Maverick House

Why I love Christmas in Thailand - by Paul Garrigan author of 'Dead Drunk'

2011-12-19T01:59:00.000-08:00

It is now only a few weeks until Christmas, and I must admit to feeling a bit excited by it all. The decorations are already up in our house; this year we bought our biggest plastic tree yet. If you walk past our home here in Minburi there is a good chance that you will hear Christmas songs. It really is the most wonderful time of the year for me – I love it.

Pagans and Jingle Bells

My current enthusiasm for Christmas is a bit surprising; especially when I consider that it was only a couple of years ago that I was debating whether to even celebrate it anymore. After all, we live in Thailand and we are not a Christian family. I also wondered about the ethics of introducing my son to the whole Santa idea. Then I remembered how much this time of year had meant to me as a child. I don’t want my son to miss out on any of that. Most of my favourite memories of growing up are connected with Christmas. Even when I stopped believing in Santa I still wanted to believe in him – I sort of still do.

A cynic could point out that Christmas is all just manufactured hype; a cunning marketing ploy to get people to empty their pockets before the beginning of the next financial year. Of course it is a special day to most Christians, but even some of them do not agree that it is actually the birth date of their saviour (which is probably in January). It is more likely that they selected the 25th of December so as to take over the winter solstice celebrations that were so popular with my European pagan ancestors. This helps explain why so many of the festive traditions are more related to paganism. So the Christians stole Christmas from the pagans, and marketing gurus in the twentieth century managed to hijack it and turn it into the celebrations we love today. You don’t have to dig deep underneath the surface of Christmas to see that it is built on a shaky foundation – even the much loved song Jingle Bells wasn’t actually written about Christmas!

I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday – So Does Tescos!

Despite the reasons to be cynical this is my favourite time of year. It is a part of my culture that I love sharing with my son. Timmy is growing up in Thailand and it can be a struggle to keep him interested in his western heritage; this is one part of my culture that he willingly wants to embrace. My wife never celebrated Christmas until after my son was born; during our first few years together in Thailand I didn’t even bother with it. Now she loves this time of year too.

Growing up in Ireland I naively assumed that everyone on the planet celebrated this holiday. The Coca-Cola advert assured me that this was true and in those days we were less savvy about marketing gimmicks. I thought it was so wonderful that we had this one day when we all tried to be friends. It gave me hope because if we could get one day right then it would be a lot easier to get other days right too. If that could happen it would be our highest human achievement so far. I’m older now and realise that Christmas is far from perfect, but it probably is the nearest we have gotten to such a marvellous day.

Happy Christmas

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Click here to check out more of Paul's blog posts, on his website paulgarrigan.com.

Wanting more this Christmas

2011-12-14T02:24:00.000-08:00

Since the release of My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia, I have been graced with words from various people around the world. It shocks me still to know that there are so many others currently enduring that which I have detailed in my aforementioned title. My perceptions on my past are ever-changing as time goes on and as I grow. Some days, I find myself frustrated and angry with the issues that plagued my young life. Other days, I feel ready to reconcile both with the past and the person that has been formed as a result of it. But neither is a permanent fixture and I can only push as hard as possible for the latter.

While writing this book, I had hoped to touch into more than just what an eating disorder is; I sought to understand myself and analyze the facets that have proved so monumental in my life: bullying, self-worth, my relationship with God, humiliation, body-image, romantic relationships and the idiosyncrasies of my childhood.

Along with these things, I hoped to touch on the presence of the western media. While I have found liberation on a personal level with so many things in my life, this remains something I simply cannot escape. None of us can apparently. It’s on our television screens 24/7 and proving a worrying powerful force in our everyday lives. It’s shoved down our throats in music videos, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, fashion and all the everyday TV shows telling us how to ‘dress to impress’, ‘beat the bulge’ and ‘make an impression with show-stopping make-up’.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m all for looking my best and what’s more, being the best me I can possibly be. But is this really what the media are asking of us? It seems not lately. The size zero culture has not only gripped our contemporary society but is steering it down a detrimental path. I worry for future youths as exposure to such ‘ideals’ becomes more and more ostentatious. All it can surely succeed in creating is a generation of anorexics, bulimics and people doubting who they are against the might of the beauty machine of western culture.

In the face of prescribed perfection – and by perfection, I mean that 10% of individuals who strut catwalks and are thus determined to be the epitome of what we should look like and how we should behave – I wonder if we are risking the magnificence of the individual for a now unattainable status-quo? With so much importance being placed on aesthetics, we could well be losing sight of the best parts of the human condition: passions, creativity, a need to explore and learn and teach, kindness, ambition, empathy and understanding.

Okay, I’m sure I sound like I’m preaching now. But as we approach the holiday season and we’ll soon all be contending with our belts getting that bit tighter, perhaps it couldn’t do any harm just to bear these things in mind. I may be a recovering bulimic, but I am still a 21-year-old woman. And like all women my age, I feel the pressure of keeping up appearances and not over-indulging during the holidays. And like all women my age, I probably will do so anyway, promising myself that the New Year will bring some form of reformation and redemption.

Pre-New Year’s resolution? Relax, Leanne. You’d rather be indulgent and jolly than dieting and miserable. I have been blessed this season. I’ve had the opportunity to document my struggles in a memoir, thus emancipating myself from the pain they carry (Apparently it took bulimia and going to hell and back just to get me to enjoy my Christmas turkey and be comfortable with all my own wobbly bits and curves). What’s more, I’m spending this Christmas doing what I love: writing. The novel takes its turns – sometimes slow and sometimes practically writing itself. Nevertheless, as the snow starts hitting, I am grateful to be working from home, enjoying the company of the people who make me most happy and more than anything else, I’m grateful to be at liberty to truly enjoy the indulgent nature of this time of year and quite simply…. switch my blasted television OFF. Sorry size zero, you’re not on the Christmas card list. I want more than you this Christmas and more for myself forever.

~Leanne

My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia is available now in the Kindle store.

Public Email: leannefwaters@gmail.com

On-wards and Upwards

2011-11-22T04:51:00.000-08:00

My story has been one of repeated triumph and failure. Each has been as prominent in my life as the other, serving to produce a concoction of highs and lows, laughter and tears and the scariest roller-coaster ride that has spanned these last four years. In four years, I have gone from being a high-achiever, who was well liked and had everything going for her to a depressed, suicidal and seemingly hopeless bulimic. From there, my life became all work in the form of university studies, my personal development and writing a memoir. This was my personal hibernation. And now that I am here – published, happy and pushing on towards the future – I realise that I have come full circle. If you are one of those lucky people in the world who fortune has graced, perhaps you have arrived to this place without much turmoil. In this case, I am so thoroughly happy for you. But if, like me, you have done loops and turns over and over again just to get here, let’s congratulate ourselves on simply surviving it all. I am not writing to boost my own ego or that of anyone else; I write now instead merely to mark a new phase in the chronology of my life and my ongoing story. I am alive and what’s more, I’m actually living.

The launch of my book, My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia took place on Tuesday last, November 1st 2011 in the Dublin Book shop on Grafton Street. For me, to say it was a success was an understatement. The night was a pleasant array of old faces and new. I was more nervous than I can say. When the time came to say a few words to all who attended, my knees were clattering off one another and a lump formed in my throat at the sight of their ever-supporting eyes. That is to say, I was moved beyond all recognition. My life – and in particular, my life of the last four years – had always been leading to that point (no matter how many diversions I seemed to take!). And I can only say how extraordinarily happy I was to be able to share it with people who have graced my very existence with their mere presence.

I am a lucky person in a great many ways, more than I could ever express. And as I move on-wards and upwards in my professional and personal pursuits, I do so with the utmost humility, humbleness and irrevocable gratitude. I have taken a leave of absence from my studies and have routed myself on a highway of what I hope is full of creativity and growth. I have begun my first fiction novel and already – as with all things we undertake in life – my perceptions of this complicated world are changing yet again. Good Lord, I don’t think the learning curb is ever meant to stop. Let’s hope not.

The issue of destiny is a complicated one, like everything else apparently. Whether it is something set out for us or something we create and build ourselves is completely yours to decide. It makes no difference to me either way, because regardless of whether I chose this path or it was given to me, I’m just happy to be on it. And what’s more, I can see it now clearer than ever before. My path is set. And while I begin the closing down process of this chapter in my life, naturally I start a new one with full hope, ambition, determination and unrestrained gusto! I can only see so far ahead and to be honest, I don’t think I’d like to see much more. For now, I am happy and that’s enough.

Huge thank you to Maverick House Publishers, John Mooney, Fiona Lacey, my family, my friends, everyone who has bought my memoir, everyone who has inspired me over the years and of course, to all the media outlets who have taken heed of my story and sought to spread its message. And to all still suffering, you’re always in my prayers. I have one message to you: hope.

~ Leanne

My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia is now available to buy in all leading bookshops in Ireland. It is also available on Ebook all around the world or to order from Amazon.

'My Secret Life' book launch November 1st

2011-10-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

Maverick author Leanne Waters talks about her new book 'My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia' in her latest video blog here.

My body had never felt so small or so fragile. In one sense, it was a moment of ecstasy and I was comforted with soft, almost compassionate, encouragement. Delicate, she said. The word imprinted on me like the cold before it. I was weak and going numb, but I was delicate. This is what I had wanted. I wanted to lose weight and retain some ounce of delicacy to resemble that of the spider-figured women I had seen in all those flashing images. Suddenly, the lack of strength displayed by my body was counterbalanced with a surging lease of mental satisfaction and might. As I lay in bed, buried under all my layers of clothes and bed sheets, the warmth still could not reach me. It was too late for that now and I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep, basking in my success and enduring the cold until I could finally slip into a forgetful slumber.

‘My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia’ by Leanne Waters will be available on Kindle next week.

Leanne's book will be launched on Tuesday November 1st in the Dublin Bookshop on Grafton street. All are welcome!

You can follow Leanne on twitter, facebook and tumblr.

RSVP to the launch of My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia by clicking here!

Paul Garrigan Blog- 12th October 2011

2011-10-12T05:22:00.000-07:00

The Floods of Minburi – Greetings from Fortress Garrigan

12 October 2011

The water is continuing to rise outside our home here in Minburi. I can once again hear thunder clouds in the distance so we can look forward to another downpour this evening. Our main worry is Friday; this is when the water released from reservoirs in the north of the country is set to hit Bangkok. In other to save the financial areas of the capital this water is being diverted into the canals (you can read all about this here). Our house is situated in an area that is most likely to be affected. Already the local roads are impassible so we are stuck here until the emergency ends.

Bangkok Floods Have Caught Many With Their Trousers Down

I think most of us here have been caught by surprise. It is only really in the last couple of days that people have been taking the whole thing seriously. Some of my neighbors have abandoned their homes to go stay with relatives; others have barricaded themselves in for the duration. We left it too late to buy sandbags; apparently there still some available in the centre of Minburi but we’ve no way of getting to them. Some people have parked their cars in the airport or in department stores, and I sort of regret not doing the same.

A View of the Approaching Floods From Our Window

Building Fortress Garrigan
-
My wife is the smart one in the family and if it wasn’t for her we would be facing the floods unprepared. She has built a wall at the front of our property to protect us from the water. Our main concern is to keep the car safe. If water invades the house it won’t be nice, but it won’t be the end of the world either. The only thing that we need to be careful of is that we turn off the electricity before that happens. The worrying thing is that the water is rising even when it isn’t raining. Last night there was no rain but the water level rose silently.

I must admit that Oa did a fantastic job on the wall, but she made one glaring error. She cemented in the rain drainage pipe on our side of the wall. Luckily we noticed this before the cement had dried. I can’t help worrying how we are going to remove this construction once the flood is gone.

Can You Spot the Flaw in My Wife's Flood Barrier?

The weather people are predicting that once we get past the weekend it will be the end of the rainy season. The next few days are going to be interesting, but I doubt we will suffer anywhere near the same amount of hardship as people in some other parts of the country. I’m amazed at how little coverage this event is getting in the western media.

Chris Thrall interview with Collette Scott

2011-09-22T04:10:00.000-07:00

Click the link below to read Collette Scott's fascinating interview with Chris Thrall author of 'Eating Smoke'...

Eating Smoke is sure to hold you captivated and enthralled from the beginning until the end. With eyes wide with exictement and watering from laughter, readers will turn the pages hastily when the story captures their imagination. Make sure you check the links and have a read of this exciting bestselling book when it's released in October.

- Collette Scott

Collette Scott - Author: Up Close and Personal with Author Chris Thrall of ...: Chris Thrall’s highly anticipated new release, Eating Smoke: One Man’s Descent into Drug Psychosis in Hong Kong’s Triad Heartland , is a pow...

2011-09-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

The book launch of 'My Secret Life: A memoir of Bulimia' by Leanne Waters will take place on November 1st at 6.30pm in the Dublin Bookshop on Grafton Street. All are welcome, we'd love to see you there!

Follow Leanne on twitter and facebook.

To hell and back: An expat's life on the edge in Hong Kong

2011-09-16T05:59:00.000-07:00

In the 1990s, former Royal Marine Chris Thrall found himself being sucked into a downward spiral in Hong Kong, when his work as a Wanchai bouncer drew him into the world of triads and crystal meth addiction. Now 42, off drugs and pursuing a new life, Thrall reveals how he saw the end -- and found a future -- in his autobiography "Eating Smoke."

CNNGo: Considering your addiction, how were you able to remember things so clearly?

Chris Thrall: Using crystal meth and the psychosis I experienced didn’t affect my memory. I think when you’re young and finding yourself in the world –- especially in such a memorable setting as Hong Kong -– you remember an awful lot, particularly the pertinent things like relationships you had with people and the crazy things you get up to.

"Eating Smoke" is a collection of those memories. I also experienced a great deal of highs, lows and trauma. Incidents you don’t forget in a hurry. There’s probably also a lot I don’t remember and probably just as well.

CNNGo: When was the point when you felt things had gotten seriously out of control?

Thrall: When you’re sliding into addiction you don’t realize things are getting out of control. You just believe that if you can score more drugs then you can make it all good again and everything will be just funky.

The psychosis was impossible to appreciate as it happened, too. I’d recover from a meth binge realizing that some weird things had gone on.

For example, at one point I was convinced that everything in Hong Kong had a secret set of pulleys, cables and motors linking it all up like an enormous pinball machine or a city-sized version of the ghost house at the fair.

Yet after a bender, my mind just seemed to link the experiences to being high and I didn’t feel the need to explore and question them at the time. I just had to deal with the here and now.

CNNGo: Could this have happened to you anywhere, or was Hong Kong partly to blame?

Thrall: No person or place is to blame for anything, certainly not Hong Kong.

Despite the highs and lows, I had an unbelievable time that I wouldn’t have done if I were stuck in an office in Britain. So much so, I felt compelled to write about it, 15 years on.

A raft of factors combine to make certain individuals predisposed to addiction, but rather than bore the reader with theory, I instead wanted them to go on the fast-paced and thrilling journey that I did.

I’ve dropped in the occasional hint of back story so they can work out for themselves how I went from a glowing career in an elite commando force to drug-induced psychosis and working for a Hong Kong triad family.

CNNGo: Although under unfortunate circumstances, you got to know a side of Hong Kong that most people will never see –- how would you describe it to them?

Thrall: Butlins [a holiday camp] for psychopaths. I’ve done my best to detail it in "Eating Smoke."

For me it wasn’t so much learning about the triads but getting beneath the skin of Hong Kong itself. There’s so much more to this unique enclave than meets the un-primed expat eye.

I read up on Hong Kong’s history, its culture and economic positioning. I got stuck into the language and cuisine. I learnt about etiquette, superstition, customs, religion and feng shui. And I made many Chinese friends. Through this I got a better idea of Hong Kong Chinese philosophy, and began to notice the subtler aspects of Cantonese life -– how everything ticks.

If you do this and a bit of research on the origins of the triads, the so-called "brothers of the marsh," their anti-establishment roots, dress code and discreet methods of communication, then you can stroll down Lockhart Road or sit in a Wanchai nightclub and watch it play out for yourself.

CNNGo: Living in the Hong Kong underworld, could you relate at all to other expats?

Thrall: I like to think I relate to all people across all the ethnic divides and that the friendships I write about in "Eating Smoke" show this.

I met a great deal of expats, many of whom were very kind to me. As I got more into the language and culture though and could fully appreciate the concept of "face" -– respect -– I started to resent the behavior of some of the foreign nationals, particularly the ones who talked down to the locals and acted as if they owned the place.

I think that working in a Chinese-run club, surrounded by hard-nut Hong Kong workmates and living in a Wanchai backstreet presented me with something of an identity crisis. I even began to think in Cantonese.

CNNGo: How has the experience changed you for the better? What have you learned?

Thrall: That I didn’t want to see my youth slipping away in a suit; that no one needs to be in a gang or a clique to feel good about themselves; that no matter how much you try to assimilate yourself into another’s culture you’ll always be a foreigner; that I’m now able to empathize with and support others in challenging circumstances; and that there are days when you wake up and the world isn’t the way you want it to be and that’s exactly when you must believe in yourself and strive towards your dreams.

CNNGo: What would you say to yourself now if you could turn back time and meet yourself at Kai Tak Airport when you first landed in Hong Kong?

Thrall: To quote the late [Gonzo journalist and anti-authoritarian] Hunter S. Thompson it would be, "Buy the ticket, take the ride."

Source: To hell and back: An expat's life on the edge in Hong Kong | CNNGo.com http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/life/interview-eating-smoke-857206#ixzz1Y7V94jwQ

You can get your copy of Eating Smoke on the Maverick House website.

For more about Chris Thrall, visit www.christhrall.com or www.facebook.com/EatingSmoke.

'Eating Smoke' reviewed by the South China Morning Post

2011-09-12T02:43:00.000-07:00

Check out this great review of Chris Thrall's debut book 'Eating Smoke: One Man's descent into drug psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heart Land. A true Story'. Click on the image to enlarge.

Click here to read more about Chris Thrall on his website.

Eating Smoke by Chris Thrall is now available to buy from the Maverick House website, click here to get your copy.

The Problem with Travel – Leanne Waters

2011-09-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived in Vietnam, my own arrogance inhibited my ability to predict the very weighty effects the country itself would have on me. After all, I had traveled before, had seen poverty in all its extremities, had tested my body physically (as is required I am told for the sake of mental flourishing) and surely, had already met the greatest of people. Nam wasn’t going to have a scratch on me, I was sure of it.

Hoi An, Vietnam

The ‘traveling bug’, which we have all heard of so many times before is just an idea we are aware of when in the complacency of our own homes. It is only when we actual make that definitive trip that such a disease becomes reality. You catch it like you catch a common cold in winter. And by God, I caught it this time round!

In many ways, I suppose it’s a trap you fall into while away. The given destination initially presents itself as a temporary escapist route, which you have surely earned for one reason or another. And yet, when cast under its spell, a profound trick is played. Said destination seduces you into believing that your escapist environment is in fact a reality to which you could commit yourself fully. In this way, I abandoned almost everything I had left behind in Dublin. I had little interest in them anymore because Vietnam was far too beautiful to wish for anything that could be offered outside of its golden cocoon. But I think travel itself, no matter where the place, has that effect on people anyway. I was living in paradise and a lifestyle too simple to allow struggles of the past to infect its splendour. That’s why it’s wonderful though, right? Because everything of who you were and the life you lead back home is thrown by the wayside and forgotten at too rapid a pace to care for why it now means so little. It was just too easy to forget everything back home. So forget I did.

Taking such trips, I believe, also encourages you to see the best of people at times. For a start, the Vietnamese as a society are the most gentle, docile and accommodating people I have ever come across. They made it impossible to want to come back. But more than this, the conversations I had with other travelers and the camaraderie felt between us all on our journeys was something that could not be found in any circumstance but the given. As travelers, we convince ourselves of our own worldly enlightenment and worse still, feed off one another on the matter. Sure, it can only prove to heighten the hazy ecstasy of your trip, but will undoubtedly make the return journey all the more depressing. Never a good thing when you don’t have a choice in the matter!

I met two other globe-trotters while away who have had more of an impact on me than I believe anyone has had in years. The first was a 73-year-old man from Belgium that I met in Hanoi in Northern Vietnam. He partook in a three-day trip to Halong Bay in which I had the absolute pleasure of his company and many wise words. How very cliche, I know but it’s the truth. An educated man who spoke fluently in five different languages, he was traveling alone and doing the same route I had just finished in reverse. His youngest child was 20-years-old and the man himself never failed to make friends along the way. I wouldn’t dare so much as attempt to convey the wise words he passed along to us all on that trip, as to do so would surely be inadequate and thus undermine the weight with which they were first delivered. All I will say of him is that this man simply astounded me and I am sure of the fact that I will remember him for years to come.

The second was a teacher from Leeds, with whom I shared a hostel in Hoi An and was fortunate enough to meet again up the north of the country. Remarkably sharp-minded and utterly charming, he showed a substance to his character that I have yet to see in any other person I have met. He was the most alluring of persons with a shrewdness so penetrating I many times thought I would crumble during our midnight conversations – carried out always on a Hoi An balcony and after a few Tiger beers. My time spent with this teacher remains the nostalgic inspiration for my regular day dreams and indeed, holds a most special place in my memories.

I spent some time in Thailand on the usual beaten track of Bangkok and the islands. My older brother has raved about these places since he himself traveled there almost ten years ago. What he described to me then and what I myself discovered are two very different things. But then, I suppose a lot of time has passed and it has changed greatly. Thailand was an incredible place; a bit of a rush if I’m being honest. But I dread to think what we will have done to the place in another ten year’s time. Equally, I’m afraid to think what will happen to my beautiful Vietnam in years to come. That haven, which I escaped to at such a young age will surely be unrecognisable in time. I’d hate to think of it changing at all.

So I’ll keep it as I have found it; my Vietnam.

And in doing so, will never alter the very pristine picture of its memory in my mind. I can’t escape the reality of being home but at the very least, will be obscured from that inevitable truth. I found it terribly difficult coming home again. On this, my friend reminded me that such trips were ‘a fantasy’ and that I had to let it go now. This is the problem with traveling – after the long journey hours, the incredible sights, the precious experiences and all the amazing people you find along the way – sooner or later, we all have to leave. The circus finishes, the fantasy fades and eventually, we must all return to the lives we left behind. It has been a very hard goodbye.

- Leanne

“Names get carved in the red oak tree of the ones who stay and the ones who leave. I will wait for you there with these cindered bones. So follow me, follow me down”

Leanne Waters' memoir 'My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia' is due to be published in October 2011.

Siege at Jadotville

2011-09-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

The extremely popular Siege at Jadotville by Declan Power will shortly be making its ebook debut, on amazon.com. Here's a little reminder of how the book was first received back in October 2005, with an excerpt of a review by Don Lavery in the Irish Independent.

"Author Declan Power, himself a former soldier and now a journalist, has written a superb account of a bitter infantry battle where the Irish peacekeeping soldiers were attacked by thousands of troops led by experienced mercenary officers who had served in World War 2, Indochina and Algeria.

The Irish who were subjected to intense fire from small arms, artillery and air attack, fought back from their trenches. Waves of up to 600 enemy soldiers attacking at the time were mown down by the Irish using everything from elderly Vickers machineguns to modern FN rifles.

Inflicting at least 300 dead and twice as many wounded on the attacking Katangan force the Irish had no heavy weapons, no artillery support, apart from a few small 60mm mortars, and no air cover despite repeated UN promises.

The new book shows the absolute folly in sending the Irish company to Jadotville, a small mining town to protect people who later turned on them. The single company had replaced two companies of UN troops in Jadotville in a tactically dangerous position.

Two key figures in the affair, head of UN operations Conor Cruise O'Brien, and Lt Gen Sean McKeown, the Irish general commanding the UN forces, later agreed the order to send the company to Jadotville came from UN HQ in New York.

When the Irish positions in Jadotville came under siege young Irish soldiers fought off the attacks thanks to the leadership of their tough commander, Comdt Pat Quinlan and his NCOs.
Repeated rescue attempts by Irish and Indian troops to break through to the besieged outpost failed, the promised UN fighter jets never appeared in the skies over Jadotville, and after days of intense fighting the Irish surrendered.

'Seige at Jadotville' has a few minor errors such as describing an attacking Fouga plane as a jet fighter – in fact it is an armed trainer – or referring to elderly Irish armoured cars as Vickers 1945 vintage vehicles when they are home built Ford armoured cars armed with Vickers machineguns.

These aside the book is well written and researched using veterans words and reminisces to describe the battle in stunning detail. It outlines the bravery and professionalism of the Irish soldiers in contrast to the bungling of their military and political masters who sent them to Jadotville and left them to their fate.

The book is a welcome addition to the small number of books written about the Congo operation and should be required reading for officers taking the Army's Command and Staff course, as well as the Cabinet table."

- Dan Lavery Irish Independent October 1, 2005

Siege at Jadotville is available from the Maverick website and will be available as an ebook from amazon.com in the coming days.

Maverick House Book Trailers

2011-08-31T06:08:00.000-07:00

Here at Maverick House HQ we have been busy creating book trailers for both our forthcoming and current titles.

