King Bhumibol Adulyadej, A Life's Work: Thailand's Monarchy in Perspective.

• Author: Montesano, Michael J.
• Position: Book review

King Bhumibol Adulyadej, A Life's Work: Thailand's Monarchy in Perspective. Edited by Nicholas Grossman and Dominic Faulder. Singapore and Bangkok: Editions Didier Millet, 2011. Hardcover: 383pp.

One assesses this book with an inescapable sense of what might have been. As is typical of the sponsored publications of Singapore's Editions Didier Millet, the production quality of A Life's Work is of the highest standard. The volume features hundreds of fascinating photographs. Given the wealth of detail introduced, its prose is generally beyond reproach. The editorial and writing team, led by Nicholas Grossman and Dominic Faulder and featuring such names as Chris Baker, David Streckfuss, Porphant Ouyyanont, Paul Wedel and Joe Cummings, has clearly worked with considerable diligence and intelligence to bring this book to the reader. Much about A Life's Work will thus give pleasure to anyone with an interest in Thailand. The volume's largely corporate sponsors can be satisfied with the results of their investment in this project. And yet by other standards, standards amply justified by these times, this book fails, and it fails in a number of rather troubling respects.

The appearance of A Life's Work coincided with King Bhumibol's completion of his seventh twelve-year birth cycle in December 2010. At the time of its publication, the king had been an inpatient of Siriraj Hospital for some twenty-seven months, since September 2009. His reign, dating to 1946, has seen the revival of the Thai monarchy after decades of decline, widespread respect for his work to integrate the farthest reaches of the country into the national mainstream, and a startling record of economic growth that transformed Thai society beyond recognition. Nevertheless, the king's reign has lacked one thing: a realistic strategy for a soft landing, for a conclusion that will make possible the survival of monarchy in a country far more complex than that of the late 1940s or even the mid-1980s, and for future sovereigns very different from King Bhumibol.

This book--its preparation overseen by such stalwarts of the liberal wing of what Duncan McCargo has so astutely labelled Thailand's "network monarchy" as Anand Panyarchun, Pramote Maiklad, Sumet Tantivejkul, and Wissanu Krea-ngam--presented an excellent opportunity to promote the likelihood of that soft landing. Had A Life's Work proved a volume that one could read rather than just peruse; had it really focused on Thailand's...