Master photographer Paul Malone captures the charm and grandeur of these palatial homes and other notable structures in the Mississippi River region between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in 156 full-color photographs, including interior views of many of them. Ornate stairways and foyers, elaborate parlors, and spectacular bedrooms complete with period furnishings reflect the prosperous and opulent lifestyle of the antebellum period.The accompanying text by Lee Malone highlights the h...

Under a canopy of magnolias and live oaks, bordered by the streets of Jackson, Magazine, Louisiana, and St. Charles, spacious mansions serve as a gallery of fine architecture in a section of New Orleans known as the Garden District. Once home to a grand plantation, the property was sold and divided for residential use more than 150 years ago.In his final work, critically acclaimed photographer Paul Malone visits forty-three picturesque landmarks of the Garden District. With histori...

The Peaceful People is the story of the Penan, the jungle nomads of Sarawak, Malaysia, on Borneo island who for decades have fought for possession and preservation of their traditional forest lands. Drawing on extensive first-hand interviews, as well as the diaries and journals of explorers, botanists and colonial administrators, and the observations of missionaries, Paul Malone provides the most comprehensive account of the dynamics of Penan society to date. Written in a compelling and ac...

Islamic, authoritarian, democratic, developing, disintegrating, Indonesia is an enigma to outside observers who have never seemed sure just what it is.The largest country in its region, Indonesia holds the key to Southeast Asia's future, while recent developments (demands for greater regional autonomy, ethnic, political and religious conflict) are making the archipelago significant on the world stage and prompting re-examination of its history.As a state Indonesia is a twen...

A Short History of Bali covers the entire history of this intriguing and mysterious island from before the Bronze Age to the presidency of Megawati Sukarnoputri and the tragedy of the Kuta bombings on 12 October 2002. It looks at the arrival of Indian culture early European contact the role of anthropologists and taste-makers of the 1930s in romanticising the island and the complex legacies of Dutch control. It tells of the Japanese Occupation the Indonesian Revolution the massacres of 196...

Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of the World's Largest ArchipelagoIndonesia is by far the largest nation in Southeast Asia and has the fourth largest population in the world after the United States. Indonesian history and culture are especially relevant today as the Island nation is an emerging power in the region with a dynamic new leader. It is a land of incredible diversity and unending paradoxes that has a long and rich history stretching ba...

The past fifteen thousand years-the entire span of human civilization-have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age, when coastlines were more than seven hundred feet below modern levels. Over the next ten millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and starts. These rapid changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because those people were able to adjust r...

Since the Bali bombings of 2002 and the rise of political Islam, Indonesia has frequently occupied media headlines. Nevertheless, the history of the fourth largest country on earth remains relatively unknown. Adrian Vickers' book, first published in 2005, traces the history of an island country, comprising some 240 million people, from the colonial period through revolution and independence to the present. Framed around the life story of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's most famous and c...

Humanity can make short work of the oceans’ creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller’s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It’s a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the explorers set sail.As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the S

New in the Short History of Asia series, edited by Milton Osborne, this is a readable, well-informed and comprehensive history of Malaysia from ancient past to hyper-modern present day. One of the last British colonies to achieve independence, Malaysia has been developed by its leaders as a model of rapid modernisation. From an earlier image as a romantic tropical backwater, it is now a self-conscious, rapidly developing, hi-tech nation-state stretching from Thailand to the sea boundaries ...

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006) was undoubtedly Indonesia’s most significant novelist and writer. After the 1960 publication of this book, now translated for the first time, Promoedya spent some 20 years in prison often in appalling conditions. The book sets out in the form of nine letters much of the author’s humanist and deeply anti-racialist philosophy as it discussed the history and needs of Indonesia’s large and long-established Chinese population who were facing increasing official...

Meticulous research, chilling facts.... an important and much needed book.-- Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder, The Jane Goodall InstituteIf it is understanding you seek, turn these pages.-- Virginia McKenna, OBE, Founder, The Born Free FoundationIf you care about elephants and rhinos, and the poaching onslaught that threatens their extinction in the wild, this is the book for you.-- Ian ...