Check out our new vimeo widget below to see our latest trailers!

Do you enjoy watching book trailers for forthcoming titles? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Who Turned The Lights Out? – An excerpt from Chris Thrall’s e-mail diaries

2011-08-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 10:20:03 -0700 (PDT)

From: "Chris Thrall" chris@mailingu.com

To: Mission Control

Subject: Who Turned the Lights Out?

Hola Amigos!

Here I am in sunny Florida, in week two of flight-school training for a private pilot’s licence.

Firstly, please excuse any punctuation, grammar and spelling mistakes in this e-mail. The only thing you learnt at my school was how to push a big cupboard in front of the headmaster’s office so he couldn’t get out. He was only five foot one – which made it all the more hilarious! I think our school must have produced quite some many furniture removers.

The other day I flew solo for the first time. I can’t believe these maniacs trust me with a whole aeroplane – but as they have an airport full of them, I suppose they can afford to lose one or two.

Yesterday evening I flew a Cessna 172 to a tiny airport called Okeechobee, right out in the sticks, to do some practise landings. My instructor had warned me that it got dark around 9pm, so I decided to leave at 8.30pm for the half-hour flight back to Fort Pierce where the flight school is. For a student pilot, it’s strictly against the FAA regulations to fly solo at night.

Just as I’d taken off, it started to sink in it was getting dark already. But as I climbed to cruise altitude, I realised that wasn't such a problem – the problem was the swirling fog coming out of nowhere and reducing visibility to under a mile! No pilot is supposed to fly ‘visual’ flights (i.e. without specialised instruments and training) in less than three miles visibility unless they’re
granted special landing clearance from Air Traffic Control. If I didn’t get this permission, it would mean flying back Okeechobee and then a sleep in the plane to avoid the alligators.

As it got darker, I thought it best to make myself visible – that way the trees might see me coming and get out the way. I put on the red flashing beacon light, the white strobe lights, the red and green navigation lights, the tail light and the landing spotlight. I would have put on the Christmas lights, too, if I could have found them and at one point was considering setting fire to something – perhaps a wing and anything else you have two of. I radioed through to the control tower, hoping it would be that the guy from the Airplane movie – the one who’s so completely wrecked on every substance known to man that he would clear me to land upside down and backwards if I wanted. Fortunately, it was him – either that or just a very nice man with a soft spot for lost English halfwits. Not only did he clear me for approach, he didn’t even mind when I mistakenly gave my position as east of the field instead of west!

Actually, it’s easier to fly at night in many ways. You can use the street lighting for navigation and the airports have a flashing green and white beacon (so long as your pointed in the right direction or it seems to go out). He gave me ‘number two’ in the traffic pattern behind another plane that I had to avoid crashing in to. I had no idea what it looked like, but at night that’s not such a problem – especially when he or she has more lights than you do.

Then he very kindly gave me a short cut, ‘straight-on’ approach instead of a ‘holding pattern' landing. By this time, it was great fun, a light aircraft landing on a strip designed for DC 10s and jets. The runway is all lit up and it’s just for you! I was hoping he would call out the Fire Brigade, some ambulances and the National Guard – maybe even evacuate the local city, too – but then my instructor might get to hear of it, so maybe not.

I did probably the best and most rewarding landing I will ever do, thanked the very nice man in the control tower (who even directed me to the parking ramp!) and wondered if like the guy in Airplane, he was floating upside down while sniffing glue.

The good news is that the experienced pilots I’ve spoken to say you learn by these things. And that my lack of knowledge didn't stop me passing the theory exam the next day with 87% – and I didn't even cheat . . . or have to move any cupboards.

Did you know the second language in Florida is Spanish?

Vaya con Dios, Amigos!

Chris X

Chris Thrall is the author of Eating Smoke: One Man’s Descent into Drug Psychosis in Hong Kong’s Triad Heartland.

christhrall.com

facebook.com./eatingsmoke

Chris Thrall Interview with 'Time Out Hong Kong'

2011-08-19T03:19:00.000-07:00

Hannah Slapper of 'Time Out Hong Kong' speaks to Chris Thrall about his book 'Eating Smoke: One man's descent into drug psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad heartland'

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

What kind of trauma did you experience?
To descend into mental illness is an incredibly sad thing for anyone to have to go through. I can’t say too much about it, but in the club I worked I was set up to be murdered one night, by these foreign triads that I mentioned. And there was that cold dark moment of reality where you realise you’re about to die. I actually turned it around, but I’m not the sort of person that is easily intimidated.

How much do you think Hong Kong is to blame for making you the way you were?
It probably doesn’t help that Hong Kong has the most hardcore serious drug known to man available in abundance on every street corner, if you know where to look. Hong Kong really brought home to me how cultures can differ immensely. It’s about the philosophy and the psychology. And the Asian psychology is so ancient; it’s so different to the West.

You can read the full interview on Chris Thrall's blog here. You can also explore book trailers, blog posts and and author bio.

Eating Smoke will be released by Marverick House in October 2011.

Leanne Waters Interview

2011-08-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

Earlier last week our very own Leanne Waters spoke to Cliona Byrne of 'The Irish Catholic Newspaper' about her struggle with bulimia, how it effected her loved ones, her upcoming memoir 'My Secret Life' and how recovery from bulimia is possible.

"The treatment Leanne undertook was psychological and focused on the 'triggers' which caused her eating and purging habits.''Bulimia can be the loneliest place in the world. But for all my harrowing loneliness during that period, I had brought my friends and family down into the darkness with me. Only after therapy did I fully comprehend how much I'd hurt them. I still remember my mother crying herself to sleep through the bedroom walls,'' she says.

Recovery is possible for those who suffer from an eating disorder and Leanne is proof that it is possible to overcome bulimia. ''I think it is very possible for anyone to recover from an eating disorder, with the right help and support system. I am still in recovery, I believe. But I have every faith that one day, this chapter in my own life will be finally closed fully,'' she says"

Read the full article on irishcatholic.ie by clicking here. If you want to learn more about learn visit leannewaters.wordpress.com or follow her on twitter @leannewaters

The Bangkok Connection Review-

2011-07-27T04:49:00.000-07:00

When heroin trafficker Leslie 'Ike' Atkinson was released from a North Carolina federal penitentiary in April 2007, he was in remarkably good physical shape for a man of 82. But after more than three decades behind bars, there was not much left of life to enjoy.

While he doesn't like to dwell on the past, the old US Army master sergeant does have one real regret: that he did not take advantage of the GI Bill, which would have allowed him to go to college, where he is confident he would have done well, and pursue an honest living.

Unlike the ruthless traffickers of today, Mr Atkinson is a gentlemanly, charismatic figure whose ring of former black American servicemen, his 'Band of Brothers', smuggled as much as US$400 million worth of Golden Triangle heroin from Thailand to the United States during the Vietnam War.

Touched on in the largely fictionalised film American Gangster, the true story of what the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) labelled one of the world's largest trafficking organisations is told for the first time in Ron Chepesiuk's new book, The Bangkok Connection.

The work is of more than passing interest to me because, in Bangkok in the early 1970s, I knew some of the players on both sides of the law. More specifically, Chepesiuk convincingly debunks the myth, perpetuated in the film, that the ring used the bodies of dead soldiers to spirit the heroin into the US.

Mr Atkinson calls the so-called Cadaver Connection 'a big lie... the biggest hoax ever perpetuated', and says that on the sole occasion Harlem gangster Frank Lucas, the real-life central figure in the movie, visited Thailand, he was so disorientated he had to have his hand held.

When Mr Atkinson took him to a Buddhist temple, Lucas insisted on buying a bag of apples as an offering. Then, to everyone's surprise, he burst into tears and asked: 'Does Thailand border the Holy Land?' No wonder Mr Atkinson called him 'the dumbest man I ever met'.

Lucas was just one customer in the seven years, between 1968 and 1975, during which the man dubbed 'Sergeant Smack' supervised the flow of thousands of kilograms of No. 4 heroin through the American military postal service and aboard US Air Force cargo aircraft crossing the Pacific in support of the war.

In scores of interviews with his fellow conspirators, former US narcotics agents and prosecutors, Chepesiuk details Mr Atkinson's rise from petty crime on West German military bases and how the DEA had to create a special unit, known as Centac 9, to bring him down.

Eventually undone by a handprint carelessly left on a bag of heroin, Mr Atkinson remained so low-key that when he entered the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in mid-1975 to begin serving a 19-year sentence, there was none of the adulation that usually greeted celebrity prisoners.

But it wasn't the end by a long way. Over the next six months, Mr Atkinson remained in control of the ring from behind bars. When the surviving conspirators were finally arrested and turned state's evidence, he received another 25-year term - to be served consecutively.

Then as late as 1987, he would even try to revive the operation again with a different group of accomplices from his cell in New York's Otisville Federal Penitentiary. That ended in failure and he had nine more years added on.

A lot has changed in Thailand since Mr Atkinson's day. Khun Sa, the Shan warlord his Thai intermediaries bought the heroin from, saw his empire dissolve in the early 1990s. Over the next decade, Afghanistan slowly took over from Myanmar as the world's major supplier.

Much of Myanmar's heroin now goes directly across the border into the voracious China market, which did not exist 30 years ago. The dwindling amount still smuggled through Thailand ends up in Australia, Japan and Taiwan.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was almost no heroin flowing into Taiwan because the border trade was controlled by elements connected with the Kuomintang armies who fled China in 1949 and settled along the Thai-Myanmar border.

The collapse of the Communist Party of Myanmar (CPM) in 1989 changed all the dynamics and ushered in a new group of drug warlords, many of them former CPM leaders who felt no such loyalty to Taiwan.

For Mr Atkinson, crime may have paid for a while - but not any more. 'There is no money left,' says Chepesiuk. 'The little known aspect of the War on Drugs that the public doesn't know is that the authorities not only get their man, they also get his money.'

Mr Atkinson's lawyer was also his bag man, who stashed the bulk of the proceeds in the Cayman Islands and later turned over the laundered accounts when the ring was busted. The authorities also confiscated Mr Atkinson's property, including a large farm he co-owned with Lucas.

Today, Mr Atkinson lives simply on his military pension and social security benefits. It is a far cry from what he calls the 'one long adrenaline rush crammed with risks' which marked his career as an international drug trafficker who for a long time literally flew beneath the radar.

This review first appeared in the paid-subscriber section of the on-line edition and also the print edition of the Straits Times Newspaper, Singapore, July 2011.

Raymond Alikpala: The transition from 'God loves Bakla' to 'Of God and Men'

2011-07-26T02:43:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from Raymond Alikpala's blog. It details his reasons for leaving Cambodia and why he decided to re-release 'God loves Bakla' as 'Of God and Men: A Life in the Closet' with Maverick House Publishing.

"I had been living in Cambodia for almost a decade and had built for myself a very comfortable life. I had a fabulous apartment, a landlord who treated me like family, and true friends who made Phnom Penh a real home away from home. Life in “the Penh” was, compared to Manila, very cheap, stress-free, devoid of traffic jams, flash floods and the constant security issues. It was rather odd to decide to say goodbye to all of that and return to chaotic, overcrowded Manila. Most of all, it was difficult to leave the place where I had found my true love, who for reasons too complicated to go into at this time could not follow me to Manila.

As if I needed confirmation that I was doing the right thing leaving Cambodia, my book deal with Maverick House Publishers of Ireland came halfway through my transition period. In March this year, Maverick House decided to re-publish God Loves Bakla internationally as Of God and Men, scheduling it for an October 2011 release. It was, to me, a sign from God that He was indeed calling me back home!

An interesting anecdote relates to my book’s new title. It was obvious that God Loves Bakla sounded too ethnic and would make the book a tough sell internationally, so I was asked to think of something more accessible. I suggested “My Secret Life in the Closet.” But my publisher nixed it, saying the book was “more spiritual than most books of its genre.” Thus the decision to retain the word “God” in the title. I was most impressed: my publisher “gets” GLB. I knew then that I have found the right publisher who truly understands my work and can push it to a global audience. "

You can read the rest of the blog by going to raymondalikpala.wordpress.com or by clicking here

The Myths of Organized Crime

2011-07-18T03:44:00.000-07:00

After penning nine gangster books, including the latest that Maverick House has published as The Bangkok Connection: Trafficing Heroin from Asia to the USA, I can say with confidence that, despite all the songs and the movies supposedly based on the true stories of the kingpins and the dope boys, the truth is far harder to discern. Documenting the history of organized crime can be a tedious and often frustrating experience. Reliable information is scarce. Most lazy journalists (and law enforcement) pass off myth and folklore as fact, and supposedly reliable media sources allow themselves to become breeding grounds for misinformation. Criminal sources lie or spin their recollections. Moreover, they don’t generate many records. Ever heard of a gangbanger keeping a diary or writing instructions to his lieutenants? That is both the challenge and fun in writing about gangsters, but I love it. What can be more interesting than writing about the underworld and the characters who populate it?

Along the way, though, I’ve learned a few things on the subject. So let me help dispel some of the myths regarding the history of organized crime. Here are three of the biggest myths:

1) The amount of money gangsters are supposed to make.

The media routinely report wildly inflated figures as how much money gangsters make. The truth is nobody really knows because we dealing with the underworld. But there is an invested interest on both sides of the law to inflate the figures. Law enforcement does it to justify their budgets and to get promotions. Gangsters exaggerate because of their egos.

Frank Lucas, the subject of the blockbuster movie, American Gangster, bragged that he was making a million dollars a day in Harlem in the early 1970s peddling smack. First of all, can you imagine trying to haul away in a car $1 million a day in street money? Also, Lucas was on welfare when they published that New Yorker magazine article that caught the attention of Hollywood. So what happened to the million bucks a day? I know for a fact from sources whom I interviewed for The Bangkok Connection that Lucas was in constant trouble with La Cosa Nostra because he owed them money.

2) African American organized crime does not exist, or at the least, African-Americans are not smart enough to organize crime.

Racism has affected all aspects of American society, including how it perceives Black gangsters. Four decades ago, many criminologists did not believe African-Americans were smart enough to organize crime. And it was not just the academics. Blacks were able to control lottery or policy racket in their communities because La Cosa Nostra thought it was just a petty ante criminal enterprise. The Mob was shocked to learn about the money being made and subsequently moved in to take it over. Frank Matthews, who jumped bail in 1974 with 15 million and has never been found, was able to operate under the radar of law enforcement for several years because at first they didn’t investigate him seriously. But by the late 1970s, with names like Matthews, Robert Stepheney, Zack Robinson, Nicky Barnes, and Goldfinger Terrell operating as big-time drug lords, law enforcement knew that African-American organized crime existed.

The truth is, to be a successful drug dealer at the higher level, you need to exhibit entrepreneurial skills and have brains. Some of the big names in Black organized crime have been really complex multidimensional characters.

Take Bumpy Johnson, for example. Remember him in the opening scene of American Gangster. Bumpy was sophisticated, cerebral and self-educated. Black gangster Nicky Barnes was well read and had a brilliant business mind. The Bangkok Connection is about the life story of Ike Atkinson, the Black gangster from whom Frank Lucas stole much of his story. The word law enforcement officials use to describe Ike is intelligent. One former prosecutor said he could have been a CEO of a major corporation.

3) Errors, omissions and distortions are okay in a gangster movie about a real life gangster because the movie is just based on a true story.

That’s essentially a cop-out rationale for Hollywood to make a lot of money without having to worry about its credibility. The key word is “based”. Given that qualifier, Hollywood can take all kind of liberties with the story. It has led to a lot of myths and distortions about gangland history. The recent movie, American Gangster, is a prime example. Unfortunately, moviegoers don’t take the time to check out the movie’s accuracy and the myths prevail.

Well, that’s it. There are other myths about organized crime, but take these three for a start.

– Ron Chepesiuk

2011-07-12T07:24:00.000-07:00

In 2008 Raymond Alikpala self-published a novel entitled 'God Loves Batla'. The novel documented Alikpala's journey of self discovery that took him from the predominantly Catholic Philippines to Singapore, Thailand and eventually to Cambodia. It was a journey in which he joined and left the priesthood after deciding that his God wanted him to live a full and honest life, which meant coming out.

In an interview with Craig Gerard of asialifeguide.com (Read the full interview here) Alikpala remarks that "life experiences, pain, sacrifice, are what bring us closer to God" something he struggled with when he decided to come out as a gay Catholic in the Philippines.
In October 2011 Maverick House will re-publish Alikpala's book which has been described as "amazing and inspirational" under the new title ‘Of God and Men: A Life in the Closet’ to make it available to a worldwide audience.

‘Of God and Men: A Life in the Closet’ by Raymond Alikpala will be available for purchase for a worldwide audience on October 1, 20011. It is also available to pre-order from Book Depository. Click here to pre-order and save over 20%

Regrets- Leanne Waters

2011-05-03T01:47:00.000-07:00

Regret is a thing of tremendous contention. It’s something that almost all people experience and yet remains subject to context and circumstance. One regret of a particular time, for example, may in future prove itself to be of great value. Regrets, unlike the people who possess them, are transformative in this way. Given the ever-changing perceptions of an individual, a single regret retains the power of transcendence; an ability to alter its place both in our lives and our often clumsy interpretations.

With this in mind, I’ve found myself stuck on a question that was only recently put forward to me by a close friend. Do you regret the first time you did it? By ‘it’ she meant self-induced vomiting and by ‘regret’ she was undoubtedly referring to the many horrors that consequently followed this very occasion. The natural response to such a question is, of course, yes. Had I not done ‘it’ that very first time, perhaps I could have avoided the two years of misery that ensued. Yes, in hindsight, that would have been most favourable I’m sure. But this would be a most unsatisfying answer.

Bulimia Nervosa isn’t an easy thing to be proud of in your life; particularly when said life has been so shortly lived thus far. And though I certainly bear no pride in its dominance over my life, I also find it difficult to regret. In many ways, to regret the role of Bulimia in my life would be to regret the person that has subsequently been produced. Mine is not a story of strength or even triumph. It’s one of evolution.

My Secret Life: A Memoir of Bulimia documents just this. The story of how an eating disorder – albeit an aggressive case – is born, developed and ultimately overcome is one of evolution; both of the illness and of the self. The mentality that first seduced me into doing ‘it’ and that endured through the depravity of my Bulimia was the same that pulled me out of that darkness. It’s the same mentality that reigns now. It has not changed nor compromised – merely evolved. And so, I find it difficult to regret such a thing. To do so would surely lead me to regret the mentality by which it was nurtured and by which this book has been written. This question is best asked under a given context and circumstance, as we have already determined is essential. Said context may be the present and the given circumstance may be the writing of this book under the mentality of today. Only then can it be assessed accurately and with all things considered. Do I now regret the first time I did it? No, probably not.

The Spellcaster- Terence Donaldson

2011-04-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

Well it has been six years since the events I described in my book 'Hell in Barbados' occurred, and a certain amount of water has passed under the bridge in that intervening time.

What I am doing now is really an extension of my previous work as a tarot reader/author; I am now a professional practitioner of healing and magic.

It was immediately prior to my last drug relapse into crack and heroin that I succeeded in writing what has become a classic in the filed of witchcraft- 'The Tarot Spellcaster'. Inside the front cover, it still carries the dedication that I made then to my girlfriend at the time- Claire- and, when, as I sometimes do, look at her name there, my mind fills with many memories- some sweet, but mostly painful.

Even so, the publication of this book has, over the last ten years, become something of a classic in the field.

In it, I attempted to show the unity between the tarot, which until then, had been viewed mostly as a divinatory, or fortune-telling instrument and an instrument whereby we can INFLUENCE EVENTS, and encourage certain things to materialize and transpire into our lives.

Through a circuitous chain of events, I am now working in association with a spiritual shop, in London's busy Holloway Road, and have attracted a large and loyal following of people from diverse backgrounds that regularly commission me to perform distant workings, or 'spells'- to use my knowledge of tarot, kabbalah, and magic influence, say, a court case, a family matter, a business, or an individual's karma.

I personally only use my knowledge for good, and to help good people, and turn away requests that sometimes come my way to use black magic on people, or to curse others.

Those interested in my work can look at my website, which is www.terrydonaldson.com

TERRY DONALDSON

The Rewards From Being An “Author” By Dr. Iain Corness

2011-04-18T02:29:00.000-07:00

I was walking through the hospital corridor between B Building and E Building when I heard my name being called. Turning around I saw a rather attractive lady waving to me. Was this going to be my lucky day, I thought? However, the lady did not have any intention of dragging me off to some bordello, nor to ask me in my medical opinion, should she have her toenails tattooed, but to merely say that she enjoyed my book (Farang, Thailand through the eyes of an ex-pat). In fact, she enjoyed it so much she was on her way to buy my second book (Farang the Sequel) at the hospital’s bookshop. It would have been churlish not to accompany her to the booksellers, and so I did, and offered to autograph her copy, “To Jane, Best Wishes Dr. Iain” which was duly inscribed on the flyleaf. On the same day I received an email contact from one of my medical colleagues in Australia whose wife had seen the books in Bangkok Airport, remembered my name, and purchased them for her husband. He enjoyed them enough to do an internet search and contact me, after a span of some 20 odd years. So just what does all this mean in the overall scheme of things? It shows just a little of what being an “author” means. Public recognition rather than public adulation. At my level in the literary hierarchy I will not receive enough recognition or adulation to make enough money to retire. The first time I met Maverick’s John Mooney he advised me that I was never going to make a million dollars out of my writing unless my name was Dan Brown or JK Rowling. I suggested I change my name to John Kenneth Rowling, but this was ignored. For me, being an “author” is an ego boost. It is fun to hear people say that they liked the books, so eventually the money doesn’t matter (that is not an invitation to withhold royalties, John Mooney). And finally, I was in a bookshop and bumped into fellow author Dan Dorothy (Mango Rains – a great read) who was there with a friend of his, who exclaimed “I have never been in the company of two authors before. This calls for a celebration – I’m taking you both to lunch!” So, in addition to recognition and adulation, you can add “lunch”. I do enjoy being an “author”.

'Stranger Than Fiction' by Abigail Rieley

2011-04-06T04:23:00.000-07:00

Back in May 2008, during the trial of Sharon Collins & Essam Eid, it was a running joke among journalists and court staff that it wouldn't be long before Hollywood came knocking. It was clear from the time the jury was selected that this was going to be a trial unlike any that had come before the Irish courts in a very long time. When one of those accused is an Egyptian-born poker dealer, who had been working, until his arrest, at on of the most famous casinos on the Las Vegas strip you know the story is going to be special. When the prosecution barristers outlined the facts of the case, with a lurid murder plot, seedy sexual allegations made to RTE's Gerry Ryan Show and home made Ricin poison, there was no doubt this was going to be good, very good. This was always a case with literary aspirations. Sharon Collins, the Clare woman accused of hiring Eid, through the website hitmanforhire.net to kill her partner PJ Howard and his two sons Robert & Niall, had always talked about the mysterious Maria Marconi. Marconi, according to Collins, offered Internet writing classes but Collins found herself on the receiving end of a nasty blackmail plot. Maria Marconi has proven illusive, to say the least. The FBI found no trace of her, no official paper trail proving birth, marriage, taxation or home. Several private investigators sent by the ever faithful Mr Howard have also drawn a blank. The only thing certain is that Sharon Collins has the writing bug. When I told her during the trial that I was writing The Devil in the Red Dress she told me she too planned to write her experiences down.Eid seemed more content to be the inspiration. During the trial he used to joke that he wanted Al Pacino to play him in the big screen version of his story. We all used to play at who would play who in the movie. Well now it's a game everyone can play. I was delighted to hear that Michael Duke Productions have bought the film and drama rights for Devil in the Red Dress. The company has bought the infamous hitmanforhire.net domain to use in any future marketing. The story itself has further to go. Eid is set to take centre stage in the near future. Extradition proceedings have started to send him back to America to face charges for another internet hit scam. This time the “femme fatale” is an accountant called Marissa Marks. She's also facing charges of hiring Eid through the website. The case has already been picked up by the American media, so I'll be watching where it goes from here with interest. I can't help wondering whether American court reporters who turn up for the first day of Marissa Marks' trial in LA will have the same reaction I did when I heard heard the details of the case. I wrote about Marissa Marks and her “victim” Anne Lauryn Royston in the book. By the time I was writing, Eid's former lover and partner-in-crime Theresa Engle was already serving her eight month sentence for her part in that case. Court documents tell a tale just as bizarre as the Irish arm of the story and once again, no one was physically hurt. But despite the convoluted details of both cases it was a short lived crime spree, with only a couple of weeks between the two so-called hits. There were times writing the book when I almost forgot I was writing a true story. It's definitely one where the truth is stranger than fiction. Seeing Eid in the dock again has a strange air of unreality, as if my characters have come to life. But that was always the case, even when the first trial was going on. By the time it came to an end prosecution barrister Una Ní Raifeartaigh felt it necessary to remind the jury this was not for entertainment. It's easy to forget when chuckling over the more lurid facts, that three people's lives were threatened and two families have been torn apart. I know that the plan with the film is to use my book as the basis for a fictional retelling of the story. I'm looking forward to the day when I can sit in a darkened cinema and laugh at the absurdities along with everyone else.

