This is a book about Burmese Karen nationalists, their Christian leadership and their Buddhist and traditionalist rank-and-file. It tells of their day-to-day lives, and of their hopes and fears for their self-declared, but internationally unrecognized, free state of Kawthoolei, located to the south of the Shan plateau and just across Thailand's western frontier.

In many respects -- the author's stylistic ease and wit, the significance of his subject matter, the keenness of his insight and uniqueness of his experience -- this is a truly marvellous book; by any measure it is an extraordinarily good read. It is, nonetheless, a work difficult to review, at least for an academic periodical such as this.

The book appears under the imprint of one of the world's most prestigious academic presses, yet it is not really an academic work -- certainly from any disciplinary, or even interdisciplinary, perspective. The author provides some of the accoutrements to academic writing: appropriate references to a body of literature, a good bibliography, endnotes. But the text falls more (although not fully) within the genre of fine travel writing than within that of scholarship per se. Indeed, one has to ask oneself why either the author or Cambridge University Press chose one another. It seems to this reviewer that both author and reading public would have been much better served had this book appeared under the imprint of a commercial publishing house, with facilities for rapid and large-scale distribution in paperback format at relatively modest cost. This is surely a book that could appeal to readers beyond the patrons of specialist academic bookstores, where most university imprints are to be found. Cambridge University Press, for its part, might perform more useful -- and traditional -- service by concentrating on the publication of works of unquestionable scholarly merit, but less commercial viability. The book is introduced by Nigel Barley, that splendid contemporary popularizer of the anthropological enterprise in Britain (whose own books, such as The Innocent Anthropologist and Native Land, I note, appear in Penguin paperback editions), who declares Falla's work "anthropological in the truest sense", conveying "the 'feel' of another way of life", while eschewing the "pretension" one may find in more "formal texts".

Certainly, we must delight in Falla's prose, for example:

On a bamboo stage behind the church, lit by pale incandescent lights, the evening began as official programmes anywhere do, with speeches. The public address was prone to feedback, the generator to stalling. The villagers gathered in front of the stage, small children crosslegged in front, their elders on the wooden benches from the church hall. In the background, women sold chicken soup and noodles and rice-flour fritters by the white light of pressure lamps or the smoking flame of naked wicks stuck into tin cans filled with paraffin. Others were selling Burmese cigars.

'You want to be careful with those. Feel them careful, weigh them in your hand before you light them.'
'Why?'
'Sometimes they pack a .22 bullet inside, facing backwards.'
'Who does that?'
'Rival cigar companies.'

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