Volume 54, Number 3 · March 1, 2007
Thailand: All the King's Men
By Ian Buruma
The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej
by Paul M. Handley
Yale University Press, 499 pp., $38.00
When it rains in Thailand, it usually comes in torrents. I arrived in Bangkok in October in the middle of a tropical storm. The great postmodern shopping malls, marble corporate palaces, and gleaming new hotels, built in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there seemed to be no end to the property boom, rose imperviously above the floods. But many parts of the city were under water, causing endless traffic jams on inundated roads. The inhabitants of Klong Toey, a fetid slum of about 80,000 people plagued by drug addiction and AIDS, were living in raw sewage. On my way to the hotel I saw shoppers wading through water up to their thighs to buy groceries at markets that remained open despite the floods. The main headline in the next day's newspaper was: 'Flood Disaster: King's Move Helps Save Capital.'[1]
Review, 4757 words
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