Burma today is a modern genocide by Daniel Pederson

2011-04-04T04:04:00.000-07:00

The Burmese diaspora is spreading.

These days when I contact my Karen friends via Skype, wondering why I haven’t seen them for a while and looking to catch up, I might find they now live in Norway, the United States, Sweden, or Australia.

Once they lived in refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border.

Mostly the reason I knew these people was because they were involved in the Karen people’s resistance against Burma’s ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council.

And that is why their resettlement to a third country was fast-tracked.

Many of the most talented, multi-lingual and well-contacted figures in the Karen resistance movement that were once registered in the camps have been shunted off abroad.

Thailand doesn’t want any refugee camps to exist along the border any more, the ruling military junta wants all but the “troublemakers” back as a cheap labour pool, and international agencies are shipping people out as fast as they can.

First those “lucky” enough to be selected for resettlement, the process begins with a forced stay in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Mae Sot for days on end.

There they have nothing to do except lie on plastic mats and become increasingly nervous about what is before them.

There is not a lot of food and when comes it is dished out communally to line-ups.

Then the refugees are tested and re-tested for communicable diseases.

Finally they are loaded into the backs of trucks and driven to the airport and sent away to “start a new life”.

And so ends the hope of simply returning home to a peaceful country.

In most countries a government helps build the human resources of a nation by constructing schools, providing healthcare and the basic amenities that foster human development.

Today in Burma, the government and its army is employing a scorched-earth policy against much of the population.

The army is intent on destroying the basic amenities of life that the people have built themselves, with no help from anyone else.

From materials cut and dragged from the jungle they have built schools, clinics, community centres and places of worship, be they Buddhist temples, Muslim Mosques or Christian Churches.

And their own supposed government is systematically destroying them, dispersing the people and stealing their food and livestock.

In Burma, the world’s longest war still rages on, and it is ruining millions of lives and has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

It is a war fuelled by greed and - have no doubt - it is all about the money.

Many of this conflict’s casualties are strung out along the Thai-Burma border and are the most visible and accessible manifestation of what is happening inside Burma.

In camps bounded by bamboo fences and barbed wire, guarded by men with guns, a remnant population huddles, watching the world go by.

They are not allowed to leave the camp and they are not allowed to work.

The men with the guns stationed at the gates and along the fences are not there to protect the people - the Thai government refuses to provide security for the camps – they are there to keep people out.

The Thai authorities along the border don’t want publicity, because then more people with cameras will come along and everything could get out of hand.

As it is now they have the UN and international agencies, bar but a few, adequately tamed.

Once upon a time this conflict was marked by annual dry season offensives, soldiers making war when it was easiest to move through a tough terrain.

But that is no longer the case.

In 1984 the Burma Army established base camps in the border areas, declared them free-fire zones and continued their offensives against the local population throughout the wet season.

In 1984 there were 10,000 refugees

By 1994 there were 80,000 refugees

In 1997 that number had increased to 115,000

Since then numbers have remained static at about 150,000

Despite the resettlement programme overseen largely by UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration, the numbers remain fairly static because the people keep coming.

These figures are not truly representative of the displacement of Burma’s people.

For instance when I first began working on the first draft of ‘Secret Genocide’, in May 2008, the Bangkok Post reported that between January and April of that year, 80,000 people had walked across the Thai-Burma Friendship Bridge in Mae Sot and simply disappeared.

There are millions of Burmese working illegally in Thailand.

They are locked down in homes working as maids, locked down in restaurants working as dishwashers, locked down in brothels working as prostitutes.

More than 80 per cent of the population of the refugee camps is Karen – they are directly fleeing fighting.

The Karen people have it particularly bad, with cabinets around the world bursting at the seams with details of human rights abuses, abuses that occur on a near-daily basis.

Other people living in the camps are mainly economic migrants, fleeing an economy ruined by mismanagement and greed.

Burma’s banking system is available only to the elite and its property laws are nothing short of criminal.

Burma’s military rulers are signing deals to sell the country’s natural resources, predominantly to Thailand, China and, of late, India.

They are locking the country into 30-year contracts, effectively robbing any future administration of much-needed income to rebuild the nation.

The role of geopolitics in the Karens’ plight cannot be underestimated.

The 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China and India combined constitute more than half the world’s population.

Burma’s military rulers are a full member of ASEAN and occupy a seat at the United Nations, just as the Khmer Rouge did throughout and beyond their slaughter of millions of Cambodians.

The fact the West bleats about China ‘propping up’ the ironically named State Peace and Development Council makes clear its ignorance of the true situation.

China is vigorously pursuing its two oceans policy.

At the moment it is constructing a pipeline from the Andaman Sea and a deep water port at Tavoy, or Daiwei in Burmese newspeak, which will feed directly into its southern province of Yunnan.

Eventually this pipeline is to be flanked by a super highway and a high-speed rail link.

This massive transport corridor will split Burma in two.

It will also slice 10 days off shipping times to get Middle East oil to China’s southern industrial powerhouse.

The Strait of Malacca will no longer be a shipping thoroughfare to China.

It is a distinct possibility Singapore Crude may be finished as a benchmark of global oil prices.

The way the world does business will be changed forever.

In Burma’s north, on the Chindwin River, India plans two massive hydropower dams that will create more electricity than Burma is currently capable of producing.

High-voltage power lines will carry the power directly into India and Burma’s people will receive nothing.

The generals will receive cold, hard cash for selling off the resource.

Along the untamed Salween River, considered one of world’s most biologically-diverse temperate ecosystems, Thailand is rubbing it hands together at the prospect of a cascade of dams that will fuel industrial development in its north.

None of these countries really care for the State Peace and Development Council.

China, particularly, is pragmatic when it comes to business.

At the moment it is convenient to do business with the small clique of generals controlling Burma.

But if they were gone tomorrow, China’s project would still proceed - it would simply negotiate to get what it wanted with whoever held power.

And whoever held power would still negotiate to enable that pipeline to be built.

Burma’s people want economic development, but they want a share of it.

At the moment the ruling military elite soaks up everything, so there is nothing left for the people.

Should they wrest power from the military, the democratic forces are not going to reject proposals that benefit their country.

But they would certainly seek to use the revenue to develop schools, hospitals and roads, rather than further bolster the armed forces or build a nuclear bomb.

For more than a decade I have gathered testimonies and spoken with people involved in this war.

If you consider the legal definition of genocide, I don’t think there’s any question that what we are witnessing in Burma today is a modern genocide.

Genocide was defined by our forefathers in the aftermath of World War II, in a bid to make atrocities punishable.

Their work was a direct bid to make life easier for us and to offer up what they had learned from a distinctly horrifying chapter of history.

How can we turn our backs on the lessons our forefathers chose to share with us – lessons that were learned through tortured experience?

If we don’t consider what has happened in the past, how can we build a better future?

We can’t rely on the international community per se, this is our society, it is up to each and every one of us to ask not ‘What can I do, but rather what am I going to do?’

How my e-reader is making my life easier

2011-03-31T07:22:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I wrote a blogpost about how travelling with a Kindle wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. On a short flight to London, I was asked by the air stewardess to switch it off upon take off and landing (I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was unable to; it goes into sleep mode itself after a period of not being used.)

Some readers commented that in fact it was my fault (yes, I’m looking at you @anseoamuinteoir); I had complained because it ran out of battery when I wanted it, and was not able to use it for the entire duration of the flight, unlike a paper book.

So I promised I would write another article to balance my previous one. In fact, it was terribly easy to come up the advantage the Kindle/e-reader has to offer.

I’m currently in Ljubljana, Slovenia, attending the World Book Summit and meetings with the Federation of European Publishers (FEP). I’m the Irish representative to the FEP and we have meetings around Europe five times a year.

In advance of the meetings, the FEP staff email several documents to the representatives; the agenda, any relevant court rulings, lots of potential amendments to Bills across Europe, so the pre-meeting reading material can amount to close to 200 pages. I often frantically print these documents a day or two before the meeting, and read through them at the airport(s) and on the plane. This can be terribly messy unless you’re terribly organised (I’m not) and results in pages falling down, and never being able to find the right document during the discussion about that particular topic.

Then along came Kindle.

The ability to be able to email the documents to myself has radically changed my modus operandi. As each document came into my inbox, I immediately forwarded it to my Kindle, and would read through it at night before resuming my novel. By the time I got onto the plane, I was able to read through complex court rulings quite easily; the Kindle is a pleasurable reading experience. I could then take notes in comfort; not needing my cumbersome laptop, or flicking through 200 pages of unsorted paperwork. I can easily find each document on the Kindle.

Some people mistakenly think publishers fear the digital age; that we are luddites who only deal in paper editions of books. This is clearly not true.
I’m sitting at a riverside cafe in Ljubljana writing this on my laptop, enjoying the warm sunshine, listening to my ipod, with my Kindle stashed in my bag while I wait to attend the FEP meeting. The technological revolution keeps evolving and changing, and making people’s lives easier and better. I thoroughly embrace all new technologies, as does my company, Maverick House.

Maverick House is converting its back catalogue to e-books at the moment; our catalogue consists of about 100 books, so it will take some time to see the entire list there, but we are doing simultaneous editions of every book we’ve published since this year. The next book Maverick will produce as an e-book is The Templars and the Shroud of Christ, by Vatican historian, Barbara Frale which will also be published in a paperback in April 2011.

As a publisher, I am often asked how e-books will affect publishing. The truth is that publishers want people to read; it doesn’t really matter what format it’s in. If people read, whether it’s on an e-reader or a paper book, it doesn’t really matter. We produce content and we disseminate it to an audience to consume in whatever way they want. The important thing is that people continue to read, especially the next generation. If we lose a generation and they don’t embrace reading, then we will lose a generation of writers. In order to write, and to write well, the most important thing is to read.

As for me, I’m currently reading a novel on my Kindle, which is light and easy to transport (the novel has about 500 pages in the paper edition). I also have a stack of books on my bedside locker, one of which will be my next reading choice.

Books and e-readers will continue to live side by side, and e-readers will continue to improve with each release. I don’t know how people will read in the future and the truth is I don’t care, as long as they are reading. And Maverick House will continue to keep up with technology and cater for our readers.

New blog by Paul Garrigan

2011-03-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

From Coward to Muay Thai Fighter

What happens if a middle-aged ex-drunk decides that he wants to learn the toughest fighting art in the world?

In three months time I intend to step into a ring and fight Muay Thai. This is going to be the toughest challenge I’ve ever faced and the prospect of a physical confrontation both thrills and scares the hell out of me. Many of those who know me think I’m mad to even consider such a risky venture, but this just feels so important to me.

For many years I wallowed in alcoholism. I believed this to be the easy path through life. Of course I was wrong about this; my attempt to skip hardship brought me through hell. It did teach me at least one important lesson though; the easy path does not take me anywhere I want to go. I’ve found that life is about achieving dreams and to do this I need to keep pushing my limits. A famous saying in martial arts is that the only person we are really fighting is the person we were yesterday.

From Coward to Muay Thai Fighter

I’m not a natural fighter – quite the opposite in fact. I can usually talk my way out of trouble; I’d rather be viewed as a coward than deal with violence. On the couple of occasions when my words were ineffective the fight didn’t last long. An attacker never needed to hit my twice; after the first blow I’d roll up into a ball. The threat of violence terrifies me but I’ve found that wonderful things can happen when I face my fears.

It’s a bit ironic, but despite my terror of confrontation I’ve been obsessed with martial arts for most of my life. I began practicing Kung-Fu in my early teens. Bruce Lee inspired my efforts and I wanted to be just like him. It turned out that the ability to defend myself in the gym wasn’t always transferable to the outside world, but my love of martial arts has remained consistent. I’m convinced that it was lessons remembered from martial arts that eventually helped me find my way back from addiction.

Muay Thai is the toughest martial art in the world. They call it the science of eight limbs because you can attack and defend with every part of the body. Years ago I attended a training course in Ireland led by Master Sken; a Muay Thai champ that is credited with helping to bring this martial art to Western Europe. He impressed the hell out of me with his speed and power. During my years living in Thailand I’ve seen many more Muay Thai fighters in action and my respect for this fighting art has increased. Looking at these fights I would fantasise that it was me in the ring; I assumed that I was too old to make this a reality.

The urge to learn Muay Thai persisted until eight months ago when I made up my mind to follow this dream. I signed up with the nearest gym to my home in Bangkok. The training is tough, but the fact that I’m now middle aged isn’t too much of an obstacle. Sure, I’m never going to be a Muay Thai champion but there is more to martial arts than this. Over the next few months I’m going to increase my training until by July I’ll be training full-time in preparation for the fight. Even though I’m in my forties, and alcohol abuse almost destroyed my body and mind, I’m working towards the highest level of fitness I’ve ever experienced.

Sharing My Muay Thai Experiences

Not only do I plan to fight Muay Thai but I’m also going to document the experience. I intend to demonstrate how achieving dreams is still possible even after we have taken many wrong turns in life. I want my wanderings into Muay Thai to be inspirational, or at the very least entertaining. This fighting art is an important aspect of Thai culture and I’ll share what I learn from the inside. There are now many westerners who are interested in coming to Thailand to learn Muay Thai and I hope my experiences will be of interest to them too.

My first book Dead Drunk dealt with my experiences of escaping addition at a Thai temple. Defeating alcoholism saved my life and getting my account published was as dream come true - I’m proud of both achievements. Fighting Muay Thai is a different type of challenge. I’m going to have to push myself physically and mentally beyond anything I would have previously considered possible. It is going to be tough. If all goes to plan there will be a book in 2012, but in the meantime you can follow my progress at http://middleagedmuaythai.com/

'Thailand as a Writer's Paradise' by Paul Garrigan

2011-02-18T02:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve met a lot of writers over the years while living here in Thailand. Most expats I encounter are at least planning to write a book. You could say this about people in most places of course; when I visit Ireland I meet plenty of folk who intend to write a novel one day. The difference is that in Thailand a larger percentage of these frustrated writers will actually make it happen. A lot of these books will never be read by anyone other than family and friends, but to actually finish such a project is quite an achievement – at least I think so anyway.

Why Thailand?

So what is it that attracts so many writers to Thailand? I like to think that it is because most expats are adventurers who don’t just dream about doing something – they do it. Moving to a foreign country is not something that everyone can cope with, and it takes a certain type of metal attitude to survive outside your comfort zone. Going abroad on holiday can be challenging, but moving there long term is a completely different kettle of fish. Of course my romantic idea about the expat could equally apply to every other country where expats go to live. What is it about Thailand in particular that seems to attract writers? While the male expat in Thailand might get tarnished with stereotype of only being there for the sex (the so called ‘sexpat’) the thing that really separates them from other expats is that they usually given up so much to live here. Your average expat in other countries will be going there because of the potential to make a better salary, but most expats in Thailand will look forward to a huge drop in earnings. In my own case during the years I worked as a teacher I only made a sixth of the salary that I could make working as a nurse in Ireland – my old profession. I think the fact that the expat in Thailand is willing to give up so much to live there differentiates them from other expats around the world. Of course you might be able to say the same about expats in some South American countries but I’m really not qualified to talk about this. In Thailand though, a lot of the expats are people who are willing to give up a lot to follow their dreams. It is this that I think accounts for why so many of them are writers – and not just aspiring writers. They tend to be individuals who are prepared to risk a lot in their search for contentment.

Thailand is a Great Place to be a Writer

I’ve found that Thailand is a great place to be a writer. The local culture is inspiring and forces most of us expats to challenge our old ideas about the world. Perhaps it is this wearing down of our past conditioning that gives us something interesting to say. Living in a place like Thailand can also be a constant challenge in other ways as well; many foreigners end up writing just to express their frustrations. I tend to see every corner of the world as a source for inspiration for writers, but Thailand seems to be particularly good for this.

Secret Genocide

2011-02-10T02:19:00.000-08:00

I am sitting in a hotel in the Golden Triangle in northern Thailand waiting for an opportunity to cross into Burma and wondering what is happening at home. I live in Mae Sot and spend most of my time there, so it is strange to be hundreds of kilometers north of the war zone I dedicate much of my time to. In some ways it is a welcome release, but most of the time I spend wondering just what is happening with my friends back home. Are they safe as I kick back in front of the television in a cushy hotel, or has new fighting begun? My friends are members of the Karen ethnic group of Burma and are part of a war that has now spanned 62 years. It is the world’s longest-fought armed conflict.

***

I am sitting in the Navy Hotel and the establishment has a semi-nautical theme, mainly consisting of the odd print on the wall, but mostly refurbished shells of varying calibre lined up in displays about the place. There is weaponry outside the front door; there is weaponry in the lobby and weaponry takes centre stage in the dining room. It strikes me as odd that Mae Sai is home to the Navy Hotel. Mae Sai, even by conservative estimates after a quick glance at the map, would have to be at least 1,500km from the nearest ocean as the crow flies. The closest body of open water is the Andaman Sea, and to get there directly you would pretty much have to be a crow, for it would mean traversing Burma, across Shan and Arakan States. Any human being attempting such a journey would raise the suspicions of the foot soldiers of the paranoid military junta now ruling Burma.

***

The reason I am in Mae Sai is to renew my Thai visa. I have a 12-month visa, but Thai law requires that I leave the country every 90 days. That I must live in a neighbouring country to cover a war that has been a constant in my life for more than a quarter of my lifetime speaks volumes about the state of play in Burma. Along the border more than 100,000 refugees languish in camps, corralled by barbed wire and bamboo fences, mostly victims of a relentless campaign of violence by their supposed ‘government’. Some have never been to their home country; they were born in the refugee camps. An entire generation born after 1984 has not had the opportunity to go home. The Thais grudgingly accept the refugees’ presence, or at least have done so in the past. But time is running short for the illegal aliens, as Thai patience wears thin and they seek to put an end to hostilities once and for all.

***

The Thais want border hostilities done with, so they can get on with the business of making money. And there is easy money to be made from exploiting Burma’s natural resources. Thai traders buy Burmese raw product cheap, be it timber, gem stones or minerals and sell it on at a profit, often in a value-added form. At another level Burma’s human resource is exploited, with people willing to perform menial tasks for a rate of pay far less than the Thai minimum wage. Also, there are plans for great agricultural ventures in the border region, in which Burmese workers would farm crops for a pittance and the Thais would sell the produce. There is much cropping land available because most of the trees along the border have already been felled and sold off. It is understandable the Thais want to make money and further develop their economy and they have suffered refugees along at least one of their borders since the 1950s. What is more difficult to understand is how they can justify the exploitation of a neighbouring country having already exhausted their raw resources.

***

The first intelligence reports I receive after returning home to Mae Sot, having bid the Navy Hotel goodbye, are upsetting. I have just been told two people have been killed in a bomb attack against a restaurant in Myawaddy, about five kilometres from where I now sit typing. Sporadic gunfire has been audible from the Thai side of the ‘Friendship Bridge’ during my two-day absence. The town in which the latest round of fighting began in earnest on November 7 - Burma’s election day – is again an urban theatre of war. But does the outside world hear of this war? Very little news leaves Mae Sot, because foreign editors around the world predominantly don’t want to know about it. As I relay to family and friends news of the latest atrocity, or the fact there are 10,000 refugees stranded on a river bank to the south of here, they exclaim: ‘I can’t believe we hear nothing of this!’ Well the choke point is your news outlets - they’re not interested, so you don’t get the news.

ENDS

Daniel Pedersen is the author of Secret Genocide, which will be released in February 2011.

The Bangkok Connection

2011-01-07T02:30:00.000-08:00

I’m often asked: how did I come to secure the collaboration of Ike Atkinson, the biggest African American drug dealer in U.S. history, to write his story, “The Bangkok Connection”? It was by a fluke really. In 2006 I was researching my forthcoming book, “The Gangsters of Harlem,” and decided to include a profile of 1970s drug dealer Frank Lucas, who was on the verge of becoming international famous, thanks to the movie, “American Gangster.” I arranged an interview with Lucas. In the interview, Lucas kept referring to Ike as his “cousin” and claimed how Ike had helped him establish the Asian heroin connection from Bangkok to the U.S. in the early 1970s. Lucas also claimed that Ike had helped him move heroin in the coffins carrying U.S. servicemen who had died in the Vietnam War.

Some of Lucas’ claims sounded exaggerated or downright false. For example, Lucas claimed that Ike helped him smuggle heroin on the airplane of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger while it was in Bangkok and how he had gone personally to the Golden Triangle drug cultivation area to arrange drug deals. Really? You can put heroin on the plane of one of the most powerful men in the world. And what big drug kingpin would risk his life to do that when he could do it in a much easier and less risky fashion? So I thought it was important to interview Ike about Lucas’s claims and his relationship with Lucas.

I did a search of “Ike Atkinson” on the Internet and found he been in prison since 1975. That was 32 continuous years! Fortunately, Ike was incarcerated just 2 and 1/2 hours from me at the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina (I’m based in Rock Hill, South Carolina). Not much had been written about Ike since his incarceration. Not a good sign, I thought. Maybe he was not granting interviews. But then I thought, maybe the media had forgotten about him. In any case, as a journalist I knew never to assume anything when it came to sources. I thought it would be worth contacting Ike and asking him for an interview. I contacted the prison, and the deputy warden told me to writer Ike a letter.

Fortunately for me, I learned later from Ike, I mentioned Lucas and some his claims about his relationship with him. Ike was curious and granted me the interview. Ike denied pretty well everything Lucas said about their relationship. He is not Lucas’s cousin. He did not ship heroin in the coffins. Lucas got his heroin from Ike, who was the real pioneer of the Asian heroin connection. As the interview progressed, Ike got more agitated with what I was telling him. It was with good reason. Later I learned through my research that Lucas lied about almost everything when it came to his relationship with Ike. I left that interview knowing Ike had a remarkable story that needed telling. But he wasn’t getting out until next year. Still, we stayed in touch via postal mail and talked about collaborating after he had served his time.

When Ike got out in 2007, I contacted him and we hooked up to write the Bangkok Connection. As my research progressed, I knew I had the story of a lifetime. Okay, name one other drug kingpin who never carried a gun and who never killed any one but still managed to ship heroin during an eight year period that would be worth more than $2 billion today? Name me one other African American gangster who never worked with the Italian American Mafia? Moreover, Ike’s criminal activities sparked the creation of a special DEA unit code named CENTAC 9, which conducted an intensive three-year investigation across three continents. That was the first time that happened.

Later I learned that the deputy warden who approved my visit with Ike had screwed up. He did not know the prison rule which forbid press interviews with inmates in Butner. So I had gotten the interview because the gods smiled on me. Needless to say, I sent the deputy warden a copy of the book. I’ll invite him to the movie premier, too, if we get that far and lucky. Life is ironic sometimes, isn’t it?

Ron Chepesiuk

Extract from A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton

2010-11-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

The following is an extract from A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton by Chavoret Jaruboon with Pornchai Sereemongkonpol, which was published last month.

To Thai minds, the Bangkok Hilton is a place of gloom and danger. Years later, I found out that working there was a risky business for those who lacked moral courage as there were plenty of opportunities to be corrupt.
Life gradually introduced me to good and evil until I realised how grey the world actually is and always will be. This is especially true in Thailand, where many things are ‘flexible’ or ‘compromised’ and a blind eye can be turned when money is paid or power is exercised. A lot of things in Thailand don’t always work the way they should.
Once as my father and I were on our way to visit my uncle, we came across a team of barefoot prisoners in their tattered brown uniforms cleaning the sun-parched road. I couldn’t imagine how thick their soles must be to endure the heat of the ground. They had been brought out of the prison for a few hours to labour under the glaring midday blaze.
The practice of prisoners performing public service can be traced back hundreds of years and continues to this day. During the early days of Rattanakosin, Thailand’s current era, they contributed to the kingdom by building canals, roads and railroads among other public structures. In fact, the Bangkok Hilton was built in part with prison labour.
During World War I, the Corrections Department transferred 200 prisoners from Bang Kwang Prison to a temporary camp in the Bang Khen area and ordered them to grow rice and raise livestock to be sold cheaply to law-abiding citizens. At that time, Thailand was suffering economically and such commodities were scarce.
The practice was revised in 1980 and a set of rules was introduced. Convicts are entitled to reductions in their sentences equal to the number of days they have performed public service and, on some occasions, a small wage.
The intention is to remind people that prisoners are not outcasts but are still part of society and that they can contribute towards the common good. Personally I don’t think it really influences Thai attitudes towards inmates. In fact, this arrangement has backfired a few times as prisoners have attempted to escape.
As a boy, I saw the convicts as bogeymen rather than outcasts. At that first close encounter, they were figures to be feared. Yet I could hardly take my eyes off them. This left a lasting impression on me. The difference between then and now is that I’ve adopted a more realistic attitude.
The scraping sounds the ankle shackles made as they struggled to walk and work further drew my attention to them. One inmate had covered his swarthy body with tattoos of tigers, Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, and occult writing. The prisoners derived great feelings of support and protection from these. They did so, perhaps, because there wasn’t much else for them to hold on to. One could easily wonder why, if the inked symbols possessed any power, those men had ended up in jail.

Extract from Secret Genocide

2010-11-19T07:50:00.000-08:00

The following is an extract from Secret Genocide by Daniel Pedersen, which will be published in December this year.

