is only in tourist traps and international airport gift shops that one truly finds a measurable “Thai” or “American” or “Dutch” culture that actually exists apart from a country’s many particularities.

At one point, I asked my daughter what she had noticed about Thailand compared to other places we’d traveled, in the US or abroad, and she surprised me with her answer: “There are very few beggars here. There’s poverty like anywhere, but people are always offering to sell something, even if it’s just a flower. They aren’t asking for money, they’re always trying to offer something in return.” 

Joshua Foust, Omnivore

Image: Flickr/Joshua Foust

LAST WEEK, WE POLLED OUR EDITORS, contributors and friends on their one summertime must read. We decided to extend the conversation and dig a little deeper with a new feature, Reading Habits. This week: Contributing Editor Joshua Foust.

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If you can believe it, I actually wake up earlier than I need to so I can do some reading before I get into the office. First things first is Twitter. By and large, it's replaced my RSS reader as my primary source of news, and I blame that entirely on the people I follow, from think tankers studying parts of the world I'd never think to study (like Latin America) to a rich community of Pakistani journalists and pundits I consider friends. That's in addition to my friends, who happen to be journalists and aid workers in a fabulous number of places, all of whom greet me at 06:30 with a huge variety of things to read about.

I have a day job, so once I'm at the office I can't spend all day reading the news (which I would probably do if given the chance). So in between doing income-related tasks, I'm working through my RSS reader. I used to just go to a few sites and blogs and read those to get an idea of whatever I should feel outraged about that day. By and large, Twitter and RSS have replaced those, and allow me to set up filters so I can avoid most of the chaff and focus only on the wheat, to abuse a metaphor. 

Within Google Reader, I subscribe to two newspapers' RSS feeds: the Christian Science Monitor and Al Jazeera, both of which have Central and South Asia feeds. I like the CS Monitor because it's the only American newspaper, I think, that has consistently presented "the other side" of Afghanistan (and Iraq, to an extent) with anything approaching honesty. It's just not condescending the way some of the other papers are. And Al Jazeera is the one thing Robert Kaplan and I agree on—its news division is just stellar, truly without peer in terms of reach and coverage. I also subscribe to PBS's Need to Know feed, in part because I'm a contributor, and in part because at least so far they have a knack for finding really interesting stories. 

I read a ton of blogs every day. Tech Crunch does a great job of filtering the tech news for me, and I read Wired's Danger Room all the time. My best source of news on Central Asia news is New Eurasia, which is a wonderful group blog whose authors I've known for years. I also read everything Eurasianet.org puts out, including my friend Joshua Kucera’s blog about Central Asian military policy (which is surprisingly interesting). I have a constellation of North Korea blogs I read (NK Leadership Watch, One Free Korea, NK Econ Watch, etc.), and as a legacy from when I worked for Global Voices I get regular updates—usually about a half dozen a day—from about 45 or so Afghanistan blogs, most of which are written by actual Afghans.

I try to remain politically balanced in my domestic blog intake, so I have NRO's The Corner alongside Steve Benen and Kevin Drum. I don't get much into it beyond that—I don't always like admitting it, but I find American politics almost hopelessly dull and formulaic. I love English Russia, because every day they have stolen a wonderful collection of photos that remind me of the daily surrealities of life in the dying embers of the Soviet Union. There are some think tankers whose blogs I read, too: Bernard Finel, Andrew Exum (in fact, that’s it). I also keep a regular watch on some terrorism and war-related things: I love Kings of War, the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor, Defense Tech, Aviation Week. 

I can’t say I read all of this every day. Some days, if things feel slow the first place I go is the New York Times’ International page, then if they have nothing interesting I’ll load up the Washington Post. But what I’ve found most interesting about how my reading habits have changed in the last two years is how passive I’ve become—I used to spend hours, often neglecting my day job (which gets in the way of obsessing over the news the way my instincts tell me I should!) rummaging through the darkest corners of the Internets. Now, I rely primarily on my twitter feed to give me useful things, though in the last month it’s been a bit overwhelmed with World Cup news. But to me, at least, using Twitter as a news aggregator, pulling from hundreds of people posting dozens of times a day, has been an incredible efficiency gain: now that my news-consuming hours are greatly curtailed, it’s acted as a filter to what I have to read, instead of what I’d like to sift through. Its really quite wonderful.

Summer Reading

"Old Hermit Roy Ozmer" // Image: Flikr/State Library and Archives of FloridaONCE A MONTH, WE POLL OUR editors and writers for deep thoughts on an issue du jour. This time, we thought we'd leave the politics aside and ask them instead about their one (or two) absolute must reads for the rest of the summer.

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CHRIS ALBON

There are a number of good releases this summer, but in a first for me a comic book tops the list. War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones is the memoir of one David Axe, a young freelance war reporter and my close friend. Axe has lived enough adventure to fill a dozen lives, but that’s not my reason for buying his book, nor I suspect his reason for writing it. Rather, War is Boring promises to offer an honest self-reflection from a man both addicted to the thrill of war and aware of the damage his quest for the next high has wrought on his relationships and himself.

JOHN MATTHEW BARLOW

Christopher Andrew’s In Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5.  MI5 let Andrew, an historian, have unfettered access to its archives to write this history for its centenary last year.  I find it astounding that a secret service would let a civilian not only have access, but also have absolute freedom in writing the official history of the service.  So we get an unfettered, exciting view of the development of MI5, warts and all.  Amazing stuff, really.

