This book, the twentieth in the Association for Asian Studies’ Resources for Teaching About Asia Series, “Key Issues in Asian Studies,” is the first to focus on Indonesia. Its intent is to “convey some of Indonesia's historical and contemporary richness,” as Kathleen M. Adams puts it, and to demonstrate the country's potential for playing strategic and economic roles in the region and beyond. Adams does so admirably, portraying the essential facts about the country with clarity and authority that makes this little book a pleasure to read.
Adams, a prominent Indonesian scholar with years of ethnographic fieldwork in Sulawesi and Alor to her credit, organizes her narrative from a historical perspective, beginning 1.5 billion years ago and bringing the reader to contemporary times and offering a prognosis of what the future might hold for the nation-state. In her introduction, Adams calls attention to three currents that run through her seven...
