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From Publishers Weekly
This peculiar collection's title essay, set in small type across the bottom third of each page, is a rambling meditation on the U.S. bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge massacres, the American public's amnesia concerning these and other horrors, Joseph Conrad, colonialism and the difficulty of being a writer adrift in the "Global Village." Sitting astride this "subtext" are 13 short essays and stories. In one, Marshall McLuhan meets St. Paul on the road to Damascus and counsels the apostle on making Christianity a big business. Other pieces deal with the stupidity of corporate meetings, the effects of a satellite dish on a small town, the experience of eating "Universal Chicken" at a drive-in and an imaginary effort to design a shelter to house chronically unemployed professionals. The odd layout is pointless and annoying, and the relationship between the running essay and the other slight pieces is tangential at best.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Ingram
"Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow" is a ferociously brilliant book that challenges its readers to see the world with new eyes, in a new light. Through an arresting division of its pages-- thriteen wildly imaginative short stories at the top, and a passionate essay on colonialism and Southeast Asia at the bottom, running like a Mekong River footnote throughout the book-- Brian Fawcett startles, amuses, and infuriates his hooked readers with juxtaposed images and penetrating insights into the media jungle that defines our age.
Like subtitles read in a foreign film, the pace of "Cambodia" accelerates, and the reader's eye quickens as the work unfolds. Soon, "Cambodia" is moving more swiftly than the images on the evening news, showing us that the book's title is not an enigma, but a realistic description of its remarkably interactive contents.
Brian Fawcett's passion stirs us to resist the annihilation of memory and imagination in our society, lest we lose "our right to remember our pasts and envision new futures" in a violent world where "Cambodia is as near as your television set.". --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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First Sentence
On a sunny morning at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, militiamen of the Ohio National Guard open fire on a crowd of students protesting the invasion of Cambodia by American troops five days before. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
On a sunny morning at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, militiamen of the Ohio National Guard open fire on a crowd of students protesting the invasion of Cambodia by American troops five days before. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a very important, very understandable, very brilliant book,
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.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Past, Present, Future,
By
This review is from: Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (Paperback)
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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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews) 9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a very important, very understandable, very brilliant book,
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!,
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,
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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