CHARLI CARPENTER

Bursts by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi. Barabasi first captured my imagination with his book Linked, a lay person's guide to network science, and his new book is said to extend his analytical vision through time as well as space. His argument -  drawing as usual on wide swaths of interdisciplinary science plus fascinating anecdotes of historical and current events - is that "we work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing: our daily pattern isn't random, it's 'bursty.'" I'm in it for his methodology more than for his findings: Barabasi has developed this theory by culling data from our digital lives. "Mobile phones, the Internet, and email," he writes, "have made human activities more accesible to quantitative analysis, turning our society into a huge research laboratory. All those electronic trails of time-stamped texts, voice-mails, and searches add up to a previously unavailable massive data set that tracks our movements, our decisions, our lives. Analysis of these trails is offering deep insights into the rhythm of how we do everything." I'll be interested to see how he converts that mass of data into an argument, and I'll be interested to see if I buy it.

JOSH COCHRAN

The Passage by Justin Cronin is hands down the best book you'll read all summer. Not just another "vampire book", Cronin is able to describe a post apocalyptic world with such vivid detail I was instantly hooked. It contains mutated vampires, government conspiracies and "Lost Boys"-like characters all set against a savage, wasted world. You'll be taken on a horrific journey where you'll undoubtedly find yourself cringing and sweaty-palmed at 4 o'clock in the morning, glued to the pages. This book is definitely a guilty pleasure. Don't judge me!

JOSHUA FOUST

Nabokov's Pale Fire is, to me, the consummate summer book—that is, one best read in a single sitting, in a place far away from home. It rewards linear reading, but I'd say it's best enjoyed with two physical, paper copies, so you can read the epic poem and the confounding footnotes that drive the "actual" plot at the same time... unless you enjoy flipping the book so often the pages practically wear out (as happened to me the first time I read it while wasting away from food poisoning on a train in central Kazakhstan). Like many of Nabokov’s novels, it is exhilarating, exhausting, and leaves you at the end with a mute sense of wonder at what he manages to wrangle out of our language.

MIKE INNES

Definitely Matt Gallagher's Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War. I've only recently started diggging in to all the new Iraq and Afghanistan memoirs that have been published over the last few years - I find them to be real troves of insight into problems of social distance and psychological alienation. Most of what I've focused on so far have been those written by journalists - Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, Rajiv Chandrasekharan's Imperial Life in the Emerald Palace (what a great title), and George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. Gallagher's book will be the first soldier memoir I tackle, and I'm looking forward to it.

WILLIAM O’HARA

I'm particularly interested in reading Breakpoint, by Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism chief of the Clinton and Bush administrations.  The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act was recently introduced in the US Senate, which would provide the President with an internet "kill switch". It may be helpful to read more about the potential worst-case scenario of technological armageddon that Clarke described in the book, before forming an opinion on the legislation that’s currently being developed. 

ZACH PETERSON

George Will’s Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball tops my list of summer must-reads. After two years of living in Europe, I've developed a creeping nostalgia for America’s national pastime. With a premium on intelligence and coordination, baseball allows for a guy like David Eckstien (5’7" - 177 pounds) to be no less valuable to his team than a steroid-jacked freak like - well, most power hitters in the 1980s and ‘90s. The game’s ability to survive and even thrive after the steroid debacle is predicated on the game's appeal to the everyman. At 5’10", 180 pounds, that’s something I can get behind.

ERIC RANDOLPH

Having had David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla stolen from my bag last year, I'm finally going to read it this summer. There's added interest now since the Afghan mission looks increasingly doomed despite people listening to wise souls like Kilcullen. I hear great things about Curfewed Night, about the Kashmir conflict, and in fiction, I might give David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest a go. I read the first chapter in a hostel once and it was very weird. Otherwise, I can’t go wrong with some Philip Roth.

GREG J. SMITH

At the risk of sounding dated, my key summer read is William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956). Over the past few years I've been developing a minor obsession with scientific management and office culture and it is time to finally pay homage to this classic text. A few years ago I stumbled across Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool (2004) and it profoundly changed how I think about design and information aesthetics. Since I'm interested in how the organizational hierarchies of corporate culture drove the design standards of the late 20th century workplace, Whyte's text is obviously an essential read.

TIM STEVENS

Hot on the heels of Christopher Andrew’s history of the Security Service (MI5) and the first part of Keith Jeffery’s examination of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ completes a recent triad of treatments of UK spook institutions.  The difference with Professor Aldrich’s book is that it doesn't come with the imprimatur of his subject, nor was he granted access to its archives — GCHQ has yet to open up in quite the fashion of its sister services.  It remains, as the subtitle to Aldrich’s 448-page whopper suggests, "Britain’s most secret intelligence agency."

KATHERINE TIEDEMANN

Thomas Barfield's Afghanistan has been sitting on my nightstand for a few weeks now, and I'm hoping to get to it this summer for a comprehensive, academic history of the country at the forefront of the U.S.'s foreign policy. I've also just picked up Jere Van Dyk's Captive, his deeply personal account of the time he spent while kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008. As for more traditional "summer reading," I just blew through the three Stieg Larsson books about the adventures of Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his troubled investigator friend Lisbeth Salander, and while the books are not exactly high culture, they were definitely page-turners.

TONY WATERS

I used to be an Africanist, or rather I am still an Africanist, but have not been engaged with the subject for several years. So a prime summer reading goal is Gerard Prunier’s Africa’s World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. It is a meaty read of 368 pages, with another 160 of notes and indexes designed to appeal to my scholarly sensibilities. An excellent read for many planned summer flights and hotel rooms in…Asia, where I'll be traveling this summer.