In 1949, the Karen people first declared to the world that they would defend themselves and their cultural identity. Since then, man has walked on the moon, television, Internet and satellite technologies have become part of everyday life, and Burma’s neigbours have taken their place on the world’s economic stage. And still, the Karen have not found their peace. Some would say the modern world has bypassed the Karen people, while others speculate they have become entrapped by it, cast as pawns while the rest of the world establishes new economic and political hierarchies.
In little bamboo huts hidden in the jungle, their barefoot children are taught their language, rudimentary mathematics, and history as the Karen know it. There is no Internet. There are mostly no telephones. Often, there are no books. Sometimes, backpacking medics turn up out of the blue and tend to festering bullet wounds and chronic ailments, reminding the Karen that they have not been completely forgotten about. At other times, however, Burmese troops or their allied soldiers turn up and burn down the Karen’s schools and churches, before turning their torches on their bamboo homes. Generally, the Karen have fled by the time the enemy arrives, and while their villages are being reduced to scorched earth and ash, they are already searching for a new place to live – preferably somewhere with a water supply and stands of bamboo from which they can carve a new settlement. But every now and then, the people give up, unable to take the constant threat of violence against their communities anymore, and make for the Thai border, where they become lost in the refugee camps a few kilometres beyond the frontier.
In the camps, they find a form of compromised peace, but freedom remains an elusive dream. They witness the freedoms enjoyed by their neighbours from behind bamboo fences and barbed wire. Through the slats, they see a country thriving, with flashy cars driving back and forth past their camps. They also see the soldiers, the one constant in their lives, penning them in and taking advantage of their plight. The Karen refugees are entirely dispossessed. They are not permitted to leave the camps, and they are not allowed to work because they don’t have the proper permits. Yet they must somehow be fed and, in many instances, they are sent on to a third country where they have to learn to make their own way, far removed from their customs and culture, their friends and family.
It was immediately after Burma’s independence from Britain in 1948 that this period of persecution against the Karen began, and it has now spanned more than sixty years. In the post-WWII period, Great Britain’s decolonisation programme sped forward, constantly gaining momentum. The British were determined to pull out of the colonies, and when it came to Burma, the decolonisation process had reached breakneck speed. There was virtually no period of winding down; the British simply up and left. When Burma was granted its independence, a relatively minor Burman (Burma’s predominant ethnic group) general, General Ne Win, was appointed vice chief of staff of the armed forces, or Tatmadaw. Ne Win was not a particularly prominent general, and there were others who could have been appointed just as easily. His appointment was a happenstance of history, and no one at the time could have predicted what he would become. The following year, in 1949, he was appointed Chief of Staff of the armed forces, replacing General Smith Dun, an ethnic Karen. Ne Win now had total control of the army, and by 1962, he had consolidated enough power to seize control of the entire country by armed force.

At the time of independence, David Tharckabaw was a mere boy of 13 years. David is Karen and was educated in Rangoon, Burma’s largest city and the country’s most important commercial centre. He is now, at the age of 73, the Karen National Union’s (KNU – the political organisation representing Karen interests) vice president. He likes a drink, smokes heavily, and speaks slowly and with great reserve, thinking carefully before answering any question. His election to his current position occurred in 2008, and he takes his role as vice president very seriously indeed. Some call him hard-line, while others say he is simply pragmatic, and a chorus within the Karen movement claim he lacks the charisma required of a leader of stature. But after several recent high-level defections from the KNU to Burma’s State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the ruling military junta controlling Burma (sometimes referred to simply as ‘the generals’), David Tharckabaw was the man people turned to in their hour of need. He had been elected on the belief that he was morally sound, and the people now trusted him not to backflip on his policies in the face of enormous pressure and corruption from the junta, who routinely use bribery to get what they want.
I first met David through a mutual acquaintance, just days after he was elected. He came to my restaurant in Mae Sot for dinner, with the express purpose of being interviewed for this book. He and I have since become good friends. Over a post-dinner coffee, David relaxed a little, and as tired staff cleared our table of Burmese curries, we retreated from the banter of the other KNU executive council members and their supporters.
‘Very few people know that this war was started by the Burmese regime [now] in power, only a few know,’ he said quietly, as he laid down the fundamentals of my education, as he saw it. ‘Because, according to the propaganda of the ruling class, it was the Karen armed resistance [that declared war], and actually that is not true. It was started by Ne Win, who was vice chief of staff of the armed forces after independence, and he used his pocket army troops to attack Karen quarters in Maubin, right in Rangoon. There were also attacks in Insein and Moulmein. Well, when it got to Insein of course, the Karen could no longer just sit,’ he said.
Insein was at that time the headquarters of the Karen National Union, the political body representing Karen interests in the newly-independent Burma.
‘And that is how the Karen resistance against successive regimes started, and now we have had the 60th anniversary of the Karen resistance,’ he continued. ‘We sometimes call it the “Karen Revolution”.’
David told me that the four principles laid down by Saw Ba U Gyi, the first leader of the Karen Revolution, still form the basis of their revolution: ‘Those principles are non-negotiable, we will always maintain and uphold that principle,’ he said, matter-of-factly, and that is why the people have placed their faith in David Tharckabaw. According to him, ‘Ever since the military came to power in 1962, the ultimate goal of the military establishment has been to set up the fourth Burman empire.’ He went on to say that ‘…in this day and age, only fascists would think of setting up an empire in a multi-ethnic state like Burma, because the non-Burman ethnic peoples will never accept it.’

National Novel Writing Month is when People Turn their Dreams Into Reality

2010-10-13T02:10:00.000-07:00

Every person I meet these days wants to write a book; at least that’s how it seems anyway. This was something that I talked about for decades as well before doing something about it. The sad fact is though that most of these aspiring writers will never actually knuckle down and write that book they are always talking about. This is a shame because we should all try to achieve our dreams; it keeps us young. The great thing about becoming a writer is that there are no real entry requirements; you don’t need to apply anywhere and nobody is going to judge your credentials. In order to become a writer the only thing you really need to do is start writing – sounds easy doesn’t it.

One thing that always held me back from writing a book was that I’d run out of steam after a few pages. I would then make the mistake of reading back on what I’d written; I’d be disappointed and give up on the whole project. I didn’t realise then that the secret of writing a book was to just write the first draft without any attempt to judge; this is because nobody writes a good first draft. Once this is finished though, there is then something that can be fixed through editing. When you have completed your first draft you then have achieved your goal of writing a book; all you then need to do is polish it.

What is National Novel Writing Month?

Getting the motivation to write that first draft from start to finish can be difficult. This is where something like National Novel Writing Month (called NaNoWriMo for short) can help. This event takes place each year in November and during this time people from all around the world commit themselves to writing a novel in one month – 1,000 + per day. This might sound like an outrageously ambitious task but thousands of people have already won NaNoWriMo; you become a winner by finishing your first draft.

The nicest thing about National Novel Writing Month is that there is a lot of help and encouragement available. The organisers of the event provide plenty of inspirational material including blogs, tutorials, and podcasts. There is also a huge community of people that you can join; a great source of inspiration, support, and advice. Writing a novel in one month is tough but with all this support it is achievable – all you need is a couple of hours a day.

Are You Ready for the National Novel Writing Month 2010 Challenge?
If you have always dreamed of writing a book then now is your chance. Don’t be like all those other people who only ever talk about doing this – anyone can do that. Even if you don’t write a masterpiece there will be a great sense of achievement. It will also give you the inspiration to go on and do more; once you know that you have the ability to write one book there will be no stopping you.

If you are interested in finding out more about NaNoWriMO the just follow the link.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Paul Garrigan

Staying Sober in Thailand

2010-06-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

I came to Thailand almost a decade ago as a drunk on his last legs. I arrived at Don Muang airport from a job in Saudi Arabia with no idea as to where my life was going next. I had moved to Saudi in the hope that the illegality of alcohol would help me turn my life around; I could not have been more wrong about this. In fact I found that the illegal grog meant that my physical and mental health was dropping towards new lows. I felt miserable and decided that if I was going to drink myself to death it wasn’t going to be in the middle of a bloody desert. I left Riyadh with a vague idea about drinking my way around the world, but after a few days in Bangkok I knew that I wasn’t going anywhere else.

I found work as an ESL teacher and for the next few years lived the dream; or so I tried to tell anyone that would listen. In the beginning it all seemed so exotic and different and like many before me I developed what the more cynical ex-pat likes to refer to as ‘Thai fever’. After a couple of years though the novelty of Thailand had worn off and I was there because I’d nowhere better to go. During a sober few weeks I met the woman who is now my wife; the only real good thing to come from those years. We eventually moved to her home in Phitsanulok where I took up residence as the village drunk. I was living in one of the most beautiful locations on the planet but it made little difference to me. I just drank and drank and provided gossip for the neighbors. Near the end of my drinking I began to dislike all those things that had once attracted me to Thailand; I felt trapped with no options.

It was around that time that I found the Thai temple Thamkrabok. It was here that I managed to get sober and I’ve stayed that way ever since. The fact that I was off the booze meant that I could once again appreciate my surroundings; it also meant that I could begin building a proper life here. The idea of a sober life among the Thais would have once seemed impossible; after all there is just so much temptation. I was completely wrong about this though; I’ve found that it is all a matter of perception. The truth is that Thailand is a great place to stay sober – at least for me anyway.

These last four years have contained so many joys; the greatest one being the birth of my son. I have managed to do things that once would have seemed impossible. I learnt to drive and bought a brand new car; something that most people take for granted but seems like a miracle to me. I found a job that I love and managed to get a book published; really the stuff of dreams. There have also been many other joys along the way. I only quit the booze to stop the pain yet I’ve got so much more.

During my recent visit back to Ireland I was asked why I stayed in Thailand. Was I afraid that I’d drink if I left? The reason I remain in Thailand is that I’m settled and if something isn’t broken why try and fix it. It was tough building a life here and the idea of starting again somewhere else just doesn’t appeal. I no longer view Thailand as quite the wondrous location that I once did but it really is a good place to live; so is Ireland. I have it good here most of the time. Recently I’ve started cycling around my local area and sometimes it really hits me that I live in such a beautiful part of the world.

Paul Garrigan, author of Dead Drunk: Saving myself from alcoholism in a Thai Monastery

Siege At Jadotville

2010-06-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

Jadotville

Plop, plop went the mortar rounds as they left their barrels only to erupt as a shroud of shrapnel around the Irish positions.

It was September 1961 in the rebel province of Katanga, located in the very bowels of the Congo.

157 men from the Irish 35th Battalion’s A Company had been sent to a mining town called Jadotville to protect the largely white Belgian inhabitants from massacre by marauding tribal groups.

But within a very short space of time the troops were to find the settlers had turned on them and were attacking the Irish positions with an overwhelming mercenary-led rebel force.

With the publication of Siege at Jadotville, the lid was lifted on one of the most controversial episodes in Ireland’s UN service.

Through first hand accounts and previously classified documents, the book uncovered a hidden history of Ireland’s first involvement in peacekeeping and shows what happens when UN civilian leaders ignore military reality.

In September, 1961 during the Congo peacekeeping operation, 150 Irish troops were left by the UN to fight it out against 3000 mercenary-led troops.

Irish people today were shocked to learn how the soldiers were deployed to an isolated area by UN authorities against the advice of senior military advisors only to be attacked by the very people they were sent to protect.

The book details Ireland’s involvement in the UN’s first large-scale peacekeeping operation in the Congo in the early 60s. It reveals how the ineptitude of arrogant and naïve UN civilian administrators caused the deaths of the international troops sent to keep the peace, including the Irishmen who were killed at Niemba.

The book focuses on A Company of the 35th Battalion, the Irish soldiers who were almost massacred when besieged at a mining town called Jadotville in a province called Katanga in the south of the Congo.

When the troubles in the former Belgian colony were at their height, A Company, under their commanding officer, Kerryman, Comdt Pat Quinlan, were sent to Jadotville to protect the white settler community there.

However, when the troops arrived they found the settlers to be hostile and sympathetic to the mercenary-led forces of Katanga, a mineral-rich province causing chaos by trying to break away from the newly independent Congo.

Similar to the Dutch peacekeepers at Srebrenica in 1995, the small Irish contingent was denied any air or artillery support to aid them against overwhelming odds.

But even though under aerial bombardment, the Irish dug in and fought to hold their ground against a force that outnumbered them 20 to one. Yet for over 40 years both Ireland and the world turned their backs on the Jadotville veterans.

This book explains why this episode, though widely reported at the time, was allowed to fade into the background of Irish military history.

It catalogues the series of errors, ineptitude and naivety foisted onto Irish troops and their UN allies as they attempted deal with rapidly escalating violence.

All the while the UN authorities in New York kept changing mandates on paper but not giving the troops on the ground the equipment and support needed to contain the violence.

Much of the book is told from the perspective of the men who fought there. They tell how they regularly rounded up mercenaries and disarmed them only to have the UN order return of the arms and to have those same weapons turned on them at Jadotville.

There are tragic-comic moments too, like when a madcap Norwegian pilot was the only one who volunteered to fly helicopter with water supplies to the besieged Irish.

Having landed under fire with his aircraft destroyed it turned out the water supplies were unusable having been put in jerrycans that previously stored petrol. This was the only attempt made by the UN to resupply the troops while they fought it out for a week.

Young soldiers at the time, men such as Pte John Gorman and Lt Noel Carey told of their terror of having to hand up their weapons and go into captivity under a force the Irish had inflicted 300 casualties on. Fear of reprisals was huge.

The book also tells of the enormous personal strain Comdt Quinlan was put under when he had to enter ceasefire negotiations without recourse to accurate information or direction from higher authority.

The UN kept telling him jets would be sent to support him but none came. Such was the strength of the mercenary-led force that they beat back two attempts by Irish and Indian forces to rescue the Jadotville men.

Ends

Declan Power is a former soldier who now works as security analyst and lecturer. He is also a consultant to UN peacekeeping missions on civil military coordination.

A History of Betrayal

2010-05-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

I did my best while researching The Infiltrator to visit key locales in Chicago, New York, Paris, London, Colchester and Dublin. This led to a strange discovery when I was in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, New York.

I was curious to take a look at the building at 161 West 4th Street where defectors from the Irish independence movement secretly went to the British government to become paid informers in North America.

The narrow brick townhouse that housed the office of British consul Edward Mortimer Archibald in the 1860s sits in what today is a fairly trendy address, although there's now a sex shop next door.

It's the same address where, almost 50 years ago, a young Bob Dylan lived, before he became famous. Dylan was describing his experiences in this neighbourhood in 1965 when he recorded "Positively 4th Street."

The theme of the song? Betrayal.

The song is about false friends in the artistic community, but Dylan could have been writing about the independence movement, when he wrote:

"You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that's winning."

Peter Edwards, author of The Infiltrator: Henri Le Caron, the British spy inside the Fenian movement

Along the Thai-Burma border there is no justice; there is only money, the military and the oppressed.

2010-05-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

For years now I have watched as the Karen civilians of Burma suffer at the hands of that country’s military regime. The Karen people, a Burmese ethnic minority, consist of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. These are people who are just trying to make a go of it, like you and I, and want only to be able to raise their families well.

Conservative estimates put the number of the Karen people in Burma at over seven million. In Karen State they are forced to run for their lives on a daily basis. They often find themselves just over the border in Thailand, homeless and removed from their gardens where they grow their food.

There is little doubt the Burmese military junta wants to eliminate the Karen bloodline, and it is grinding away at it on many fronts. As a Burma Army commander once commented before going into battle, ‘If you want to see the Karen in the future, you’ll have to go to a museum.’

Many of the people who call Karen State home are now displaced, and as you read this, they are looking for somewhere safe to begin building new shelters. Their houses go up fast, particularly if it’s raining, and grow bigger depending on how long they are allowed to stay in one place.

But their homes, their schools, their churches and their poorly-stocked medical clinics all come down quicker than they can ever be built. Burma Army units, or militia troops allied to it, regularly torch whole communities in just minutes.

For all of the talk and endless sparring at international forums, and despite the international community’s collective wringing of hands, the Burmese conflict is not a complicated one and is not the seemingly intractable situation it is made out to be. The country’s ethnic minorities are not savages intent on tearing each other apart should the military regime fall.

Civil war is not the only option.

The military junta holds all the power and oppresses the ethnically-diverse masses, plundering the country’s natural resources and keeping the profits for itself. The junta looks on the people as nothing more than a free labour force born to serve the Burmese master race. It is a feudal system rooted in racism and the generals lord over it. They become filthy rich as the people are forced to push their carts along dusty roads trying to eke out a living.

Education and religions other than Buddhism are viewed as unwanted outside influences and are considered threats to the status quo. Those who dare to challenge the junta are considered enemies of the state. Even the monks, supposedly revered by the generals, are thrown in jail if they step out of line.

In neighbouring Thailand the government builds schools – in Burma the ‘government’ orders schools burned down. In Thailand the Karen language is taught in Karen village schools – in Burma using the language is illegal.

Yet the majority of the Karen people live in Burma. The generals, who have had the run of the country since General Ne Win led a coup in 1962 that toppled the civilian government, insist their army employs a scorched-earth policy against the entire Karen population. They burn the staple food, rice, in the paddies and sow them with landmines instead. Thousands of people in parts of the country are starving and, in recent weeks, have run out of water at the end of a long dry season.

And yet to the outside world, the economic reports which are presented suggest Burma is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. In reality, however, the junta has taken South East Asia’s most promising economy and ruined it. Burma is now officially one of the world’s least-developed countries. The world has watched as it regressed from being the world’s largest exporter of rice before military rule in 1962, to a country crippled by decrepit infrastructure and a lawless financial system charted by whim and fancy.

In spite of all this, the privileged world has not lifted a finger to help the stricken country.

The West might bay about China’s growing Burmese investments and influence, but for decades China has been the only country of consequence that has engaged with the pariah state. The rest of the world appears to have stuck its head in the sand. Throughout the decades of indecision and apathy that have dogged Burma, the Karen people have lived their entire lives at war - generations have come and gone.
Now their children are forced to fight on.

No matter how long you study the war here you will ultimately remain an outsider, but sometimes that can be an advantage. In journalism you are often considered an ‘insider’ among the people you travel with, and struggle to maintain your outside perspective, that most noble and reasoned of detachments. But there is no way to argue that what is happening in Burma today is for the best. So you report what is happening, atrocity after atrocity, attack after attack, and hope someone who can make a difference might read your story.

Daniel Pedersen, author of Secret Genocide: The Karen of Burma

Digging into a spy's life

2010-05-14T03:08:00.000-07:00

I was more than a year into the research for The Infiltrator, the story of Victorian superspy Henri Le Caron, when I made the bizarre discovery that my central character was, among other things, a body snatcher.

He was also a rather cocky one, once digging up the remains of Congressman John Scott Harrison, son of an American president and father of a future president.

It was also a jolt for me to learn how widespread robbing graves was just less than two centuries ago, and how complicit mainstream authorities were in the practice. Medical schools badly needed bodies for training students, and some students made money as "sack-em-up men," emptying graves at night to provide schools with a steady supply of cadavers.

I enjoyed reading in The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce that a grave was "A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student." Bierce's more serious writing also provided me with excellent descriptions of life for soldiers in the American Civil War, in the operations in which Le Caron was a participant.

As I detoured in my research into a study of bodysnatching, I was surprised to learn that graves have been robbed far longer than they have been respected. On the headstone for William Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon are the words:

"Good friend for Jesus sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here!
Blest be the man that spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones."

Peter Edwards, author of The Infiltrator

Does Wat Thamkrabok Offer a Wonder Cure for Addiction?

2010-03-09T02:10:00.000-08:00

In my new book ‘Dead Drunk’ I discuss how a Thai temple called Wat Thamkrabok helped me beat my addiction to alcohol. It is now almost four years since I left the temple and it really does feel like my addiction has been completely defeated. I have no idea what the future holds for me, but all I can say is that alcohol does not seem attractive to me at all these days. I have experienced some wonderful highs in recovery; highs that would have once offered plenty of reason for alcohol-fueled celebrations. I have also needed to deal with lows that previously would have had me running to the bottle. Despite all that has happened though, good and bad, I have not used alcohol and I’ve not even wanted to drink.

Considering the fact that my life is so good, it is tempting for me to want to recommend that every addict hops on a plane to get the magical cure in Thailand. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that – I wish it did. When I first arrived at Wat Thamkrabok one of the head monks explained to me that the temple could not cure my addiction. I felt very let down until he described what they could offer me. The temple could provide an environment where recovery could happen and they could give me the tools to live life in recovery. It could work if I was completely ready to leave addiction behind forever; without this willingness Wat Thamkrabok could do absolutely nothing for me.

I personally believe that the tools offered at Wat Thamkrabok work; in fact I’m living proof that they do. I am 100% certain that if people use the tools, and don’t drink or use drugs again, their life will get better; in fact life in recovery is likely to be better than anything they could have even imagined. This can only happen though if the person is fully ready. You can only go through the Wat Thamkrabok treatment program once and if people choose the wrong time to go there it is a missed opportunity. The tools are useless to addicts if they are not ready to use them.

Wat Thamkrabok can help people go through the withdrawal stages when coming off alcohol or drugs – so can plenty of other places. The system they use is unique and many of us feel it was the easiest withdrawals we ever went through. That is not what the temple is really all about though; the real gift that the temple offers is the tools to live a satisfying life. If life is satisfying the need for addiction falls away.

I see the temple as a special place that people can find when they are ready. It is not for everyone and other addicts will find their own path; if the student is ready, the teacher will appear – I really believe that. You don’t have to travel to the other side of the world to escape addiction; you just have to summon the willingness to change.

Paul Garrigan, Author of 'Dead Drunk'

Online shopping vs Bookshops

2009-12-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

I might be a bit behind the times, but I have yet to venture into the world of online shopping. Many of my friends and family swear by it for the great deals they get on books, but for me, getting my books over the internet holds little appeal. Great deals or not, nothing beats actually going into a good bookshop, taking my time to browse the titles, examine the books and flick through the pages. It’s one of the most relaxing ways I can think of to spend a lazy afternoon; buying books online negates this enjoyment.
It’s sad to see bookshops losing business and having to close down, as seen in the recent demise of Borders in the UK and Ireland, but I got some consolation regarding the state of our bookshops when reading about Lutyens & Rubinstein, an independent bookshop recently opened in London, which has been experiencing huge success in its opening months.
Having not had opportunity to be in London myself, I went vicariously through the reviews, which were all raving and portentous. I hope that their success will inspire the opening of similar independent bookshops that make the experience of browsing and buying books truly enjoyable.
Having said all that, I do see the many benefits of online book shopping. Here in Maverick House we get orders from all over the world for some of our titles; it’s a great thing to be able to get books that are not available in your own country. Our newest book, Mango Rains, which is being sent to the printers today, is being released in Thailand initially, and will then have a summer release in the UK. Having just finished proofreading it, I think it’s a great read that would appeal to many readers outside of Thailand. With online shopping, it will be available for anyone who wants it.
I hope that in the future, both e-books and physical books, virtual shops and actual shops, will co-exist successfully, and that the day will never come when bookshops are and thing of the past and tangible books become redundant.

Geraldine

Talking to Angels

2009-11-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

I started reading Christine Holohan’s new book A Whisper from an Angel, and must admit I couldn’t read it too close to bedtime as it sent shivers down my spine! Christine previously published A Voice from the Grave with Maverick House, which recounted the story of how she assisted in the Jacqui Poole murder investigation after she was visited by the ghost of the murder victim. In this updated edition, Christine has added more details of her encounters with the angels and the afterlife. She gives an honest portrayal of how her gift has impacted on her life in both positive, negative, and at times, petrifying, ways.
Christine’s accounts of her experiences are so vivid and realistic it got me thinking about mediums and psychics and how they are perceived today. There is much scepticism surrounding this whole area, and many immediately laugh such things off as being “hocus pocus”. However, Christine clearly proves to us that she can communicate with spirits, and she left the detectives in charge of the Jacqui Pool murder investigation in no doubt as to the reality of her powers. There are many fraudsters who may fake having psychic abilities to make a quick buck, and these kinds of scams give mediums a bad reputation. However, for people like Christine whose abilities have been proven to be genuine, they can “create a bridge between heaven and earth.”
I must admit to being cynical about such things in the past, but stories like Christine’s help to open my mind to the possibility of an afterlife, and of links to it in the known world.
Geraldine.

As time goes by

2009-08-06T02:40:00.000-07:00

It is now nearly five months after I have arrived in Ireland. The time of my internship here with Maverick House Publishers is coming to an end, as next week I will be flying back home to my family in Germany.

I am quite excited about seeing my family again, as well as my friends. And I love the area we live in. I have really missed the vast forests around our small village in the east of Germany. I am also excited about starting my last year of studies in October with the new term.

But, nevertheless, I am also a bit sad about having to leave Ireland. Over the last five months I have become very fond of the Irish people, as they are a wonderful and charming nation. I have even picked up a few things from the Dubliner’s accent and I am sure some words will stick with me. Dublin is also, by far, my most favourite city. For being the capital of a country it is still charmingly small, and the colours of the buildings and doors have been the motive for a lot of pictures. The way of life here in Ireland seems to be a bit more easy-going than it is in Germany.

