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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
a very important, very understandable, very brilliant book, Mar 10 1999
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Past, Present, Future, Aug 11 2010
Do you remember the Khmer Rouge? Do you remember Srebrenica? Do you remember Rwanda? If you don't remember what these words mean don't worry, you've got lots of company. Brian Fawcett wrote this book in the mid-eighties and things haven't changed, things have just progressed further along the road to the Eternal Now - no past, no future. Fawcett managed to lift the curtain for a peak behind the scenes and it isn't all that pretty: bureaucracy, religion, mass media and our consumer culture are destroying our sense of self-worth, our sense of the worth of our fellow Human Beings and our ability to stop the crazy merry-go-round that just keeps going faster and faster. The stories in this book are not at all tangential to the sub-text, they are a reflection of it, despite what Reed Business Information, Inc. states above. Well, gotta go, "American Idol" is on...
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
a very important, very understandable, very brilliant book, Mar 10 1999
By alex jager - Published on Amazon.com
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 - Published on Amazon.com
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, Jan 18 2003
By E. B Rush - Published on Amazon.com
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.
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