With the holidays well and truly over (sigh), I thought I’d share my favourite summer reads and listens:
1. ‘Amir Sjarifoeddin: Politics and Truth in Indonesia’ by the University of Michigan historian Rudolf Mrázek.
Among a crowded field of charismatic 20th century Indonesian nationalists and revolutionaries, the story of the life (and premature death by summary execution) of Indonesia’s second prime minister, Amir Sjarifuddin, is an extremely compelling and poignant read.
2. (Relisten) ‘An Australian World’ ten-part podcast series from University of Sydney historian and The Australian Financial Review‘s International Editor, James Curran, on the history of Australian foreign policy from Federation to the present.
3. ‘The Rise of Indonesian Communism’ by Ruth T. McVey. A classic of 20th-century Indonesian studies, McVey chronicles the development of the Indonesian communist movement from its pre-WWI (ISDV) origins, to the establishment as a party in 1920, through to the party’s failed rebellion in 1926 and subsequent outlawing by Dutch colonial authorities.
4. ‘Against the Rules: Season 4’ podcast from Michael Lewis (of ‘Moneyball’ and ‘The Big Short’ fame). Earlier seasons of this podcast were good but this latest season on the rise of sports gambling in the US (since its legalisation by the Supreme Court in 2018) is great. It’s rare (and confronting) to have Australia serving as the cautionary tale here.
5. ‘The Cold War and Its Legacy in Indonesia: Literary Representation of the Red Scare’, a fantastic (relatively) new (2023) book from Goethe University Frankfurt scholar Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert examining the ways in Indonesia has (and in many ways hasn’t) come to terms with its Cold War past, particularly in terms of its literary representation of this period of history.
Those are my summer highlights. Was good to have the space to read and listen at length. What did y’all read, watch and listen to over the break?
Liam Prince is Acicis’ Consortium Director.