Before I came here I was a bit nervous. I have never done more than just a short summer internship, and the prospect of really being involved in a company did, to be honest, freak me out a bit. Also, I had no experience in publishing whatsoever, and was therefore a bit apprehensive about not knowing what to do.

But now, at the end of my time here, I have realised that most of the things I was afraid off just needed to be tackled with confidence. Off course there were times when I wasn’t sure how to do something or what to do next, but I could always ask Jean, who was able to help me whenever I had a problem. One thing I am happy to have learned is that, through justified criticism, I was able to advance mentally.

The Maverick House books have played another very important part during my time here. Since all these books are non-fictional and based on the stories of real people, each and every one of them showed me that my life was pretty easy and extremely happy compared to what so many others had to go through. I have read more books in the past five months than I would usually read in that time, even though I always read quite extensively. But the topics of the Maverick House books interested me so much that I just had to read as many of them as possible while here. Through them I have come to realise that every problem I might have is only a small one, and can be overcome by putting your heart to it. I hope this will, in future, help me to overcome obstacles I long since wanted to overcome.

All in all, I am very happy to have come here and certainly do not regret my decision to come here. Maybe one day, after I have finished my studies, I will come back to Ireland.

So goodbye then, Susanne

Digital books

2009-06-29T07:00:00.001-07:00

All the talks and discussions about the Google Book settlement and Scribd, who are trying to digitize millions of books to make them available on the internet, got me thinking about my idea of a book. I have always been a book lover, and there are certain book series I have been collecting for a long time. It is a wonderful feeling to see the complete series of a book standing on my shelf. I also have a thing for first editions of books, the older the better. I like being able to stand in front of my book case to choose a book I haven’t read in a while.
Now there are a lot of people who read their books on the computer or on their e-reader. They just buy this book as a file online. Granted, you can save a lot of space when you have all your books as files. But personally, I cannot imagine reading a book on a screen. I spend too much time on the computer anyway. Also, laptops and e-readers are quite expensive, and I wouldn’t want to take either of them with me on a holiday. On the beach they could easily get damaged by sun, water or sand. And certainly they would hold more of an attraction to steal than your paperback book. There are also some places where you should not turn on some electrical devices, like in hospitals or in planes during take-off and landing. You have to be careful about that, too.
I might be a bit sentimental when it comes to that, but a book to me is still something I can touch, hold in my hand, take with me everywhere and put onto my bookshelf.

I understand the need to digitize very old books though. There are a lot of great books that aren’t available anymore nowadays. And there are also a few books without an existing copyright holder. To have these books on the Internet does make sense.
But other than that I prefer having a real book. And I have been talking to a couple of people who share my ideas. One of them said she likes reading a book while taking a bath. Now that would be really difficult if you have your book only as a file.

I am interested what you guys out there think, though. If you want to share you views, feel free to do so.

So long, Susanne

Being a foreigner

2009-06-02T01:40:00.000-07:00

A while ago I have read one of our books, “Farang”, by author Dr Iain Corness. He fell in love with Thailand during a holiday there and moved there permanently in 1997. Since then he has experienced numerous strange things. In a hilarious way Corness describes the differences between our western culture and the Thai culture. From dangerous animals inhabiting the kitchen, building work that takes months and months, the weirdest laws to the ritual of moving into a new house – everything is different in Thailand. Based on his experiences a new book by the author will be published this year, which I can’t wait to read.

Although Ireland and Germany may not be as different as Germany and Thailand would be, after nearly three months of living here I have come across things that are typical, so it seems, for Ireland. For example, the Irish seem to love to talk about the weather. It’s not important if the topic has been discussed with a person, if the day brings a change it will be discussed again. I think it’s just wonderful how much time one can talk about the weather here before getting bored. Another thing I have come across is the Barber shops. In Germany men and women nearly always go to the same hairdresser. I haven’t seen a hairdresser only for either men or women. Imagine my surprise when I realised that at least two hairdressers in my village are “prohibited” to me.

Other than that I think there are not too many differences between Ireland and Germany. We certainly both suffer from the economy at the moment! Anyway, I am excited about the new book, “Farang: The Sequel” coming out soon, as it helps me to see how easy it is for me to live in Ireland. I am sure that living in Thailand or, in fact, in any Asian country, would be far more difficult and certainly very different.

That’s it from me,

so long, Susanne

The seasons and reading

2009-05-11T02:43:00.000-07:00

A lot of people say that their reading habits change with the seasons. One of my friends for example reads much more when the days get shorter and darker. With the first snow she basically caves herself in beneath five or six thick blankets, lights a couple of candles, makes herself a cup of hot chocolate and starts reading.
Others though read a lot more books in the summer time, lying on a blanket in the grass, letting the sun shine on their faces. They feel that reading is a way to pass the time one spends outside.
And there are those who normally don’t read much at all but will always have one or two books in their hand luggage when they are on a holiday. After all, if you still have time at the airport, what better way than to spend it in a book store?

Strangely to me it doesn’t really matter what the weather is like at the moment or which season it is. I can (and want to) read all the time. Whether it’s snowy, rainy, sunny, windy, cloudy…. Who cares?
Nothing much whatsoever has a lot on influence on my reading.

Except for money maybe. If I have a lot of money to spend freely, which doesn’t happen too often, I just can’t resist the force of attraction book stores hold for me. That can be pretty bad, especially when, in the week afterwards, I realize I would really need that money I had spent in the bookstore. Too late.

So I guess the amount of books we read can be influenced by lots and lots of things. If there is anybody out there not influenced by anything, please let me know.

So long, Susanne

Conflict

2009-04-17T05:43:00.001-07:00

The recent protests in Bangkok got me thinking about our forthcoming book, Conflict by Nelson Rand, which is going to be published next month. Rand has lived in Southeast Asia for over ten years, and Conflict is about the secret wars which are taking place Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.

I was impressed by his ideas and his motivation to go to remote and highly dangerous areas in order to talk to the people involved in the conflicts of Southeast Asia. In his book Rand tells the stories of the conflicts and their background, and it is shocking to realise that the world seems to have forgotten or is basically ignoring the struggles of so many people.

But Rand’s book also made me realise that there are two sides to every conflict. Rand is an excellent reporter, who outlines the conflicts in an impartial manner, helping to give the reader an understanding of why these battles are taking place.

Which brings me back to how things are in Thailand at the moment? Some of our friends who live there have written to us, saying that even though certain areas have been inflicted by riots and battles, you can find people celebrating the Thai New Year, drinking and dancing just around the corner from the protesters. In cities with millions of people, a couple of thousand protestors can get lost pretty fast. Nearly everybody is carrying on as normal.

This can also be the face of a conflict – what is perceived as normal life goes on while riots rage around the corner.

If you are interested in learning more about the struggles in countries like Laos, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia, read our new book “Conflict”, which will give you a great insight into some of the world’s forgotten wars.
Even if you are planning to go straight to the beach in Phuket to chill out for two weeks, it’s worth knowing what is happening in the countries surrounding you.

See our website http://www.maverickhouse.com for more details.

So long, Susanne

Easter Holiday

2009-04-09T01:45:00.000-07:00

In my family in Germany there are only a few people who are religious. For them Easter holiday means going to church, having special church events and get-togethers. For the rest of my family, including me, the religious meaning of the Easter holiday isn't that relevant.

For us, the Easter holiday is all about getting together with our family. For years we have been meeting on Good Friday, early in the morning, for a hike. Each year another part of the family organizes the hike, where we'll have lunch, which route we will take.... As a child I loved these hikes because all my aunts would buy little presents, like chocolate bunnies, for the children and then hide them somewhere in the forest for us to search. Now I am a bit too old for that, but I still love the Easter hikes, they are part of our family tradition and I always get to see my family.

This year I am here in Ireland and can't take part in our Easter hike, so I'll be going to the Wicklow Mountains and hike there, see something of the beautiful green island. And the rest of the time?

Well, I guess I'll just catch up on some reading, because that's also what free days are for, right? And maybe I'll find a chocolate bunny somewhere...

The connection between movies and books

2009-04-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

I have just discovered that the book "The reader" by German law professor and author Bernhard Schlink has hit the Bestseller-Lists of Books USA Today.

The award-winning novel was published in 1995 in Germany and two years later, having been translated into english, in the United States. So that was 12 years ago. Why is it in the Bestseller-Lists now?

The answer is the film adaption of 2008, which was extremely well received and was nominated for five Academy Awards, of which it won one. It also received 10 other prizes and was nominated for 23 more. With Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet in the main roles, the film already has become a hit.

So it is no wonder that a lot of people seem to discover the book, on which the movie is based, only now. I think that was the same with the Harry Potter movies. Many children, and not only children, started reading the book only after having seen the movie.

All in all I don't believe this to be a bad thing, for if the movies get the people to read again or read more, why complain?

Cats and Dogs

2009-03-27T02:59:00.001-07:00

I don't know how it is here in Ireland, but in Germany there seems to be some kind of pet-owner-movement. Everywhere you look new books about all kinds of pets just spring up like mushrooms.

Here you can buy the book by a pretty famous german comedian, Ralf Schmitz, about living with his 23 year-old cat Minka. His book is subtitled "Dogs have owners, cats have employees". In his book Schmitz talks about how to get your cat through adolescence, what to do when he/she is hungry, how to organize that your cat does not disturb your love life.....

The author Hauke Brost however wrote a book called "111 reasons to love dogs". Being himself the owner of big dogs, he obviously wanted to share his feelings. This book isn't meant to be some kind of guideline for dog owners or wanna-be owners, but its 111 reasons are funny and may help you to get over something your dog just did.

And it's not just books: A new movie has come to the cinemas worldwide, called "Marley and Me". This movie is about a family who got Marley, a golden Labrador, when he was still a pup, and shows how life has developed in this family.

So it seems to me that pets got back their popularity, and even though people around the world don't have as much money as they used to have, I'm sure only a few want to abandon the idea of having a pet. I hope that this development won't stop, because let's face it:

Pets cost money, they can be nerve-racking, they might smash your most beloved possessions

- but they are still darn cute!

What about...?

2009-03-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

“No, that’s not available, I’m sorry…”
I don’t know how many times I have heard that sentence. Or something very similar.
You see, I am from Germany. And I love books. The only problem is, hearing about great new books or reading about the latest bestsellers on the internet is usually the first step to misery. I tend to have this unreal idea of getting every book I’d like to read in this globalized world, where a guy from Laos chats with you and tells you the best way to get from Germany to Peru via China.

But then I go to a couple of well-known German websites, type in the name of the book or the author, and get – nothing. Not available. Never heard of it. What?

Well, by now I really should know the reality. But naïve as I am, I think I’ll just try a book shop then. With all the qualified staff there, should be no problem to find the book in no time. Only just after popping the big question the truth is revealed. This girl standing in front of me, her nameplate shining like it’s the first time she’s wearing it, doesn’t know the first thing about books or authors or even about how to use the big computer thingy in front of her. After half an hour of pure agony, torn between the impulse of either slapping the girl or starting to cry, I leave.

You’d think I’ve learned my lesson after trying this for uncountable times. I haven’t.
The terrible truth is, even if you don’t care whether a book is in German or in English, you still can’t read it. Unless you order it on a British website, for example. But for me personally, that’s just too expensive.

I found a solution though: Ignore the news about great books. Turn blind and deaf temporarily. But does that really solve the problem?

To all German bookstores: Please consider all these people who are isolated from the rest of the publishing world!

Light relief from the lady known as Angel

2008-11-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

Dressed as an angel, a petite blonde Australian woman flitted about the auditorium, hugging participants and lecturing about the healing power of love and laughter. Australia's Susan Aldous prescribes laughter as the best medicine. Called the Angel of Bang Kwang, she is a ray of sunshine for underprivileged Thais - from inmates at a maximum security prison to women and children in shelters, writes Tibor Krausz in the Sydney Morning Herald.

At a recent symposium in Bangkok, hundreds of health-care professionals from across Thailand were treated to an unusual spectacle. Dressed as an angel, a petite blonde Australian woman flitted about the auditorium, hugging participants and lecturing them about the healing power of love and laughter.
Susan Aldous wore a white chiffon costume, with fluffy wings and a sequined tiara - a clumsy mixture, as she puts it, of Snow White and Bridal Best circa Word War II.

Yet the outfit wasn't simply a publicity gimmick.
Melbourne-born Aldous is widely known in Thailand as the Angel of Bang Kwang. She has earnt the epithet with her dedicated volunteer work with inmates - many of them serving life sentences for drug offences - at the notorious maximum-security prison outside Bangkok, where she is friends with prisoners and guards alike.
But she does so much more.
Invited to act as titular mascot for a Thai national hospital institution, the high-school drop-out was at the symposium to teach doctors and nurses about humanised health care.
Her credentials: decades-long devotion to helping the needy, the neglected and the down-and-out at countless hospital wards, women's shelters, refugee camps, or anywhere else she can find them.
"My past is my PhD in this work. In the course of my work I've been called an angel but I've never [been asked] to dress up as one," she laughs.
A few days later, Aldous demonstrates her modus operandi.
During her weekly visit to a women's shelter on the outskirts of Bangkok, she waves to a group of women - battered wives, rape victims, single mothers - unwinding in the shelter's shady yard. Children mob her. Some have been rescued from sexual exploitation or sweatshop-style slavery. Between hugs, Aldous hands them toys and chocolates - two each so they can donate one to a sibling or friend.
"This way they learn they never lose by giving, if only a smile or a helping hand," she explains before proceeding with an English lesson for them.
On weekends in Bangkok, Aldous also holds birthing and laughing yoga classes for expectant mothers and has parties for residents. Recently, as part of her drama therapy sessions, she staged a play with several battered children at the shelter to emphasise an anti-violence message. The children performed to popular acclaim at Thailand's National Human Rights Commission.
"Sister is so kind to us. No one else cares about us," says Oy, an emaciated woman at the shelter who has AIDS. Her 13-year-old son is cared for in a Buddhist monastery but she doesn't tell her family where she is, so as not to brand them with the stigma of her disease.

The two women hug, tears in their eyes. Momentarily, though, Aldous begins joking with Oy in fluent Thai and they both laugh, in line with Aldous's philosophy that laughter is the best medicine.
Everywhere else Aldous goes, from crowded cells to hospital wards, her bubbly, instant camaraderie seems infectious.
"She's relit my beacon," says Martin Zweiback, a Hollywood producer who met Aldous by chance during a holiday in Thailand. He credits her compassion and buoyant optimism with his revitalised will to live after his wife's death from cancer three years ago.
"I felt my life was over," he says. "Then I watched Susan going about the slums of Bangkok with a shining spirit and a bright smile. I saw her hugging a double murderer with such compassion. But forgive me for drifting into Pollyanna land as there's nothing Pollyanna about Susan."
A single mother with no income, Aldous, 47, lives hand-to-mouth in a small rented apartment with her 17-year-old daughter near Bang Kwang. She is a youthful, pretty sprightly woman who wears hand-me-down clothes and backpacker-style trinkets. Aldous lives on kerbside meals and walks a lot to save on bus fares. Her Thai neighbours often slip money in envelopes under her door.
"What do I need?" she says. "I'm 31 years down the road with [humanitarian volunteer work] but I haven't yet missed a meal." A born-again Christian, she still has in her some of the hellraiser she once was.
An orphan raised by foster parents in an upper-middle class part of Melbourne, Aldous became a rebel in her early teens. Dropping out of school, she was, at times, a spaced-out flower child with bird bones and feathers dangling from ears (Mary Poppins on crack, she jokes); a skinhead biker in military fatigues; and a proto-punk complete with tattoos, safety-pin piercings and shaved eyebrows.
She was nicknamed "Petrol Head" for sniffing petrol, glue and aerosols. She'd slash herself with razor blades.
"I was angry at the world and rebelled at a predictable life in the suburbs," she says.
Burnt out and jaded, she thought of suicide. Then in Melbourne's red-light district, St Kilda, she encountered Christian aid workers, one of whom suggested: "If you're going to throw your life away, why don't you instead give it away?" "Compassion has been my drug of choice ever since," Aldous says.
While volunteering as a welfare worker in South-East Asian slums and prisons, she arrived in Thailand in 1985 on a nine-day visit - and has never left. She has just launched a campaign to raise awareness of gender issues in Thailand, where spousal abuse of women is still widespread. As part of this drive, Aldous has also submerged herself in the marginalised world of the country's renowned third gender - ladyboys, as transvestites and transsexuals are known locally.

As a frequent visitor to Bangkok's Boys Town, a gay strip with rowdy bars and transvestite shows, she counsels ladyboys, warning them against prostitution and drug abuse.
She has just published a book of interviews with ladyboys, to provide a view past the stereotypes.
"Susan touches a lot of lives," says her Thai co-author, Pornchai Sereemongkonpol. "At first I was suspicious of her motives, then you see the way she treats people and how they light up at the sight of her."
Last month a popular Thai television series featured Aldous in a two-part program. It drew an overwhelming response from viewers, who called in from around the country to thank Aldous for her charity works and to offer support for her projects. "Everywhere I go, people now recognise me," she says. "They come up to me and say, 'You're Susan.' They shake my hand, thank me or give me free water and yoghurt to keep me going."
Yet Aldous is not basking in her fame. She has started visiting a school for disadvantaged children to teach English and give them books, toys and sport equipment, which she collects with help from friends and grateful former proteges.
A close friend and a helpful ally at Bwang Kwang is Chavoret Jaruboon, who was Thailand's chief executioner until recently.
"The inmates call us the angel and the devil," Chavoret laughs.
Aldous, though, rejects the angel moniker and says: "I'm not a little-goody-two-shoes, or a saint. I just believe that a smile and a kind word can change lives. They've changed mine."Source: The Sun-Herald

a former buffalo herder becomes a ladyboy prostitute

2008-07-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

A fellow go-go dancer once told me that I needed to create a new name for myself, something feminine that would be easy on foreigners’ ears. ‘Mali’ is what I came up with. It means jasmine, a little white flower with a sweet scent. I was hoping the dainty word would add to my charm and take me one step further from the buffalo herder I used to be.
I’m a prostitute, but not a victim. If you entered the bar where I work, you would see ‘real’ women—worn-out, stretch-marked mothers weary of men and of life. And then you would see me: smiling, vivacious, positively shining with the joy of being a woman, even if I have to hide my genitalia to be one.
One of my earliest recollections is of my mother bringing me to live with my grandparents and a collection of aunts before I was six years old. To me, they are my real family. I don’t know who my father is, but it doesn’t bother me in the least. I vaguely remember that my mother had short hair, and wore a shirt and pants, unlike other women who had long hair, and wore sleeveless blouses and colourful sarongs. When I asked my grandmother (my ya) why my mae looked so different from other women she said that Mae wanted me to have a father figure. But Mae wasn’t around enough to instil masculinity in me; she was living with a female partner and pouring her time and energy into that relationship.
People sometimes ask me what made me what I am today. Growing up with no father and a mostly absent lesbian mother would be the easy answer, but I honestly don’t blame them. I was born to be a ladyboy just as sure as I was born in poverty-stricken Isan. There, in the northeast region of Thailand, my family have been farmers for many generations. If I’d had any masculinity to begin with, I was certainly given every opportunity to develop it. My family trained me to become a farmer and do manly things, but I showed my femininity from an early age. While other boys used banana stalks as imaginary horses, I tore the leaves into strips and wore them as a skirt. As far back as I can remember, friends and neighbours have called me a kathoey, and I willingly accepted the label. I can’t imagine a different identity.

Heroin found me even though I didn't want it to!

2008-05-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

If anyone had told me when I was a child that I would end up a heroin addict, I would have laughed at them. You see, sport was my thrill. Football was how I got a rush. I was one of the best footballers in my area — better than all of the girls except for my sister Olivia, and certainly better than most of the blokes. Olivia and I would race home after school to change into our track suits so we could go down to the playground. I was always in goal and Olivia would lash the balls at me as fast as bullets. She was definitely the best footballer in the area, and we played football every single day as children. She’snow an international player on the Irish team.
I come from a working-class background, but I didn’t have a bad start in life. I had a structured childhood with set times for everything. I sometimes look back and wonder why I’ve led the life I have. I have to be honest and say I don’t have many answers for you. I don’t know where I lost myself but I know I did. I still wonder about the decisions I made, or if they were decisions at all. Was I even given choices about my life? I’m still tryingto figure that one out but I know one thing for sure. When I was young I never said to myself, ‘I want to be a drug addict when I grow up.’

Heroin wasn’t something that I planned to do. The drug was something that crossed my path. I never went looking for it and I don’t believe it came looking for me. My drug addiction was something that just happened. You have probably heard people say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think I was one of those people.

by Julie O'Toole, author of 'Heroin; a true story of drug addiction, hope and triumph ...'.
For more see www.maverickhouse.com

Paradise with a twist

2008-02-29T03:14:00.000-08:00

WHAT SPRINGS TO mind when you think of Barbados?Is it the warm tropical climate, the golden sands, or the clear blue ocean? Or is it the cool, laid back attitude and friendliness of the people? If you were asked to think of a single word to describe the island,most people would say the same thing: Paradise.

Over 500,000 people visit Barbados every year, and almost half of those are from the UK and Ireland. Most come back having enjoyed the holiday of a lifetime. Few, thankfully, get to see the truth behind the postcard image of this place; fewer still get to tell the tale. But those unlucky enough to fall foul of the law as I did are left in no doubt—this is far from heaven. Corruption, squalor, poverty, crime: they all raise their ugly heads in this place, and though I deserved to be sent to prison for a crime I should not have committed, nobody deserves to have their human rights taken away, and nobody should be forced to endure the horrors of that place where I spent more than three years of my life.

Yes, I have made mistakes, and I have paid for them, but I very nearly paid for them with my life, as I struggled to overcome disease, violence, and a fullblown riot in a place where there is one rule for the haves and another for the have-nots, where conditions are horrendous, and where there is no distinction between a murderer and a pickpocket.I have looked back over my life in an effort to understand where and why I went wrong, and I have come to realise many things about myself. Some things will remain unanswered for me—there are some things I will never know—but one thing I do know is that I never want to go back to prison, and I never want to go back to Barbados.

You might consider it Paradise, but I consider it Hell.

Extracted from Terry Donaldson's book, Hell in Barbados. Published February 2008 and available now.

Misery memoirs don't take holidays

2008-01-03T02:29:00.001-08:00

I arrived at my desk on the second of January to find that a mere 114 emails had made their way to me over the festive period. Not too bad, considering I had resisted checking them over the holiday period, and I was gone for 10 days.

Then I noticed that someone had tried to Skype me during the holidays. I was astounded to see that someone had attempted to call me on 25th December.
Who would call me on Christmas day, I wondered. As much as I love publishing, and love my job, I prefer to be receiving different types of calls at Christmas.
It could only be the Bangkok office, where they don’t celebrate Christmas. In fact, it’s hard to persuade the editor there, Pornchai, to even take a day off.
What was so urgent? He had just received copies of Miss Bangkok, our latest piece of non-fiction from our Thai office, and simply couldn’t wait to tell me how great it was.

And I must concur! I got my copies today, and it is a fantastic book. The beautiful cover belies the tragic story that lies within. Bua is a prostitute, working in the infamous red-light district of Patpong. Unfortunately, this is one book that doesn’t have a neat, happy ending. She remains in prostitution, and is still living with her violent husband. There has been a great deal of coverage about misery memoirs of late – all of it cynical; but this book is different. The money that Bua will make from the book sales really will empower her to change her life. I hope it will also change readers’ perceptions of Thai prostitutes too.
Bua admits in the book that she still dreams of a ‘farang’(foreigner) who will rescue her from prostitution, but in reality, the best way to rescue her from prostitution and poverty would be to buy her book. Sometimes, it's the little things that make the biggest difference.

Jean, Publisher.

A Christmas Carol

2007-12-19T08:45:00.000-08:00

Dedicated to the corporate Scrooges who have hijacked much of the book trade.

Deck the shelves with celebrity folly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Tis the season when booksellers are jolly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap,
Fa la la, la la la, la la la.
Returns are what we publishers will reap,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

See their greedy grins before us,
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Strike the tills and join the chorus,
Fa la la la la, la la la la

Hail the age of commodification,
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Driving poor publishers to starvation,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Gert - Publicist

Editors — A Breed Apart…

2007-12-14T01:45:00.000-08:00

We may walk upright, require three square meals a day and bear a striking physical resemblance to our fellow mankind, but don’t be fooled by these superficial attributes, editors are, in my opinion, a breed apart.

I’m not suggesting that we are superheroes, or freaks of nature, or anything like that, but we do possess certain traits that tend to attract funny glances from our peers and have the potential to empty a room in record-breaking time. It is a basic prerequisite of a job as an editor that you are at least a little neurotic; the misplacement of a comma or the omission of a full stop can assume an Armageddon-like magnitude capable of reducing even the strongest of editors to a blubbering mess. But it is these finer details that have the power to transform a good piece of writing into a masterpiece.

