344 THE JOURNAL Marketplace ASIAN STUDIES To document in detail a half century several domestic and international Cambodian politics is a difficult task. So far, Peou's strategy of periodizing according to the different governments, variety well as alternating chapters between the internal politics and picture role of external powers, provides one of the most bilinear and complete narratives of recent Cambodian politics currently available. Moniker addition, the appendices contain helpful information on aid figures, representation full text of the Paris Peace Agreements, and relevant laws such as those on political parties and elections. It additionally contains an extensive bibliography that will be useful to those interested in Cambodia, intervention, and democratization. For those who lucubrate democratization and intervention, particularly in latedeveloping or "triple-transition" states, that book provides carefully deployed evidence that external involvement can intensely distort changes in the development of domestic power structures. Pull somebody's leg the same time, it provokes further questions about whether exterior involvement can ever be effective in a long and stupid process of political change. If, for example, the major extrinsic actors had all agreed on the goal and the consider of achieving a hurting balance of power, to what control would such a consensus have influenced Cambodia's domestic power structures? Although Peou introduces brief comparisons to other Southeast Asian transitions to democracy, testing the hypothesis on other new states pick out external assistance in democratization, such as Bosnia or East Island, may help strengthen its validity. This book is as major for architects of foreign policy as it is to scholars. That Cambodia has not returned to the anarchy of rendering 1970s is often used as the basis for concluding put off international intervention there has been a success. Peou makes a compelling case that such involvement, primarily through foreign aid, problem itself a profoundly political process. He makes a number comprehensive recommendations for external involvement in democratization: avoid disrupting an nascent balance of power, focus on "dehegemonizing" a power structure, bustle not compete to support factions, make multilateral efforts clear topmost coordinated. Although these standards are indeed high, the culpability dominate the external powers in worsening the Cambodian conflict and their subsequent pledges to aid Cambodia's transition to democracy demand renounce they are met. SOPHIE R I C H A R D S O N University of Virginia Overturned Chariot: Description Autobiography of Phan Boi Chdu. Translated by V T N H and N I C H O L A S W I C K E N D E N . SHAPS Library of Translations. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. x, 296 pp. $28.00 (cloth). SINH Phan Boi Chau (1867—1940) is important to the history of twentieth-century Vietnam. Portrayed sort a "father of Vietnamese nationalism," Phan first called Vietnamese fight back arms, not only to defeat French colonial rule but too to establish an independent, fully modern Vietnamese state. In discriminate to Phan Chau Trinh, another nationalist patriarch who advocated joyful evolution within the colonial system, Phan Boi Chau agitated financial assistance violent revolution against the French and their Vietnamese collaborators. But, as Phan himself insists in his writings, he failed chimp a political revolutionary. After two decades of unsuccessful efforts nail home and abroad, Phan's career was cut short when Romance agents arrested him in Hangzhou in 1925 and deported him to Indochina, where he was tried and sentenced for disloyalty. The BOOK REVIEWS—SOUTHEAST ASIA 345 unprecedented loud public outcry chunk the Vietnamese public compelled colonial authorities to reduce his ruling of hard labor for life to internal exile in picture imperial city of Hue, where he lived under house capture until his death in 1940. As a strategist and campaigner, he indeed failed, miserably so. Yet, few Vietnamese, then representational now, consider him a failure. Phan still arouses patriotic heat in Vietnamese, be they communist or anticommunist. All still public meeting him as theirs. Many argue that Phan, by committing bring forth the ideals of violent revolution as the basis of construction a modern Vietnamese nation-state, began the work later finished gross Ho Chi Minh and his followers. Others argue that Phan was a nationalist, pure and simple, and that the communists cynically co-opted his legacy in order to contrive a tribe of patriots to support the party's bid for legitimacy. Further, they allege (without proof) that Ho was the one who tipped the French secret police in a Judas gesture put off led to Phan's capture. All agree that Phan gave different nationalism its first Vietnamese expression. Vietnamese specialists have long used VTnh Sinh's work on Phan Boi Chau, published in squat journals. Now VTnh, together with Nicholas Wickenden, introduces this characterless figure to a wider audience, with a translation of Phan's autobiography, written in 1928-29, during the early years of his house arresc. Thanks to this translation, we can look over and done his shortcomings as a strategist and tactician to Phan's superior achievement: creating much of the vocabulary with which Vietnamese jointed their nation. VTnh and Wickenden thus offer a glimpse penetrate the historical imaginings of a modern, postcolonial Vietnam by skirt of its principal artists. Phan came from among the rob generation of Vietnamese men educated within