Cambodia Book

"Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow" is a ferociously brilliant book that challenges its readers to see the world with new eyes, in a new light. Through an arresting division of its pages-- thriteen wildly imaginative short stories at the top, and a passionate essay on colonialism and Southeast Asia at the bottom, running like a Mekong River footnote throughout the book-- Brian Fawcett startles, amuses, and infuriates his hooked readers with juxtaposed images and penetrating insights into the media jungle that defines our age.

Like subtitles read in a foreign film, the pace of "Cambodia" accelerates, and the reader's eye quickens as the work unfolds. Soon, "Cambodia" is moving more swiftly than the images on the evening news, showing us that the book's title is not an enigma, but a realistic description of its remarkably interactive contents.

Brian Fawcett's passion stirs us to resist the annihilation of memory and imagination in our society, lest we lose "our right to remember our pasts and envision new futures" in a violent world where "Cambodia is as near as your television set."

Publishers Weekly

This peculiar collection's title essay, set in small type across the bottom third of each page, is a rambling meditation on the U.S. bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge massacres, the American public's amnesia concerning these and other horrors, Joseph Conrad, colonialism and the difficulty of being a writer adrift in the ``Global Village.'' Sitting astride this ``subtext'' are 13 short essays and stories. In one, Marshall McLuhan meets St. Paul on the road to Damascus and counsels the apostle on making Christianity a big business. Other pieces deal with the stupidity of corporate meetings, the effects of a satellite dish on a small town, the experience of eating ``Universal Chicken'' at a drive-in and an imaginary effort to design a shelter to house chronically unemployed professionals. The odd layout is pointless and annoying, and the relationship between the running essay and the other slight pieces is tangential at best. (September)