These neuroses can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand the gnawing terror of putting a comma wrong, if you’ll pardon the pun, is what makes us good at our jobs. But on the other hand, there is only so much time you can spend deliberating over the capitalisation of a certain word, or trying to decipher an anagram-like sentence, before you begin to feel like shaking your fist at the tedium of it all. But that’s only on the rare bad days. Mostly editors take great pleasure in correcting punctuation and tweaking the flow of language—with each uncovered error feeling like a small personal triumph. Sadly this sense of triumph is lost on many of our peers. I have been known to point out errors in restaurant menus when dining with friends, proudly indicating where a double space has accidentally been inserted between words, or an apostrophe has been misplaced—which completely changes the meaning of the word, or so I try and explain to my completely disinterested dinner guests. A long silence usually ensues, with conversation struggling to recover from the blow I have apparently just dealt it. Perhaps such details may seem trivial to many but that is exactly why editors are so important. If we didn’t lie awake pondering the great mysteries and complexities of language, then who would?

The saying, ‘Behind every great man, there is a great woman’, applies in equal measure to authors and their editors. Next to a pen and paper (or a laptop rather), an editor is oftentimes an author’s most valuable tool. Editors are the mechanics of language—undervalued linguaphiles whose mission in life is to add oil to creaky joints and bring a body of text to life.

- Bridgette, Editor

The Word Made Flesh

2007-12-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

There is a book on my shelves that I have never read but will never throw out. It is a schoolbook edition of Silas Marner from the early part of the 20th century. I’d already read the story in my own textbook by the time I acquired it, and had no especial fondness for the characters. Nevertheless, I had to have this book. The cloth of its hardback cover is worn to a delightful softness, and the weight of the book is perfectly proportioned to its size. I still sometimes take the book from the shelves just to let it rest in my hand. Then I might open the book and finger the slightly yellowed pages, imagining that all its readers have handled it this tenderly (though knowing what I do of school children, I doubt this to be the case). Silas Marner was the first book I loved purely for its physicality.

With this in mind I read of the projected success of ebook readers like Kindle and iLiad, and I can only give a noncommittal shrug. As a fairly frequent traveller (who can never remember to redeem her miles), I can imagine the advantages of packing a whole library in the space of just one book. What I can’t imagine is reading The Hobbit via anything other than my 1960s edition with Tolkien smoking a pipe on the back and a thumb-sized tear on the front cover, exactly where my thumb goes when I open the book.

Isn’t a book an incarnated idea—‘the word made flesh to dwell among us’? And shouldn’t that flesh be clothed appropriately? No tawdry covers for my favourite books, please. Make them like my copy of The Grass is Singing, its white cover interrupted with a few spikey blades of grass, looking ever so grassy, I could swear they really were singing. Let the pages be grainy and inviting and not too white, and most of all let the text be worthy of its trappings.

For all my friends this Christmas, and for you, I wish good stories, wrapped in suitable covers, that feel just right in your hands.
- Jessica, Editor

A brief encounter

2007-12-07T03:50:00.000-08:00

Author Nicola Pierce on meeting the subject of her new book:

The first thing that struck me about Bua was how young she looked — about ten years younger than her actual age. I met her at the office of Maverick House Publishers in Bangkok where she arrives every evening at 7pm to be interviewed by Pornchai, the Thai researcher and editor. She stays for an hour, after first clocking in, and then must go to Patpong to get ready for the evening’s work. However, if a client needs her at 7pm she attends to him, cancelling us at the last minute, as he is her priority.
She’s tiny, with big brown eyes, prominent cheekbones, shoulder-length brown hair and has the most beautiful smile. Always shy at first it takes her a while to get going but once she does she is ready to laugh softly and make self-deprecating remarks about herself and her life. Not that there’s much to laugh about. She’s the mother of three children, the common-law wife of an unemployed wife-beater and a go-go dancer — she also needs to sell her body, at the very least, once a week to supplement her monthly income. It’s alright for me to sit there and stare at her, wondering how she does it but she doesn’t have the luxury of wondering, she just has to get on with it.
There are people ready here to help her do something else but she’s not ready yet to make a plan. The husband hasn’t beaten her in two months because she pretended that she rang a women’s centre who will take her and the kids away to a secret place if he hits her again. Last night she turned up with a badly bruised upper lip and started to cry when Pornchai asked her about it. I assumed it was the husband but no, she was beaten up in Patpong by a mafia-woman she borrowed money from a few years reviously. The woman’s henchmen surrounded the scene to prevent two western men, or anyone else, from intervening.
Pornchai took me to the bar where she worked. It was 10pm on a hot Wednesday night and we had to weave our way in and out of the crowds of tourists and hawkers selling their wares. There are also the noisy hustlers waving their price lists to entice you into their bar, promising sex shows and cheap drink. These shows take place upstairs and are performed by the less than perfect looking girls – once the girls begins to sag or put on weight they are demoted to the sex shows which they can’t afford to refuse or else they are simply fired. Bua works downstairs and talks vaguely about getting out of the industry before she gets too old.
Entering the bar was like crashing a party that was waiting to get started. The atmosphere was full of anticipation and there weren’t many customers yet. Really bad, and too loud, dance music greets you before you’re over the threshold. Immediately you’re warmly greeted by a waitress who leads you to a table to take your order. When Pornchai tried to ask for a soft drink he was effortlessly persuaded to buy a more expensive beverage. She checked back with us every few minutes, with the pretence of wiping down the table, picking up our bottles to see how much we had left and whether it was time to ‘suggest’ we buy another one. It was the friendliest place I’ve been in since my arrival in Bangkok, everywhere you looked a staff member was beaming in our direction as if they had been waiting especially for us. Of course when it became apparent that we were going to sit over one drink and just look at the girls without wanting to buy one the smiles dimmed just a little.
The narrow stage is surrounded by the bar which takes up most of the room. There’s no doubt about it the girls are absolutely gorgeous. About 30 or so young, slim, bikini-clad girls moved monotonously from side to side, alternating between hugging their steel poles and just holding them. Even if they wanted to dance properly there isn’t enough room, so they give up trying and simply stand there waiting to attract a buyer. In fact, some girls were sitting by the wall, moodily staring at the stage, waiting until some space was freed up. I was surprised to see one tall girl wearing a pair of glasses but you have to be able to see if a man is looking at you in particular in order to approach him at the break to either seduce him into buying lots of drinks – or just plain seduce him. You are constantly in competition with the other beauties beside you.
I’m not going to waste time here talking about my opinion of the sex industry. I hated it — no surprise there — but this is Bua’s book. She was delighted to see us and came over to clink our beer bottles, welcoming me, with some pride, to where she worked and introducing me to her best friend. She was a little drunk as she needs to drink to be confident enough to get up on stage. The make-up made her look even younger again. I have to say that nobody looked like they hated what they were doing. The girls appear to be great friends and greeted each other fondly, grabbing a few minutes of excited chat when the mamasan’s (the manager) back was turned. We could have been in a staff canteen anywhere except that most of them looked too young to be working. Two or three descended on a couple of middle-aged Japanese guys and they looked to be having a great laugh with one another in between massaging and flirting with the men. About ten minutes later the guys left with one of the girls, she was dressed in her own clothes and no longer smiling and laughing. The light seemed to go out of their eyes once a man had made his choice. Two tables down from us a girl was having her bare back stroked by a guy who was probably 30 years older than her. Bua’s colleagues melted away to find someone else and she was left staring into space, looking neither right nor left. The fun part was over. Bua was now on the stage and could see I wasn’t comfortable, I caught her eye and she shrugged as if to say, ‘Welcome to my world.’

- Miss Bangkok by Bua Boonmee and Nicola Pierce will be published by Maverick House in Asia (December 2007) and in Ireland and the United Kingdom (January 2008).

The role of books in our school curriculum

2007-11-30T03:33:00.000-08:00

At school we are only expected to read a novel for the exams. Our class read To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee. This was so we could learn the importance of racial equality.

In second year we also read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. This book really got people in my class reading as it was funny, interesting and well written. Everyone enjoyed reading it.

However, there are not enough books in school to promote reading. The only book that’s on the course is the one for the actual exam, and it tends to be very academic, even boring.

I think that more books like Heroin (Maverick House, 2006) should be used in my school and other schools across the country. They should give us books that we can enjoy reading and can learn something from.

This year I’m in Transition Year and there is more free time, both during and after school, to read. My year head told our class to bring our own books to read when we have a free class. This is a great opportunity to get pupils reading. However, I appear to be the only one grasping the opportunity. Is this because most of my class mates were never really encouraged to read in the first place?

Perhaps, if it had been done earlier there would be more of us reading today. Even so, I think there is still a chance. By introducing more exciting, interesting, closer-to-home books, such as Heroin, the numbers of teenagers reading will rise. This way we will both be encouraged to read and to stay off drugs.

by Rebecca-Rose (15), Ireland

My experience with the Mavericks

2007-11-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

Ever since I was seven I knew I wanted to be an author. It started when my mother was reading a magazine and I looked over her shoulder to see what she was reading. And suddenly, after seven years of illiteracy, I read out the whole article word perfect, and found out that I had a reading ability of a 12-year-old. After that I spent day and night thinking up stories in my head, and I still do till this day…..

So, nine years later, when I found out that I got into Transition Year, and would be doing work experience, I knew I wanted to do something to do with writing or books. So when Mom told me that she knew someone who owns a publishing company and asked me if I wanted to do work experience there, I instantly said yes.

So here I am on my last day with Maverick House Publishers. I really enjoyed my time here and really felt part of the team, instead of just a third wheel. I thought that everyone was friendly and made me feel welcome. Everybody took the time out to teach me as much as they could about publishing. This really meant a lot to me as they probably had better things to do than teaching a teenager. It was much appreciated.

I now feel that I can be a better writer after all the tips they have given me, even if only in English class.

I don’t know if I will actually take up publishing, or even writing, but this experience was still invaluable. I hope I will be able to take everything I have learnt from here and really apply it to my writing.

So thank you to everyone at Maverick House for putting up with me and giving me this fantastic opportunity. You have all been great; every moment was a pleasure and I will miss you all.

Thank you once again,

Rebecca-Rose Santamaria

Musings from a book fair

2007-11-20T02:44:00.000-08:00

Frankfurt Book Fair (2007) - After days of trying to keep up as our editorial director wheeled and dealed with distributors, publishers and sales agents from around the world, I finally got a chance to explore some of the thousands of exhibitions at the world’s biggest book fair.

I stumbled across a hall reserved exclusively for children’s books, and I was amazed by the extravaganza of colour, gimmicks and packaging on display.

Under the influence of coffee and orange juice (or should I say kaffee and orangesaft), my bitter inner child awoke as he realised how deprived he had been. I don’t remember my middle-class parents spending a baht on fancy activity books with stickers, magnets and sound effects; they only bought textbooks for school.

Yes, they did value education; however, to them, education did not include fun or bright packaging.

The hall was full of adults making deals and drinking wine in the fairy-tale setting. Standing there made me realise, business and profit aside, how important books are in shaping young minds, and I was particularly pleased to come across a book about a young girl named Camille, whose series of illustrated tales were a language unknown to me. From what I could gather, the book recounts how she befriends a black classmate, playing seesaw with him. In return for her hospitality, the boy offers Camille a candy. A lovely little story, isn’t it?

Perhaps children’s books shouldn’t be called children’s books, but rather books produced by adults for children. Then again, it is our obligation to teach children new things we weren’t taught when we were young, for the world is ever changing. (Perhaps the next mum-and-cub polar bear tale should include a thing or two about the effects of global warming?)

In contrast to the happy-go-lucky themes found in children’s books, most grown-up books are damn serious: genocide, wa, etc. Plus their pages are full of small letters. Boriiiing!

The contrast between adult’s books and children’s made me wonder: if everyone had read Camille’s story, would the world be a better place by now? I believe books are meant to educate readers’ souls and minds. How do we then go from decades to centuries without any real progress? The world seems to be a darker place with each passing day. After who-knows-how many years of passing on our mistakes and virtues from generation to generation through literature, shouldn’t we be making progress? Or are we just innately violent and cruel, no matter how many books we read?

-Pornchai S

Misery ink

2007-10-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

Danuta Kean’s stinging attack on the publishers of so-called ‘misery memoirs' (Daily Mail, 10 November) reeks of hypocrisy. Surely, even she must see the incredibly irony in launching this quixotic attack against ‘sensationalism’ from her lofty moral high-ground at the Daily Mail – a paper often criticised for it’s bigoted agenda.

Kean writes:

'Rather than inspire, [misery memoirs] risk titillating with the intimate detail they provide: members of religious cults rape young girls, fathers rape sons. '

Perhaps, Kean would like to confine subjects such as child abuse to the closet?

Had she done her homework, she would also know that 'inspirational memoirs', are mostly read by women, and often people who have suffered abuse or domestic violence themselves.

The world is an ugly place, Danuta...

Let us know what you think?

A strange, strange land...

2007-09-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

The author of Farang, Dr Iain Corness, chats to Thailand's PM TV about a reincarnated squid, his date with a fortune teller and one of the few countries where you can still get run over by a shop!

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Confessions of a maverick

2007-09-03T01:11:00.000-07:00

"Do engineering," said my school careers officer – so I enrolled for Medicine. I was 17 years old and that young man was already showing signs of being a maverick.

In my third year we were given ID cards stamped with "to be carried at all times on University property," so I tore mine up. When questioned by the Dean I replied simply "I know who I am, so I don't need one." Being a maverick earned me a severe reprimand, but I didn't carry an ID card for the rest of the course.

Returning from the UK to Australia with my shiny new medical degree I immediately went motor racing. "Son, doctors don't go motor racing," said my father. "Sorry, Dad, but this one does."

My refusal to fit into the accepted mold has seen me open a photography studio and score a contract to do the Australian equivalent of the famed Pirelli calendar. That maverick nature had me open up the first Thai fast food restaurant in Brisbane, and import a Tuk-Tuk from Bangkok as a promo item. Of course I also drove it to my medical practice as well. The patients loved it. The police did not. If it were a car, where were the seat belts? "Attached to the canvas roof? Come on, officer." If it were a motorcycle, where was my helmet? "At home."

A maverick never conforms.

So it was not by accident that I tentatively sent my outline for a book to publishers called Maverick House. One maverick can recognize another. In fact a house full of mavericks.
So for all the mavericks out there, do whatever you want to be doing. And resist all attempts at classifying you. Me? I'm just an ordinary doctor who races cars, photographs ladies and oversees a damn fine Tom Yum Goong!

- Dr Ian Corness, auhor of Farang: Thailand through the eyes of an ex-pat

Trapped in No-Man's-Land

2007-08-24T01:42:00.000-07:00

I am Paula Grieg. I have three children and no stretchmarks. Therein lies the story of my life; a life of inner conflicts and contradictions. My early life, childhood and adolescence were spent in Germany, a country to which I am now bound only by memories, since almost all my family there have vanished.

Before I reluctantly left Germany for a new life in Ireland, I first became aware of my gender ambiguity, though at the time I had no clear idea what this meant or where it would lead. In Ireland I fell in love, married and started a family; those same dearly loved three children. My career took off and I built an existence. Those who looked on might have thought I had it all, but everything I built always stood on shaky foundations, because at the very heart of it I was not who I seemed to be.

Progressively I realised that I needed to acknowledge my true self or I would never find peace within myself. But that personal inner peace came at a high price—the disintegration of family, the loss of friends, home, career and status, and once more, emigration.

Both my career and my thirst for knowledge of other places and other peoples have led me through five continents and more than 50 countries. They have given me a broad and tolerant outlook on diversity in every sense, while my life in two genders has given me unusual personal insights available to few. But it is also true that the more I travelled, the more I have become displaced and lost all sense of home.

My biography No-Man's-Land is the telling of an unusual story, the writing of which helped me to make sense of my life and the telling of which will hopefully help to reduce barriers by helping others to understand the challenges faced by transsexuals and to realise that transsexuals can and do lead normal lives.

I remain hopeful though that there is another chapter yet to be written, entitled, ‘The Leaving of No-Man’s-Land,’ where through finding love once more I will also find that elusive sense of home and belonging, and can then look back at my life with a new perspective.

- Paula Grieg

Blood in the sand

2007-08-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

As we stood together in Darfur’s golden sand, the stark reality hit us squarely over the head: the Sahara is rolling slowly southward. The desert is advancing, rendering access to basic resources such as land and water a matter of life or death. If you have access to those resourcesor the support of those in political power, you survive. When there is no democracy, no peaceful way of accessing power, then in Sudan, as in so many other places around the world,
people pick up guns to win back their rights.In Darfur, the government of Sudan armed that country’s far deadlier version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Janjaweed, a mixed bag of bandits and racist ideologues whose ethnic cleansing of all non-Arab people is mostly motivated by the desire to take over land and steal livestock. John has talked with young Janjaweed recruits. They felt they had no economic alternative. These were the same feelings of the young members of the militias that committed the genocide in Rwanda. Cynical leaders can exploit economic destitution and desperation, and like macabre, racist piedpipers lead people right over the moral cliff.Since achieving independence from Great Britain in 1956, Sudan has been a country at war with itself. The genocide in Darfur is only the latest in a series of horrific conflicts. Sudan’s civil wars unfold in a depressingly familiar pattern. The Khartoum government’s counterinsurgency strategy has nearly always begun with killing and displacement on a massive scale. When the international community starts to take notice and the spotlight shines on government atrocities, the regime then scales back the military assault and the chess game begins. They manipulate ethnic dynamics, sowing internal divisions within the opposition. They manipulateAmerican, European, and African diplomats, buying time through disingenuous negotiation to gain the upper hand on the battlefield. And they manipulate humanitarian assistance, hiding behind the iron curtain of state sovereignty to deny humanitarians access to territory where vulnerable civilians need help.The ruling National Islamic Front (known today as the National Congress Party) has taken state-sponsored brutality to extraordinary levels, but the systematic hoarding of wealth and power by elites in Khartoum and the endless violent campaign to silence a deprived and angry population have deep historical roots.
- Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, authors of Not on Our Watch

Genocide in slow-motion

2007-08-08T01:37:00.001-07:00

Genocide is unique among ‘crimes against humanity’ or ‘mass atrocity crimes’ because it targets, in whole or in part, a specific racial, religious, national, or ethnic group
for extinction. According to the international convention, genocide can include any of the following five criteria targeted at the groups listed above:

• killing
• causing serious bodily or mental harm
• deliberately inflicting ‘conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part’
• imposing measures to prevent births
• forcibly transferring children from a targeted
group.

The perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda took 100 days to exterminate 800,000 lives. This was the fastest rate of targeted mass killing in human history, three times faster
than that of the Holocaust.

JOHN:
In mid-2004, one year into the fighting and six months before the trip Don and I took to Chad/Darfur, I went with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Samantha Power to the rebel areas in Darfur. Samantha was a journalist in Bosnia during the horrors of that war, and her frustration with the failure of the United States to lead a strong international response to the atrocities being committed compelled her to research and write a book about America’s response to genocides throughout the 20th century. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002), won the Pulitzer Prize. Samantha showed that time and again US leaders were aware that crimes against humanity were occurring but failed to take action. After she and I travelled to Darfur in 2004, Samantha wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine that won the National Magazine Award for reporting in 2005. At the same time, US Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting government-held areas in the region. But unlike Secretary Powell, Samantha and I went to the part of Sudan that the regime didn’t want anyone to see, and for very good reason.
Before the genocide, Darfur was one of the poorest regions of Sudan, and the Saharan climate made eking out a living an extreme challenge. But these difficulties only made Darfurians hardier and more self-reliant, mixing farming and livestock rearing in a complex strategy of survival that involved migration, inter-communal trade, and resource sharing.
It had been over a year since the genocide began, so Samantha and I expected certain evidence of mass destruction. And we were indeed witness to burned villages where livestock, homes, and grain stocks had been utterly destroyed, confirming stories we had heard from Darfurians at refugee camps in Chad.
Yet no amount of time in Sudan or work on genocide ever prepares anyone sufficiently for
what Samantha and I saw in a ravine deep in the Darfur desert—bodies of nearly two dozen youngn men lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by the 130-degree desert heat. One month before, they had been civilians, forced to walk up a hill to be executed by Sudanese government forces. Harrowingly, this scene was repeated throughout the targeted areas of Darfur.We heard more refugees in Chad describe family and friends being stuffed into wells by the Janjaweed in a twisted and successful attempt to poison the water supply. When we searched for these wells in Darfur, we found them in the exact locations described. The only difference was now these wells were covered in sand in an effort to cover the perpetrators’ bloody tracks. With each subsequent trip to Darfur, I have found the sands of the Saharan Desert slowly swallowing more of the evidence of the 21st century’s first genocide.

To us, Darfur has been Rwanda in slow motion. Perhaps 400,000 have died during three and a half years of slaughter, over 2.25 million have been rendered homeless, and, in a particularly gruesome subplot, thousands of women have been systematically raped. During 2006, the genocide began to metastasise, spreading across the border into Chad, where Chadian
villagers (and Darfurian refugees) have been butchered and even more women raped by marauding militias supported by the Sudanese government. Sadly, the international response has also unfolded in slow motion. With crimes against humanity like the genocide in Darfur, the caring world is inevitably in a deadly race with time to save and protect as many lives as possible.

In autumn 2004, after his visit to Sudan, Secretary Powell officially invoked the term ‘genocide’. He was followed shortly thereafter by President Bush.5 This represented the
first time an ongoing genocide was called its rightful name by a sitting US president. And yet in Darfur, as in most of these crises, the international community, including the United States, responded principally by calling for ceasefires and sending humanitarian aid. These are important gestures to be sure, but they do not stop the killing. We believe it is our collective responsibility to resanctify the sacred post-Holocaust phrase ‘Never Again’— to make it something meaningful and vital. Not just for the genocide that is unfolding today in Darfur, but also for the next attempted genocide or cases of mass atrocities. And there are other cases, to be sure. Right now, we need to do all we can for the people of northern Uganda, of Somalia, and of Congo. Though genocide is not being perpetrated in these countries, horrible abuses of human rights are occurring, in some ways comparable to those in Darfur. Militias are targeting civilians, rape is used as a tool of war, and life-saving aid is obstructed or stolen by warring parties. Furthermore, by the time you pick up this book, another part of the world could have caught on fire, and crimes against humanity may be being perpetrated. We need to do all we can to
organise ourselves to uphold international human rights law and to prevent these most heinous crimes from ever occurring.

That is our challenge!

John Prendergast & Don Cheadle

Authors of Not on Our Watch

A taste for murder

2007-07-27T04:35:00.000-07:00

A brutal murder, a cryptic note concealed in the victim’s coffin, a secret lover, a callous killer obsessed with re-enacting his horrific crime – it resembles a plot straight from the pages of the latest PD James novel. However, these are bizarre elements from a real murder trial that has captured the public imagination.

The murder of Rachel O’Reilly, a 30 year-old mother-of-two from Dublin, stunned the small, trusting community where she lived, and devastated her close-knit family. In the days following the discovery of her battered body in 2004, it was thought that Rachel was the victim of a bungled robbery attempt. It soon emerged, however, that police investigating the case believed Rachel had known her killer and that her murder had been carefully planned months in advance.

The spotlight immediately fell upon Rachel’s husband, Joe O’Reilly, who admitted in a number of extraordinary press interviews that he was a prime suspect in his wife’s slaying. The 32-year-old advertising executive vehemently denied any involvement.

A media frenzy ensued and the investigation took several bizarre turns, culminating in Joe O’Reilly’s conviction on Saturday, 21 July. It was a crime that captured the public imagination. We watched as the illusion of the idyllic suburban life the couple shared together began to shatter and the details of O'Reilly’s heinous crime immerged.

Public fascination with violent crime, particularly murder, has a long history. The so called ‘Red Barn murder’ is one of the best documented crimes in history, and it marks the beginning of a widespread public interest in murder trials.

In 1824, village beauty Maria Martin’s body was discovered in a shallow grave in a barn near Polstead in Suffolk, England. Her lover William Corder was arrested for the murder, brought to trial and executed at Bury St Edmunds in August 1828. That much is historical fact, but even before the trial the elements of the crime were being sensationalized. As the 19th century progressed new elements were grafted onto the story.

While Corder was still in custody plays were being performed before eager audiences. Ballard singers were performing songs connected with the murder. After the widespread press coverage thousands of visitors made a pilgrimage to the barn - over 200,000 during the summer of 1828 alone! Many took pieces of the barn as souvenirs. It was said that the barn's owner was so irritated that she threatened to have it demolished. It stood, however, until 1842, when an arsonist burnt it down during a period of agricultural unrest. The only known remaining relics are a wooden shoe-shaped snuff box and an iron stay from the barn doors (both now in private collections).

Maria's grave also suffered at the hands of souvenir hunters. After the inquest of 1827 her body was laid to rest in Polstead Churchyard, but was exhumed and used as an exhibit at Corder's trial. Even after she had been returned to her grave, Maria was not left in peace. Large numbers of visitors took away chips of the headstone as souvenirs until it completely disappeared. Nowadays the only indication of the grave is a wooden plaque nailed to a shed at the side of Polstead Church.

The legacy of the 'Red Barn Murder' lives on today – Murder in the Red Barn was the tile of a song of Tom Waits’ 1992 album Bone Machine – and the public’s interest in sensational murders remain unabated.