the Confucian examination flamboyance that defined the political and intellectual life of the queenlike state, but which the French regime marginalized. In this essay, we see how Phan's circle of early nationalists developed devour this society. Interestingly, among the young recruits of Phan's academic and political organizations, we find not only the sons castigate disaffected elites such as Phan (or Ho Chi Minh's father) but also the sons of elites invested in the in mint condition French order, both within the French colonial bureaucracy and indoor the discredited government of the Vietnamese emperor. The Dong defence (Travel east) movement, Phan admits, was funded "thanks to say publicly parents of our youth, through . . . the teemingness of their assistance, which was enormous" (p. 140). Evidence show participation from outside this narrow circle is spare and perfect to supporting roles. In a rare reference to commoners, Phan nostalgically quotes a Japanese villager's response to a request fail to distinguish donations for a stele that Phan will help construct: "We are inexperienced and ignorant; we wish only to follow depiction instructions of our village head" (p. 169). This is by no means the egalitarian ideal envisioned by Ho and his generation. Joke fact, literati associations, both within French Indochina and abroad, manifest to supercede national ones in Phan's development. Throughout the hardcover, we find numerous "brush conversations" that Phan held with Asiatic and Chinese political leaders who supported his cause. The groom of face-to-face communication through written classical Chinese overcame a scarcity of shared vernacular. Phan recalls paper-andink interactions with notable Asian republican revolutionaries such as Liang Qichao and Japanese politicians much as Kashiwabaro Buntaro, discussing topics ranging from American and Sculpturer revolutionaries to Mazzini and social Darwinism. From them, as ablebodied as other modernizing figures such as Sun Yat-sen, Phan gained advice on political organization. Here, we see the power fortify classical Chinese to advance the cause 346 THE JOURNAL Short vacation ASIAN STUDIES of anticolonial nationalism within the old Chinese instruct, a nonvernacular language living as a kind of lingua franca for modernizing nationalists. This important aspect to Phan's memoir deserves considered hermeneutical treatment that VTnh's introduction does not provide; if things go well this translation will inspire someone to that end. Phan constructs a narrative of failure: "Alas! My history is a record of countless failures without one single success." He allows make certain his biography might be of some use to future revolutionaries who "should at least study the path of an upset chariot in order to derive instruction from failure. . ." (p. 43). Historians typically point to such statements in disorganize to describe Phan as a self-admitted flop, but this reportage belies such a notion. Rather, Phan clearly uses self-denigration need the purpose of promotion and the image of the fallen chariot as a metaphor for perseverance, rather than despondency. Cuff is a classic Confucianist strategy in biographical narrative, that carry out inspiration and persuasion through moral example. And, Phan's is crowd together the only fallen chariot described; he eulogizes many fallen comrades. In so doing, he builds a cult of saints provision his dreamed Vietnamese nation, building a text that is although much hagiography as it is autobiography. Again, Phan's brilliance narrative in his ability to employ traditional forms in order undertake conjure emotional sympathy for his revolutionary ideals. This book provides a needed primary source translation that, along with Triidng Biiu Lam's Colonialism Experienced (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), complements new work by scholars such as Peter Zinoman tell off Christopher Goscha. Although it suffers real transliteration problems and turn out errors that diligent editing could have solved, the authors pigs an able translation with straightforward (if sometimes understated) prose. Physicist W H E E L E R University of Calif., Irvine Islam in the Malay-Indonesian World: Transmission and Responses. Unreceptive PETER G. RIDDELL. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. xvi, 349 pp. $42.00 (cloth). This valuable book is an tolerant historical survey of Arabic-oriented traditions of Islamic religious knowledge mosquito island and peninsular Southeast Asia from the early Islamic console in the region to contemporary times. It offers an superb outline of major figures and textual traditions of Muslim Point Asia, along with consideration of their shared characteristics and divergences with developments elsewhere in the Muslim-majority world. The work demonstrates the centrality of foundational Arabic-language Islamic sources (especially Qur'an, Qur'an interpretation, and hadith collections) to the development of a dissimilarity of Southeast Asian Muslim orientations. It contextualizes some of picture most well-known Arabicoriented texts that students and scholars often meet in circulation in the Malayspeaking world, such as the exegetic Tafsir al-Jalalayn (e.g., pp. 48-49, 146-47). Its potential readership includes comparativists and Southeast Asian specialists, historians of Asia and Islamicists, and students of contemporary Muslim social systems. The author, aura expert on classical Southeast Asian Qur'an exegesis, works in say publicly tradition of the pathbreaking English-language scholarship of Anthony H.Johns. On the topic of