Thailand: A Short History | 
| Author: David K. Wyatt
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 608237
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0300084757
Dewey Decimal Number: 900
EAN: 9780300084757
ASIN: 0300084757
Publication Date: December 1, 2003
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Book Description
This highly acclaimed book, the standard history of Thailand for almost twenty years, has now been completely revised by the author. David K. Wyatt has also added new sections examining the social and economic changes that have transformed the country in the past two decades.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Very dull reading, not up-to-date June 22, 2008
Undoubtedly, the author knew Thailand and its history extremely well! This unfortunately is only necessary but not sufficient to write a readable book.
The author faithfully recounts which king invaded what place when, he tells us the outcome of that battle.....The book does not tell us at all, how the people lived, what their social behaviour was, etc. In other words, the reader does not get a feel for how life was.
The period fron the 80's onward is poorly covered. The fist edition was published in 1980 or so, and the overhaul it got in 2002 by the author was insufficient in my view.
This is not a book, I recommend.
 A standard history that's a bit lacking in revision May 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Wyatt's first edition of this book was, for many years, the standard introduction to Thai history for English speakers. It was written for an academic audience and although Wyatt is more readable than the average academic, it really isn't a good choice for people who want a little history to go with their guidebook. A more readable history is Pongpaichit Pasuk & Chris Baker's "Thailand: Economy and Politics". Wyatt undertook this second edition in part because he felt that his earlier edition gave insufficient attention to Thailand's diversity and the different worldviews of its Lao, Chinese and other minorities. The book is only somewhat successful in this respect, although it's one of the few books to avoid the "happy peasants down on the rice paddy" view of Thailand that mars social histories of the country by Thai and foreign scholars (including Pongpaichit & Baker) and tends to betray the limits of what these academics really know about the country.
This book should appeal to people who want a fairly in-depth introductory history to the country and probably should be read with Pongpaichit & Baker's volume, which does more with Thailand's social and economic history. Wyatt is very weak on the last three decades of Thai history even though he would have had ample opportunity to know and understand it in-depth. He provides inadequate introductions to key figures such as General Prem, Chatchai Choonavan, Chuan Leekpai and Taksin Shinawatra (all major Prime Ministers of the last few decades). He is very coy in discussing prostitution in Thailand and neglects the AIDS epidemic, while giving a distorted view of Thailand's great success in implementing family planning programs (Wyatt completely neglects the role of the government). The maps are poorly laid-out and make it difficult to see some of the points made in the text. Still and all, this is a good introduction to Thai history for someone who wants a fair degree of depth and is willing to look beyond the weak treatment of recent history.
Almost unreadable December 26, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
For years, I have kept a cherished copy of this book, probably because someone I know and admire wrote a glowing review of it in the Asian press.
Recently, however, despite the fact that I live in Thailand and am fascinated by the region, I realized that I had never read this book!
So I picked it up again, and began to understand why. From the very first pages, the reader is assaulted with terms for peoples (Mon, Wa, etc.) which remain totally unexplained. Of course, someone who has spent his life dealing with the history of Thailand feels that such terms are self-explanatory, but they are NOT.
Add to this particular opacity, what? The plodding style of the author, who is apparently incapable of generating reader interest or suspense no matter how compelling the tale. And then add in the fact that Wyatt took TWENTY YEARS to revise the first edition, and produce a second, slightly better edition, and you are forced to the conclusion that Wyatt finds writing in English to be an extremely difficult job.
And, if you are writing history for anyone but specialists, that very nearly disqualifies you.
Nevertheless, this book is probably the ONLY available general history of Thailand. How sad!
Readable and well-done March 23, 2006
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is, of course, impossible to cover every aspect of a nation's history to everyone's satisfaction in a single volume, or in any series of volumes for that matter. My expectation of Wyatt's effort was that it would narrate the origins and development of the Tai and Thailand on a general level. Wyatt did an admirable job of fullfilling my expectations. For those who bother to read prefaces, the author begs forgiveness from other scholars who would balk at the necessary incompleteness such an outline implictly entails.
Wyatt's history focuses predominantly on the rise and fall of various Tai states from the influence of early Nan-Chao to modern Thailand's awkward internal pressures of democracy, authoritarianism, tradition and reform. He deals primarily with top-level political contests -- successions to the throne, conflicts between the Tai, Shan, Mon, Burmese, Khmer, and Lao ethnic civilizations, the pyramidal control structures typical of various Tai empires, and so on. What emerges then is a reliable gestalt of how Tai history unfolded from the earliest days to the present.
I found Wyatt's history to be sufficiently readable and engaging. One problem is the sometimes tedious litany of dynastic struggles and successions. Also regrettably absent is a more involved elucidation of the specific nature of Tai Buddhism beyond its broad political roles in Tai history.
"Thailand: A Short History" is ultimately more a political, material, and especially, a territorial history and somewhat less a cultural one. However, without Wyatt's effort most of us would need to settle for no familiarity with Tai history whatsoever. The author is to be applauded not only for his erudition and high-quality writing, but for enduring the anguish of omission that a short history necessarily demands.
 Not worth the time or money December 20, 2005
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
I bought this book a few months before a planned trip to Thailand hoping to learn more about their origins. I did not get anything from this book. I thought that it was terribly unreadable. I have two major complaints:
1. It reads as though it is a grocery list. Sentence after sentence is bogged down with unpronouncable names that don't add anything to the major concepts. (I would love to give a quote as an example, but I seem to have lost the book; apparently I thought so little of it that I didn't even deem it worthy enough for the bookshelf)
2. There are not nearly enough maps, especially in the beginning chapters. Wyatt is constantly refering to cities and places in their geographical relationships, but he doesn't provide any pictures of what he is trying to convey. So you just end up with a jumble of names that are somewhere in Asia. And with the constantly changing political boundaries in the early history, a few maps would seem obligatory, but there aren't any.
Overall, I was very, very disappointed with this book. I couldn't even finish it because it was so dull and hard to read. (Mr. Wyatt, not every history book needs to be like this.) Don't waste your time or money. Instead, go with a general south Asian history book; you'll pick up the important things and leave behind the excruciating details.
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