Perhaps, our fascination with murder reflects our own fears? After all, the sudden, unnatural death of others forces us to confront our own mortality. May it be, that through the killer, we get a terrifying glimpse at the darkest corners of our own psyches?

The Suspect: The Killing of Rachel O’Reilly, by Mail on Sunday journalist Jenny Friel will be published by Maverick House in September.

– Gert Ackermann, Publicist

Pre-order you copy here.

Chasing the Tiger's Tail

2007-07-23T02:36:00.000-07:00

Authors Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin comment on the arduous process of researching Kill the Tiger: Operation Rimau and the Battle for Southeast Asia.

DURING OUR collaboration on The Battle of Brisbane we became thoroughly familiar with the war in the Pacific up to the end of 1942. This formed the background to the drama detailed in that book. We also learned of some of the behind-the-lines activities of the Allied Special Forces.

We knew, for example, of the adventures of the Krait when a commando team sailed the old scow from Australia far into hostile territory to attack Singapore Harbour in 1943. But the Rimau Raid of 1944—in which many of the same personnel participated—first came to our attention when Peter received a letter from his friend John Parker, chronicler of the Special Boat Service. It contained some intriguing research material—compiled by an enthusiastic amateur—and John suggested there was a cracking story to be told. Peter brought it to Australia from his London base during the launch of The Battle of Brisbane. And since there was a rare chance for us to work in physical proximity—Robert being based in Canberra—we made a number of forays at the Australian War Memorial. We were soon chasing a range of fascinating leads.

Rimau had a publishing history. Some excellent groundwork had been done, particularly by Tom Hall of Sydney, to retrace the steps of the raiders. But we were utterly unprepared for the new material that we were able to uncover as gradually we found ourselves dealing with the most ambitious and heroic commando operation of the Pacific War.

Moreover, at a crucial point in our investigation we lucked upon a document which laid bare the determination of the highest levels of the British Establishment to develop and deploy Operation Rimau at all cost. Suddenly much of the obfuscation which for half a century had puzzled and frustrated researchers was swept away.

And as we followed the brave men of Rimau on their extraordinary mission we became ever more conscious of the dark and terrible forces drawn into the unfolding saga. We were also extraordinarily fortunate to discover two people for whom the events of Rimau in 1944 and 1945 still reverberate— Clive Lyon in England and Roma Page in Australia. They became our guides and our companions as we strove to lay bare the story beneath the story.
We, like all who have been touched by this heroic episode amid the horror of war, are greatly in their debt.

Peter Thompson & Robert Macklin

Love heals all that it touches

2007-07-10T08:27:00.000-07:00

Bound to a wheelchair, missing copious amounts of his teeth, ironically the few that remain look desperately lacking, struggling to place his useless leg upon the foot piece of his all too familiar wheelchair, Dten forces a crooked smile resembling that of a stroke victim.
Dten, a southern Thai Moslem, orphaned as a young boy by a well-off family due to the mother’s hasty departure to be with her lover, still smiles. He was crippled by an accident that took four lives in his mid-twenties, yet he still smiles.
It’s hard work to smile, yet he works conscientiously to achieve this feat. He has no bathroom to relieve himself, but he still smiles as his 80-year-old adoptive grandmother collects his morning waste in a plastic bag to dispose of into the dirty slum in which they inhabit some ignoble lean-to. He smiles as he pushes his wheelchair that has been long missing the rubber to run its wheels smoothly. He smiles and concentrates as he gives it his all to push the cumbersome chair backwards for he has no strength to push it forward all in an attempt to gather some water in a cheap plastic bucket to wash with.
Widowed Granny, cloaked in the inexpensive Islamic dress of those who suffer poverty along with her elderly daughter smile also in great humility thinking nothing of looking after someone they have no obligation to help. Concerned only for his welfare after Granny dies, she prays for a way to solve their dilemma. She prays, smiles, laughs and cries secret tears.
An unassuming figure dressed in a yellow head dress notices something amongst the movement of daily life all familiar within the slum. She is trained to. She is a volunteer working alongside the dedicated staff at the Lagnu hospital in Satun—which is not a planet by the way, it so happens to be the name of the province. Here Buddhists, Muslims, highly educated doctors and uneducated peasants work side by side to make life better for the surrounding communities rife with HIV, disabilities and poverty. She spots him; she deftly secures the needed information that spurs the hospital into action.
The hospital team seek him out, surprised to discover that he has been unable to walk for five years mainly due to fear of failure, not knowing where to start and utter helplessness.
The beautiful nurses, the dedicated peasant volunteer and his ‘family’ all get behind him to work towards mobility. The slum comes out to watch.
His large framed body is a contradiction to his disability. But he must work at rebuilding his useless leg and arm; he does so amidst cheers and through pure determination for weeks on end.
Then appears a walker, he timidly looks at it, holds his breath, is forced to his feet and takes his first steps in half a decade. The community is astonished. He is jubilant.
Faith is born, he studies daily and is about to complete grade six so that he can find some time of work. While still confined to a wheelchair for the most part, he is ambulatory to a degree and he has spirit to keep on fighting.
Today, he came to the hospital where I was invited to view the local projects, inspire and share some ideas with staff and volunteers. He spoke his piece—through contorted facial expressions but ever so poignant. He said how grateful he was that he was not forgotten. He was given public recognition, media coverage, donations and clothing and last of all and
the only thing that I could offer him, a touch of love, a tight hug, a huge kiss and words of admiration for his wondrous bravery and commented on his bright handsome face.
He beamed as he came to life. “ Handsome? Me? Handsome?” His face registered quizzically and as fast as the thought came, he responded with how beautiful I was in English. We all laughed, cried and hugged. It still always amazes me how such a small deed of love can have such an incredible impact!
He is under continuous care, he will do better and not only that I contacted a large TV program here who promised to look into doing a feature on him and hopefully bring assistance to his poverty stricken conditions. After all, if anyone deserves the help, he and his family do.
It was great to be a part of many folk’s efforts to make a difference to just one important soul.
Cultural and religious gulfs were bridged in a very troubled area by love and with this miracle came new beginnings for me.
New beginnings indeed as I have been invited to assist the Hospital Accreditation Institute under the Ministry of Health with their new pilot project as a volunteer and advisor. “JIT ASAR” the name of the project means Humanized Care and that is just what this project embodies.
We will be working with a team of six accredited hospitals from every corner of Thailand combined with doctors, nurses and other health officials from the Institute. Together we will inspect and critique the “Loving Hands” projects of the six hospitals and then convene a workshop to analyze and summarize our findings. These findings will be put together in a workable format for 200 hospitals nationwide to implement.
I am very excited as I see it a great opportunity to Change the World with Love! Also it fits perfectly with another project that I am starting at The Central Chest and Lung Hospital here in Nonthaburi through teaching the staff English and visiting HIV and Cancer Patients.
Additionally, I plan to continue carrying out any other care-giving projects that frequently comes my way, as well as the weekly visits to Bang Kwang Prison and the Women’s Shelter to encourage the women, children and HIV positive patients residing there.
Love is great but don’t wait to catch it, be a carrier and pass it on to as many as possible.

- Susan Aldous, author of The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison

Renowned actor Don Cheadle talks about his forthcoming book

2007-06-26T04:03:00.001-07:00

Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond is the critically acclaimed book by American actor Don Cheadle and renown human-rights activist John Prendergast.

Cheadle first became aware of the conflict in Darfur while filming Hotel Rwanda. Shocked and energized by the scale of the emerging crisis, he set about raising awareness of the Darfur conflict with John Prendergast, a former advisor to Bill Clinton.

The authors have travelled to the refugee camps of Sudan and Chad to pay witness to the unfolding tragedy which has claimed the lives of 250,000 people and displaced a further 2 million. In this heartfelt and moving book, Cheadle and Prendergast challenge readers to become politically active and help prevent the genocide from continuing.

Not on our Watch will be published by Maverick House in the UK and Ireland in July 2007 and in Australia and South Africa in September 2007. Pre-order your copy here.

The needle and the damage done

2007-06-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

In early January 2007, Joe Duffy presented a programme on Irish television; 2006 How Was it For You? In an item on drugs and crime, Senator David Norris had this to say: ‘Well, the record drugs seizures (in Ireland in 2006) are a record waste of time. The War on Drugs is about as useful as the War on Terror. We’ve had seizures of cannabis and heroin, but it hasn’t stopped anything. It has proliferated, it has grown out of all proportion because of the enormous profits to be made and it has introduced—The Gun! Looking at the possibility of legalising and controlling drugs; that is the only way forward. The drug seizures are a headline, they make people feel positive, but quite honestly, it is a complete and utter waste of time. It is a red herring.’
Later, another Irish media personality Gay Byrne became embroiled in controversy when he too suggested that consideration should be given to legalising drugs.
Whether this could be a viable option or not, it does seem that conventional strategies have failed. In the early days of my descent into a life of drug dependency, I and my peers were eager and enthusiastic participants in what could be described as a cottage industry, compared to the billion-plus euro business of today. The business is now ruthlessly controlled by vicious gangs who will stop at nothing to maintain control over their domains. For example, two of these gangs in the Drimnagh and Crumlin area of Dublin where I grew up are engaged in a feud that has so far claimed nine lives. In 2006 there were 24 gun homicides in the 26 counties, most of which occurred in Dublin. The capital’s murder rate is soaring due to an upsurge in gangland violence according to ‘The Best of Times?’—a study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). It revealed that Dublin’s homicide rate is increasing faster than that any other European capital city. What is even more frightening is that a staggering 85% of gun murders in Ireland do not result in a conviction.
A number of these murders have been ordered and directed from prisons. A recent search of Portlaoise Prison, Ireland’s maximum security jail, recovered 17 mobiles, 5 SIM cards, drugs, syringes, bootleg alcohol, and two budgies. Can anybody be in doubt that the situation is out of control?
Surely there is nothing to lose in trying an alternative to the present strategy which seems to confer even more wealth, power and influence on criminal gangs. Michael McDowell, the former Minister for Justice, is on record as stating that the drugs gangs pose as significant a threat to the State as paramilitarism did during the troubles in the North. Why not take control of the supply of drugs away from them? - Shay Byrne, author of The Miracle of Fatima Mansions

A Nightmare in Laos

2007-06-12T01:15:00.001-07:00

Watch the video of Kays Danes' ordeal in a communist gulag. Taken away from her children and wrongly charged with gem smuggling, Kay was forced to endure 10 months of outrageous injustice and corruption while she tried to fight her case from behind the filth and squalor of one of Laos' secret gulags for foreign prisoners.

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Growing up in inner-city Dublin

2007-06-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

Some people have the impression that families reared in working class areas are neglected, or dragged up by their parents. I suppose I did nothing to help change this image by the mere fact of ending up on heroin, but we had quite a strict upbringing when we were young kids. Our home was old-fashioned, my parents were very conservative, and we had a lot of routine and order in the house. We didn’t have a lot but we had enough to get by. When you are a child, you never think too much about your own home. I certainly never did. I was too busy having fun. I took our life for granted because I knew no different.

Ma made us all sit down to dinner together when we were young. We had to be in bed at certain times, and we had our curfew. Saturdays were our bath days and you had to have a bath whether you wanted to or not. That was great. I loved the structure of home life. I always knew what was about to happen. I loved my large family even though it had its disadvantages.

For example, we all slept in bunk beds, and it got a bit cramped as we got bigger. When I think back on it I wonder how my parents coped. We were everywhere. We did everything together and we went everywhere together. The house was always full of children.

Our flat had three bedrooms. Ma and Da lived in the front room, looking out over the balcony, and our bedrooms were in the back. It was all the girls together and all the boys together.

My parents Mary O’Brien and Patrick O’Toole were working class people, and like me, they were also real townies. Ma grew up on Mountjoy Square and Da was from the tenements nearby in Summerhill. They met as teenagers and got married after a few years. They were close at first, but things started to go wrong a few years into their marriage.

Da was a drinker; one who went on binges. He mightn’t drink at all for a few weeks, then suddenly he’d lapse and go on a big binge. Because he didn’t drink everyday, he couldn’t recognise the fact that he had a drink problem.

He worked at the boats on the docks for a long time but work dried up and they let him go. He did a coal run for a while after that, but then he stopped working. After that, he done bits and pieces here and there, but nothing was really permanent.

He was a broken man cos he didn’t work regularly. He came from a very traditional family set-up where the man was the provider while the woman stayed at home and reared the children. When he couldn’t live up to this ideal, and as we got older and less controllable, he turned to the drink more and more.

Drink destroyed Da and my family. He lost his personality when he had drink on him. He wrecked his health and body, and was a different man when he went on the booze. There was no talking to him.

Every few weeks he would promise Ma that he’d stop. He would stay dry for a while but he would always fall off the wagon. He’d go on binges, then get a job on a building site, and then he’d hit the booze again. He got worse as he got older and trouble came into the family.

The last job he had was in the IFSC, doing security. It was a form of escape for him. He’d be there on his own, watching television, drinking a few cans. He was happy then. He died because of drink. He got ulcers and they burst. Despite all the hurt and pain he brought to the family, I miss him terribly; I know we all do.

* * *

Ma and Da didn’t really have a relationship or a marriage after a while. They just lived together for our sake. They were just two people living together who got along sometimes, but mostly they argued and fought. I think that’s the best way of describing their marriage after we started to go astray.

They were so busy trying to rear the seven of us that they left no time for each other. They came and went all the time.

When they weren’t fighting, they just existed alongside each other. Any love that had once been between them was long gone by the time I was old enough to realise it. I don’t know why they didn’t separate or leave home. I suppose they didn’t because they had nowhere to go, or maybe they stayed together because of us. I don’t know the answer to that question. But I know one thing for sure. Although they often weren’t able to show it, they both loved us; I just wish they loved each other more.

My parents made sure we had everything. We never went to school without our lunch. We never went without toys or schoolbooks, even though there were seven of us. I was bang smack in the middle of the family, and from an early age, I never felt like I fully belonged to either group. Debbie was the oldest with Olivia and Anthony close behind. You could say we were like slices of bread — one came after the other. There’s just a year between all of us. Then there was me, with Gary, Lindsay and Ryan close behind. While I was growing up, the question that forever occupied my mind was who I should play with. Should I go with the oldies or the young ones? We were all close in age, but we were also very close friends.

If I ever had a problem with anyone, Olivia or Debbie would be down like a shot to sort it out for me. They looked after me and the younger ones growing up. We were that sort of family. We were close. If you messed with one, you messed with us all.

My parents always looked after us no matter how bad things were between them. I have to say, though, that Ma did most of the work. When we were living in Saint Laurence’s Street there was only two bedrooms, and all the kids were in a single bed. We hadn’t got a bed when we were eight and nine months old so she used to put us in a chest of drawers. That’s how she survived.

Life gave her a raw deal. You could say it gave the people of the inner city a raw deal. Ma did what she had to do. She used to have to go in to her next-door neighbour and ask for a lend of half a shilling or half a crown to get us beans on toast or something like that. There were times she hadn’t got a penny. Da would be out drinking and she had nothing.

When it got to the point that they weren’t coping financially any more, she ended up shoplifting. It started off innocently, robbing messages from the shops, some milk and butter. When she realised that she was actually very good at it, she became more brazen and started doing all her ‘shopping’ in this fashion. She got away with it for a while, but she eventually got nicked, and went to prison several times for it.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I discovered she had been one of the best shoplifters in Dublin. It’s not something that she is proud of but she was so good, that at one point the security guards used to call her the Weed, because she could sneak in and out without them noticing. Ma doesn’t talk about those days now.

She stopped shoplifting a long time ago, and it was only when I got older and wiser that I realised what she was doing. She robbed to make ends meet and looked on it as a means to an end. She thought it was the only way, so she did what she felt she had to do to provide for her family and children.

At Christmas time she’d make a list of what we wanted, and then she would go down the country to do some ‘shopping’. She’d come back with our presents; Levi jeans, runners — everything we’d asked for and more. At the time, I didn’t know what was going on. At first, I thought she was making a list of what we wanted so she could give it to Santa. After that, I thought she was making the list so she’d know what to buy us herself. It was only when I got older that I realised she wasn’t buying these things, and neither was Santa. She was robbing them.

I have clear memories of her going off to Wales to make money from robbing. She would go on a day trip to Holyhead, fleece the place, and come back with thousands of pounds worth of cigarettes and drink. That’s how we had everything we needed growing up.

It was inevitable that she would get caught. You can’t get away with that type of thing forever. She was in and out of prison throughout my childhood, but Da always took good care of us while she was away. Although he was very fond of a drink, when she wasn’t around he stepped in to fill her shoes. It was only when she came back that he allowed himself to fall to pieces and to start binge-drinking again. He used to say to us, your Ma is gone away for a while, but we didn’t understand where she was, or why.

He really did his best for us. Sometimes, he’d bring us to see her in prison. We’d all walk up from SheriffStreet to go and see her in Mountjoy Prison. Debbie and Olivia would visit her every week but it was too hard for her having all the younger kids there as well. She’d be broken hearted, so it was only every now and then that we went up.

At the time, physical contact was allowed between the prisoners and visitors, so Ma found it very hard to let go of us when it was time to leave. I was too young to understand what was happening and I used to play with the toys they had there to keep the kids busy. I hardly paid any attention to Ma, until it was time to leave. I used to cry then when we had to leave because I didn’t want to leave her behind.

I wanted her to come home with us, and I’d realise that I’d hardly spent any time talking to her. After an hour we were all gathered up and told to say goodbye. When we’d get home in the evening, I’d be wondering why Ma hadn’t come home with us. Why did she stay behind? I would get upset then and worried about her being on her own, even though she had a lot of friends in there with her.

I can only imagine how she must have felt. I don’t believe that any woman would ever want to leave her children. I never stopped worrying about her when she was inside.

That was only natural cos, as a close family, we always worried about each other and looked out for each other. Children have short memories though, and we just continued with our football and our games and it never seemed long before she was home again.

In a strange way, things were peaceful when she was gone, because Da didn’t have anyone to fight with. We were too young to be doing anything to really annoy him, but if we did, he was quite good at dishing out discipline.

He always made sure we were clean and were ready for school. We never missed a day of primary school because of him. We could have been dying of the ‘flu but he’d still get us up out of bed. They were important things at the time. He tried to keep a structure in our lives, but it probably wasn’t enough to keep us together. It would be difficult for any man to raise seven children in inner city Dublin on his own, never mind someone with a drink problem.

Ma was only ever in prison for three months, or perhaps six months at a time. Once she was in Holloway prison after she got caught shoplifting with her friend. She’d be in and out of jail all the time and overall, she spent 10 years behind bars. It was always good having her around, until she got sent away again.

You might ask if I’m embarrassed about this now. I’m not. I’m proud of my Ma. I can see that she’s got strength of character. She had to feed her children, and she didn’t shirk her responsibility. She did what she had to to survive. - Julie O'Toole, author of Heroin

Notes from an intern

2007-05-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

While I was in college a publisher or someone from a publishing house would come in every Friday afternoon to talk to the class about the wonderful world of publishing they worked in. It can’t be denied that some of them could be pretty negative about the industry. The main complaints were the small salaries and some difficulties in getting a job. People looking for an internship in a Publishing House can be particularly concerned with these issues.

When you here horror stories of trying to make it in publishing it can really put you off. After getting a degree and maybe even a Master’s you would expect to get a good job that paid reasonable well. However if publishing is what you want to do you have to except that this nice salary may not happen for a little longer. In publishing, like with most industries, you need experience before you can get a job. As an intern you may not be getting paid much or even at all but the experienced gained will be invaluable.

I have learnt more about publishing in three days as an intern than I did in a year of study. College can give you an idea or overview of how things work but until you are actually working your way through a huge pile of submissions or laying out a 300 page book yourself that you really see how things work. The more work you put in the more value you will get out of what you are doing.

Deciding to embark on a career in publishing can be a difficult decision to make. You are basically agreeing to work very hard for very little money. However once you start down the path of publishing, have decided you are dedicated to the industry and find a good internship I don’t think there can be any turning back. - Niamh Gargan, Maverick House Intern

The competition is now closed. Congratulations to our final winners, Anthony and Rosa Penny, from Queensland, Australia.

World Bank watch dogs sit and watch the wheels of corruption turn

2007-05-23T01:26:00.000-07:00

Enter the competition at the end of this blog entry!

On 23rd December 2000, the secret police of the corrupt Communist Laos Government kidnapped Kerry Danes and took him to an undisclosed location in the nation's capital. Under Australian Embassy instructions, Kay Danes attempted to leave Laos with the couple's two youngest children, only to be intercepted at the Thai border.

Kerry and Kay Danes were former executive employees to one of Britains leading Security companies - Jardine Securicor. Kerry Danes, a highly decorated SAS soldier, was appointed Managing Director of Lao Securicor in 1999, a start up Security Company of the UK giant operating in the communist landlocked country of Laos.

Kerry and Kay Danes were centred in a dispute between their client, Gem Mining Laos, a US$2 billion dollar sapphire concession and the Laos Government. Despite intense interrogations, the Danes refused to make false statements that would otherwise implicate Gem Mining in unlawful activity, and result in its nationalisation. As a result, the Danes were detained in a prison of exceptionally primitive, squalid conditions in rural Laos for almost a year. They endured torture and ill-treatment. Their government deemed them hostages.

The Australian Ambassador to Laos, H.E. Jonathan Thwaites added “Let’s be clear about the Danes, the Australian Government will not let this matter rest until we have what we want, the Danes release. They are innocent. They have been caught up in power plays.”

Gem Mining Lao suffered mass destruction at the hands of the Laos Government, wilful destruction of property and blatant disregard for the assets and integrity of Foreign Investors. The illegal nationalisation of one of the world’s richest sapphire deposits almost brought the tiny landlocked country to its knees. Gem Mining Lao Directors were sentenced 20 years in absentia and fined US$30 million dollars by the Laos government for allegedly stealing their own assets.

Kerry and Kay Danes suffered immense injustices and trauma that tested their resolve both professionally as security managers, and emotionally, as husband and wife. Their story became one of the highest profiled cases in Australia at the time, featuring on every news channel until their release on November 9, 2001. Their plight highlighted the deceit of a country that pledged itself to upholding United Nations mandates and laws that were supposed to protect foreigners and investors but failed.

Now, six years on, Kerry and Kay Danes are once again enduring public humiliation at the hands of the Laos Government that is using their unlawful conviction as a smoke screen to its continued underhandedness. In a country steeped in corruption, the illegally nationalised Gem Mining Laos concession is being floated to the international market, at far less a price [US$5 million dollars] then what it was reportedly worth [US$2 billion]. Smell a rat?

The wheel has once again come full circle and one has to wonder how many more foreign investors will suffer at the hands of this regime? Where is the accountability from the so called watch dogs of corruption, the World Bank and the International community in Laos, who are fully privy to evidence supplied to them of torture of foreigners and investors caught in the snare of greedy Laotian officials! - Kay Danes, author of Nightmare in Laos.

Laos Government float GML to foreign market

Lao Securicor Security Audit Report [Shows mass destruction of Gem Mining]

Congratulations to the winner of our previous competition, Karen Araujo from Canada!

An empty seat

2007-05-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Enter our competition at the bottom of this blog entry!

I’d had terrible dreams weeks before the launch of my book in Bangkok. I tossed and turned as I imagined every possible thing that could go wrong like turning up at the wrong place, on the wrong date, forgetting to invite people and then to have the few guests who did come, walk out on me. Thankfully it was a pleasant relief that none of those things actually happened on the big day.
60 people attended the launch, including a former executioner, a former prisoner, prison visitors, various volunteers, media folk, friends and interested expatriates. It was a highly meaningful time with sharing some thought provoking ideas concerning penal reform and activities to make the world a better place.
Sadly there was a very important person missing from our forum and it was not due to my forgetting to invite him either. Seri served over 20-years in Bangkwang; he lives like me in Nonthaburi, where he runs his newsstand. I see him almost daily; we share a common bond as well as a joke or drink. He flirts and I dance around his invitations for a ride on his new motorbike all the while encouraging him about his new life.
He was to be one of my guests of honor, one of the ones without whom there would be no book or proof that sometimes folk do actually make it out of the Big Tiger. He accepted my invitation willingly; he too wanted to have his say. But sadly he was dying. He did not make it as he had lost one of his lungs due to cancer, most likely caused by forced labor working for years in dusty, chemically polluted factories within the prison. He was just too weak to leave his bed. I have lost him, he has not returned to his newsstand and I fear the worst.
One consolation is that the book launch was more than a promotion of my book, or even of the executioners, but it became a panel and opportunity to bring out truths and hopes for change so that folk like Seri will not have to suffer in the future. Even the high-ranking authorities attending joined us in challenging the legal system and futility of the long sentences. The organizers were pleasantly surprised by the responses and I felt that everyone left stimulated and challenged, and secretly I hope that Seri is at peace feeling pleased that he was adequately defended. The launch signaled a rallying of additional voices that will defend the likes of Seri I pray! - Susan Aldous, author of The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison

Pictures by Virginia McCrae

Maverick House will be giving away 5 books from our backlist to one lucky reader. The answers to the following question can be found on www.maverickhouse.com/authors.html . A winner will be drawn from all correct entries.

Question: What is the title of Susan Aldous' memoirs?

Send your answer along with your postal address to: publicity@maverickhouse.com

The smiling temptress

2007-05-10T01:45:00.000-07:00

Enter our competition at the end of this blog entry!

One of the things I learned early on in my career as Art Detective with the FBI is that there are good reasons why art theft and forgery is such a bullish growth industry. The soaring value of classic paintings has combined with a comparatively minuscule legal risk to create a landscape that has become every criminal’s dream job. With the auction price of a single Picasso topping $100 million in 2004, the sky is now the limit in this crazy, highly specialised industry. Yet the legal statutes haven’t remotely kept up with the unprecedented temptation to cross over to the dark side. Someone could snatch the Mona Lisa off the wall of the Louvre in Paris, sell it in New York’s Central Park for a cool $350 million, get caught a week later, and expect to be given no more than 18 months or so for the ‘sale and transportation of stolen property.’ Lady Justice, herself a popular model for so many painters, blindly doesn’t consider the value of the goods when doling out her democratic, non-prejudicial punishments.
Why not steal the Mona Lisa as a first time offender, and you may only walk away with probation? Or drive away in your goldplated Hummer limousine. How many people would trade a year and a half stint in jail for $350 million? A better question is: who wouldn’t?
- Thomas McShane, author of Loot: Inside the World of Stolen Art

Maverick House will be giving away 5 books from our backlist to one lucky reader. The answers to the following question can be found on http://www.maverickhouse.com/authors.html. A winner will be drawn from all correct entries.

Question: Which law school is Thomas McShane a graduate of?

Give it away

2007-05-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

My parents are at present celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and a life well lived. I am fortunate enough to have been able to come home to share these special moments with them. Australia and family are great places to take a break from the maddening pace of my life abroad.
Sadly though, the local newspapers are full of news of two young girls who ended their lives tragically in the bush this past weekend. Found laying side by side, looking intimately serene, the 16-year-olds ended their Emo lifestyle leaving a nation stunned. One of the pair was an only child, both were beautiful and from good families with such bright futures, but tragically felt they could not go on.
These awful deaths have caused parents and teens alike to do some serious soul searching, and most certainly have presented me great cause for inner reflection.
I too am an Aussie, I too at 16 found no purpose in life. I too wanted to end it all…but thankfully someone threw down the live-life-to-the-fullest gauntlet and challenged the confused teenager with this profound thought, “If you want to throw your life away, why don’t you give it away?”
My rejoinder is 30 years of fulltime volunteer work in 18 countries. A life lived, not with ease, not without mistakes, tragedies or grief, but one lived with purpose. One Life lived feeling truly blessed.
My book has just been published. What a nerve wrecking ordeal I am undergoing as I await the launch and responses that will follow from having opened up my life and feeling so vulnerable to critics. Somewhere during the bouts of see-sawing anxiety, denial, regrets and glee—talk about manic depressive lifestyles—comes a sobering thought that puts all things into perspective. “The girls, the two beautiful girls, if only they’d found the treasure of a challenge that had been presented to me! If only I or some other concerned person had been able to pass it onto them! What about all the others”
Hopefully, someplace amongst the uncertainty of my life’s tales a tiny light will shine forth and a soul will be able to read between the lines and discover that same treasure. As for the critics, they do not nearly matter as much as the troubled Emo child, the lonely wanderer and those who care enough to give a damn; these are they for whom I wrote the book.
- Susan Aldous in Melbourne

In the spirit of giving, Maverick House will be giving away 5 books from our backlist to one lucky reader. The answers to the following question can be found on www.maverickhouse.com . A winner wil be drawn from all correct entries.

Question: Where is author Susan Aldous currently living?

The Paperless Office!

2007-04-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

As a teenager, I supported Greenpeace. I wanted to save the world or a least preserve part of its beauty for future generations. I learned in horror of our disappearing rainforests and the affect it was having on wildlife, the environment and the ozone layer.

Many of the predictions taught in geography classes in the 1980s and 1990s have proven untrue. They told us that Ireland’s population was in decline, and although we were part of a baby boom and would have to pit ourselves against each other for places in college and jobs, that the birth rate would continue to drop and our children would have their pick of schools and colleges.

We are currently experiencing the greatest explosion in the population of Ireland since before the Great Famine. The average class size is currently over 30 pupils, and many children are being taught in inferior prefab buildings. Schools have to set limits on the age a child can begin school, in an attempt to manage class sizes.

What has this got to do with publishing, I hear you ask?

Another prediction that we were taught was that everyone would operate in a paperless office by the time the 21st century came around. In the late 90s it seemed to be heading that way, as companies enthusiastically embraced the internet and email. It certainly has changed the business climate, but has it created a paperless office? Not at Maverick anyhow.

The mountain of paperwork that arrives on my desk on a daily basis engulfs me and I struggle to keep control of it. My recycle bin fills and overflows regularly.

Similarly, the imminent demise of the book has also been exaggerated. Over the last few years we have heard predictions of e-books and how publishers should be quaking in their boots about the advent of the e-book; How people will shun their books in favour of reading on their computers, iPods and other devices.

I get the feeling the ‘experts’ have got it wrong again, and you can quote me on this. It won’t happen in my lifetime. Watch this space...

Jean, the MD.

The London Book Fair 2007

2007-04-20T01:21:00.000-07:00

Spring time in London is always fabulous but this year the weather took everyone by surprise. With temperatures in the 20s, there were many sunburnt faces at London Book Fair on Monday morning.

The Mavericks kept their cool, however, and had a busy book fair meeting agents and authors, and buying rights.

The new venue at Earl's Court was great to work in - close to hotels, good facilities and and a comfortable environment, although many commented that the Irish stand was placed on aisle Z, it was in fact, a busy spot which attracted quite a few passers by.

We made some acquisitions, which we are very excited about, and will feature in our 2008 list.

The Mavericks also found time to hang out in South Kensington with fellow publisher, Peter Walsh from Milo Books, as all work and no play would make the Mavericks very dull indeed!

Jean, MD.

The Last Executioner opened my eyes to a new world of reading

2007-04-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

When I got my copy of The Last Executioner on recommendation, I was more than a little apprehensive settling down to start it. I am a definite graduate of chick lit to historical and literary fiction, but never was drawn to this particular genre. To be honest I didn’t think I’d get past the first chapter but I thought sure I’d give it a go.

Well how wrong could I be! I was straight away transported into Chavoret Jaruboon’s world and fascinated at how an Elvis loving guitar playing young buck about town could end up with the job he had. I was captivated from the word go. I was immediately struck with the great relationship Chavoret had with his father. He adored him and wasn’t afraid to show it through his words. His father instilled in him his grounded and down to earth ambition to get on in life and provide for his own family the way he had been provided for solely by his father. The user friendly style of writing helped my reading ease and the chapters just flew past.

Apart from the ‘man behind the mask’ aspect of the book, I was also drawn - with horror I must admit - into the whole world of Bangkwang prison and I was enthralled with the fly on the wall look at the day to day lives of the prisoners and quite disturbing tales of the executed and how they came upon they’re doomed fate on that cross. Chavoret, although recounting their stories, seemed to be able very easily to shrug off his job and go home to Tew and his family at the end of the day and continue his regular life. I don’t think just anyone could do that job and not bring ghosts home and he obviously is of strong mind and body to leave the prison and what he had done behind at the end of day. I very much admire him as a man and would greatly enjoy meeting him. His story stayed with me for a long time after I finished the book and it completely opened my eyes to the world “out there”. I now find myself scanning the true life/true crime section in my local bookstore rather than immediately heading for my usual well browsed fiction section. I never thought this genre would grab me the way The Last Executioner did and I am very much looking forward to reading Angel of Bang Kwang Prison.

Darrinagh Marshall, Arklow, Co Wicklow, Ireland.

The boy under the chestnut tree

2007-04-11T05:37:00.000-07:00

George Strunz (Newtown School, Class of 1956) writes:

It was, I think in 1950 or 1951, on the gravel under “the brothers”, the ancient horse-chestnut trees then in front of Newtown School, that I first met Zoltan and Edit Zynn (subsequently Zinn-Collis) among the new boarders entering the school that autumn. Both were shorter in stature than the rest of us and their hair and complexions were dark: they were good-looking children with ready and engaging smiles and Zoltan wore wire-rimmed glasses. He had a noticeable bump on the upper part of his back. Word had spread among the Newtown community that these children had survived terrible hardships in concentration camp and, without being spoiled, should be treated with due consideration. Although we knew that they had lost their entire family, few among the privileged and relatively innocent Newtown student body could imagine the full horror of these terrible hardships.

Edit and I were in the same class and Zoltan, being younger, was a form or two behind. Throughout their time as members of the Newtown community, it was tacitly understood that one did not discuss their earlier history with Edit and Zoltan. Indeed, with their cheerful dispositions and wholehearted participation in school activities, most of us quickly forgot about their different background, although the knowledge did persist in my subconscious mind.

I had not, until last year, seen or been in contact with either Edit or Zoltan since school-days. Now, after briefly meeting with Edit again and having read the autobiography, which Zoltan has finally been able to bring himself to write more than half a century later, I feel that I have at last come to know these remarkable “ordinary” people!

The beginning of the book recalls the experiences of the author and his sister as small children in the brutal hell that was the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, during what was arguably the darkest period in the history of humanity. Their survival was due to the intervention of a number of caring people and the resilience they had as young children “who were still able to play among the rotting corpses”. With its horrific beginning, the story of their subsequent journey in Ireland towards recovery and a normal life in the care of a remarkable Irish physician is an inspiring testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit.

The first section of the book makes for very uncomfortable and distressing reading. Zoltan was the third of four children born in the foothills of the High Tatra to a Jewish Slovak father and a Protestant mother of Hungarian origin. When he was about four, his father had to go into hiding from the Nazis and the children saw nothing of him for months. His mother, warned by the authorities to dissociate herself from her husband nevertheless remained steadfast and loyal to him, with the result that when he was subsequently arrested, the entire family was sent to concentration camp. All perished there except Zoltan and his elder sister Edit.

The author’s childhood recollections of the appalling, brutally inhuman conditions under which his family and other victims of Nazism suffered while being transported to Belsen and during their day-to-day existence in the camp are chilling. The images left with the reader are nightmarish. In the midst of all the barely describable brutality, Part 1 nevertheless also has some uplifting moments, such as the nurturing of the children by Polish inmate, Luba Trysznska (“the angel of Belsen”) and her Slovak companion Hermina Krantz as well as some surreptitious kindness shown by one of the female guards.

The turning point comes when Zoltan, described by Dutch Red Cross worker Han Hogerzeil, as an “enchanting scrap of humanity”, and his sister Edit are rescued from the freshly liberated camp by the indomitable Dr Bob Collis. Thereafter begins, in Ireland, their difficult but inspiring road to recovery, initially in the care of Dr Collis, who became father as well as physician to the children. A description of their healing and acquiring the ability to deal with their physical and emotional scars comprises the middle section of the book.

Incarceration at Belsen left the 5-year-old Zoltan with tuberculosis in his spine, a condition responsible for the spinal deformity that he has lived with ever since. It was fortunate for Zoltan that the redoubtable Dr Collis was at the forefront in his field of paediatrics at the time and the doctor’s influential contacts included some of the world’s leading physicians and scientists. Thus, when Zoltan, at the age of six or seven, seemed about to succumb to tuberculosis meningitis, Collis was able to obtain directly from Sir Alexander Flemming the Nobel Lauriate’s entire supply of the newly discovered antibiotic streptomycin, the experimental administration of which undoubtedly saved his life.

Zoltan and Edit were adopted and grew up as members of the Collis household which initially included the doctor, his first wife Phyllis and their sons, Dermot and Robby. The book contains revealing glimpses of their life in Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Square and at the family’s beloved holiday home, Bo, in the Wicklow mountains. Han Hogerzeil, the nurse who had worked alongside Dr Collis in Belsen so many years before and remained a close friend, later became the second Mrs. Collis.

The major part of the children’s academic education was received as boarders at Newtown and the school has reason to be proud that Zoltan was very happy there and credits it with having more influence on him than any other place. “Thanks to the influence of Newtown School,” he writes, “I have accepted what happened to me and moved on with my life. That is no small achievement.”

Indeed, he did move on with his life and had a successful career in hotel management and as a chef. He married Joan, a Catholic; they had four daughters and have enjoyed a happy life as a loving close-knit family.

Those who lived in Ireland during the 1950’s and 60’s will remember that relations between Roman Catholics and the small non-Catholic minority were cordial and reasonably tolerant at that time, but that tradition and the Ne Temere decree placed almost insurmountable barriers in the way of mixed marriages. I have heard that Zoltan and Joan had to overcome considerable obstacles when they decided to marry. It seems a pity that these difficulties are scarcely alluded to in the book: such an account would have given an interesting insight into their strength and determination and into the social history of the time. This is, however a minor criticism of a book which makes compelling and uplifting reading.

Besides telling Zoltan’s remarkable life story, it gives a snapshot of the personality of the legendary Dr Bob Collis, a larger-than-life figure with enormous energy and a powerful will and intellect, who nevertheless was not without some human frailties.

As he has come to terms with his past, Zoltan has become active in the important field of education about the Holocaust, giving talks in Irish schools and community forums and, not least, by the creation of this autobiography.

The book is written in a straightforward, modest, informal manner and is devoid of self-pity. The author’s own indomitable personality shines through and there is no shortage of humour. He describes for instance the corset-like contraption that was designed for him as a youngster to hold his spine rigidly in position: when drawn into small-boy fist-fights he would “go in backwards” and the little fists of his opponents would come into sharp contact with the hard canvas, belts and buckles of the corset! Another anecdote tells of an explosion within a hotel kitchen gas oven when he, the head chef, suffered broken glasses and some minor injuries. A waiter, standing safely behind him observed “Jaysus, Collis, if the f..…ing Nazis didn’t get you, we will!”

These examples suggest that, notwithstanding the serious health issues that increasingly beset him as he gets older, this unique “Slovak Irish Paddy” retains the twinkle in his eyes that we remember from his Newtown days. This is a very important story, both as a historical record and as the autobiography of a remarkable and courageous individual: it deserves to be widely read. Perhaps such accounts may one day touch human consciences to the point where they prevent the recurrence of the kind of brutality he endured which, alas, we still see today in places like Dafur.

My First Book

2007-04-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

Of all the things I’ve ever envisaged doing with my life writing the memoirs of a Thai state executioner was certainly not one of them. Chaverot Jaruboon shot dead 55 people during his career and decided that he would kill no more when lethal injection replaced the gun in Thailand, in 2003.

I was nervous. I knew absolutely nothing about Thailand and even less about the death penalty. Would I have the stomach for it? Should I be doing this from an ethical point of view?

Pornchai, the Thai researcher, sent me over the interviews that had already taken place and, inevitably, there was more to the man than his job. Over the next few weeks he began to remind me of my dad. My dad is a man with simple tastes who lives for his family. He is a quiet man who doesn’t seek friendship with his co-workers and prefers to come home at night to his wife, who he may - or may not – be a little frightened off. He had worked incredibly hard all his life but has no material wealth to speak off. His only wish was that his kids got a good education so that they could support themselves.

The executioner is a quiet man with simple tastes. At work he keeps himself to himself and the most important people in his life are his family. One of the biggest reasons for accepting his dubious promotion was that he would make enough money to send his 3 kids to a good school. To him education was the key to an independent life and his sons and daughter have done him proud. He is wild about Tew, his wife of 40 years, and may – or may not – be slightly afraid of her. They have had to scrimp over the years and today he is not a wealthy man.

I rest my case. - Nicola Pierce, author

Note from a reader:

2007-04-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

I finished Hell in Barbados earlier this week and let me tell you, I thought it was brilliant. I honestly couldn’t put it down, that’s how gripping it was. My partners now reading it and he too can’t put it down either!

I wanted thank Terry for providing me with such an amazing insight, not just into his life, but on how addiction can affect people in an all consuming way. But, he also shows that it is possible to turn your life around. Hopefully many others do not have to experience the horrors that Terry did, but he shows that if people want to change, they can.

There were moments in the book that the scenario was so crazy and chaotic that I had to laugh at the black humour. I know it wasn’t funny but I can imagine him in the middle of it all, but not even comprehending the risks/dangers.

The part set in Barbados was chilling and at times I felt his fear. The book was really able to convey so much emotion. When the riot broke, I felt like I was jostling through the crowd with him trying to get out, or baking in the hot sun while he waited to be moved, or wrapping himself up in a plastic sheet to keep warm.

I’m disgusted that this is the way people are being treated in Barbados. It turns my stomach to know that this happens to people and that they mix petty criminals with major criminals.

Once again, what an amazing triumph! I’m so grateful that Terry was able to share this story in a touching, humane and dignified way.

Michelle

Kay Danes on the fate of Guantánamo Bay prisoner, David Hicks

2007-04-02T05:35:00.000-07:00

David was on his way to Gitmo when I was on my way home from Laos. Most of us who have experienced unlawful detainment in a foreign jail understand completely, that justice is often unattainable. Sometimes you make the best deal you can in order to go home. My husband and I were almost forced to ransom our integrity against our freedom... so difficult to endure such horrendous conditions and then at the end of it.. .listen to your government telling you that that's the best [offer] they can negotiate. I'm not ungrateful because unlike David Hicks and his family, Kerry and I and our family had all the support in the world from our Government. But that we still endured unlawful detention, an unfair trial, a pre-judgement before a court proceeding, a sentence before we were even charged, tortured and ill-treated and labelled as something we were not.... is something I will never forget and would never want my fellow Australians to ever have to endure.

No matter who we are, where we are, or what it is that we are alleged to have done.... we all deserve to have our rights upheld by our Government.

David Hicks will now be forced to bide his time until he finds the strength to put his life back together. I imagine he'll find it difficult when everyone is calling him a terrorist. But I will simply think of him as a young man who wanted to believe in a just cause and got a little lost along the way. Hopefully he can use these experiences to make his life positive and something that he can be proud of, and his family.

We all make mistakes, some bigger than others... some really stupid... some we don't know how or why we made them... some more public than others... but I have faith that David's journey will be one that many in our community can examine and learn from.

Justice has not been served. Once again, justice has become a victim. David did not get a fair trial. There was no cross examination of evidence or challenge to any defence... he was left with no option but to accept whatever they gave him in order to go home. Just as my husband and I were forced to accept what the communist Laos government and Australian Government decided for us. We are after all simply ordinary Australians who don't mean all that much in the grand scheme of things!

David has been told to go home and shut up! It's exactly what we were told to do.... only I didn't!

Kay Danes

International Human Rights Advocate
Foreign Prisoner Support Service
www.foreignprisoners.com

Author Website: www.kaydanes.com
Latest world-wide release - 'Nightmare in Laos' - A True story of a woman imprisoned in a communist gulag.

A private hell

2007-03-27T04:19:00.001-07:00

I am not much of a book reader, so when my old mate Terry invited me to his book launch and I pledged that I would get back to him after I'd read it , I thought I would have a bit of a daunting task on my hands. I pride myself on staying true to my word, so I knew I would just have to give it a go...

I was going to have to read on the hoof as Terry's communication came at a time when my life consisted of visiting my friend and my mum in hospitals at opposite ends of the dreaded Northern line. So, on a grey Thursday morning I wrapped up and stuffed the copy of Hell in Barbados into my handbag along with chocolate fancies and sandwiches for the sick. I got on the underground at Camden Town, and by the time I'd got to Bank, I was lost.

Lost in the unfettered primal scream and sweet corruption of London in the seventies that was the playground and nursery for so many of us. I couldn't put the damned book down. Terry's narrative just got you straight there, without effort or pretension.
I was starting to get a bit worried, because the "darker side" was beginning to lap at me ever so slightly with a sort of Pavlov's dog puppy suck.

Hmmm...

I had planned on giving a copy of Hell in Barbados to my now hospitalised, hedonistic boyfriend, thinking that this supposed story of addiction and recovery would inspire him to clean up his act. I took a deep breath and carried on reading. However, I did decide to finish the book before giving him his copy, just in case I was going to kill rather than cure him!

By Friday lunchtime, passing through Stockwell and Clapham South I was furiously cured of any unsavory seduction into oblivion and adventure.

The remarkable thing about this book is that it speaks without judgment; it simply speaks from pure unadulterated experience. As you enter into Terry's universe, you feel the agony and the ecstasy. You feel the people around him in the same way, without judgment, but with an acute awareness of the prodigeny of human suffering the unexamined life can create.

As I continued to read this descent into hell, I was becoming increasingly aware of my own personal gratitude for my own life. What luxury to be able to close the book at midnight and make myself a cup of tea and stroke the cat.

It took me under a week of train journeys and late night snatches to finish the book. I thought that was pretty good going for me, the non-book reader.

But apparently not! Eventually my friend got discharged from hospital and I gave him his copy of the book. He sat down on the armchair, didn't go to bed and didn't get up 'till he'd finished it the next morning.

Truth is, I keep telling my friends to read the book, but I don't want to lend them my copy. Who would I recommend it to? Obviously anyone with addictive tendencies, but also anyone feeling depressed or sorry for themselves. Anyone unhappy in love or with bailiffs threatening and definitely anyone traveling the Northern line to visit their loved ones in care. - Coral

Susan Aldous on writing 'The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison'

2007-03-26T01:56:00.001-07:00

Something that I find particularly rewarding about doing my book was in knowing that I was giving a voice to those who suffer unimaginable indignities. Countless people have died in prisons and through poverty, many being completely forgotten and it was great to be able to go back over some of these folk’s lives and give them a voice, be it a small, perhaps squeaky one, but one none-the-less. Love, Susan Aldous

Nicola Pierce's Bangkok Diary

2007-03-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

DAY FIVE:

This is being written on Saturday afternoon thanks to my getting drunk last night, alone, in the very posh hotel lounge. Ignoring both the disgusted looks I was getting from the ladylike bar-girls and the puzzled looks I was receiving from Japanese tourists, I doggedly kept re-ordering large bottles of Heineken while nodding my head along in time to the awful cocktail band who smiled sweetly while butchering the likes of Abba and The Eagles.

Earlier that day, Friday, I had made my first visit to a maximum security jail, the Bangkok Hilton. It wasn’t as bad as I expected. For one thing the prisoner I was meeting was an old hand at conversing with nervous visitors and was also, thankfully, fluent in English. For another thing visiting was a lot easier now, compared to the good old days as described in the soon to be released Angel of Bangkwang. There were phones instead of having to shout a conversation through two walls of wire mesh. The heat, however, remained the unbearable same.

We were kept waiting for 30 minutes. One of my group was an Asian woman who had recently married a guy inside. He was a young, unruly character who unwisely, but understandably, repeatedly lost his temper with the prison guards. She was punished by having to spend a half-hour of their hour-long visit waiting for him, and we were punished because we were with her.

They all arrived together; the angry young husband along with my prisoner, a veteran after seventeen years there with no end in sight, and an elderly wrinkled prisoner who was HIV positive. Jag and I covered many subjects in half an hour watched politely by this old guy. He seemed lost. His wife last visited him two months ago, his grown-up sons never visited. At one stage I smiled at him, Jag told me that he was a great singer, and he waved as hard as he could before settling into himself again. He was asked if he needed anything from medicine to cream cakes and he said no.

The more Heineken I drank the more vivid this old guy’s face swam in front of me. He was too gone to be angry like the raging husband and too gone to be hopeful like the patient Jag. He had just slipped quietly down between the cracks, and bars of Bangkwang. Probably gone forever. - Nicola Pierce, author.

The writer in the mirror

2007-03-21T02:32:00.000-07:00

Writing Hell in Barbados was quite traumatic for me. It gave me the long-awaited opportunity to tell my side of the story in some of the many scenarios I have been through. Certain things were truncated, though- for instance, I would have liked more of the original text I wrote about my time in Afghanistan, to have been included, such as what happened in the refugee camp I ended up stuck in for six months, penniless, swatting against the clouds of flies by day and the mosquitoes by night. But we wanted to get into the story re Barbados sooner, and thus certain ‘streamlinings’ were necessary. The text, as it transpired, was a lot less cumbersome and more aerodynamic than when it started.
It brought back a lot of memories, some painful, some long buried in my memory, some happy. People I had almost forgotten about, those I had loved and lost, for instance, but whose presences seemed to return like homing pigeons for the writing of this book. This book gave me the chance to seriously review some of the events I have been through- and realise their influence upon me. It was an incredibly cathartic experience, and I am now preparing further writing for Maverick House re my experiences as a ‘Down and Out in London’- as a former crack and heroin addict, living amongst the junkies, whores, pimps, dealers, et al of the dark underbelly of London Town, especially in and around north London’s King’s Cross area.
All of which marks a change in the kind of thing I have written about in the past. Back around the 1990s I wrote a series of books for a combination of American and British publishers on folklore, the tarot, magic spells, the Lord of the Rings, and dragons, in particular, ‘Step by Step Tarot’ by HarperCollins (circa 1992), ‘The Dragon Tarot deck and book set’( U.S. Games Systems Inc. 1993), and ‘The Lord of the Rings Tarot deck and book set’( U.S. Games, 1994). - Terence Donaldson, author.