BOOK REVIEW

History is a topic often avoided - as a dry school subject or in relation to a turbulent episode in the past.

A few years ago Newsweek ran a cover story about Asian amnesia, how governments in the region are often inclined to try to suppress embarrassing or contentious points of recent history. In textbooks China glossed over deaths during the Cultural Revolution, Japan its military abuses in occupied Asia and Thailand downplayed the student uprisings and military abuses of the 1970s, to name just a few. With changes in government come different emphases on what to look back on and what to ignore or paint in a better light. And with Thailand's frequent coups, successive governments have tried to reset the paradigm slightly by clarifying or obscuring points that make their political platform more desirable.

Whether or not this was a fair assessment by the magazine of the way the region addresses the past, it begs the question, who does history belong to? Is it the domain of government, of education, corporations, news organisations? Who should decide what is the truth, what should be remembered and in what light?

One convenient way to look back on a period is through newspaper stories of the time. It's the ostensible role of journalism to capture the essence of a story and deliver facts. Sometimes hindsight clarifies certain issues that become muddied and confused in the pages of news, but more often than not a glance through past issues can put the present in a different and more objective light.

Chronicle of Thailand, weighing in at 3kg and 444 pages, doesn't claim to be a comprehensive window to the past, nor an entirely impartial one. But through the news-story format, rewritten to provide context and limit redundancy, the book gives us roughly 40 articles per calendar year that put our current lives in broader perspective. Beginning with the first year of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej's reign in 1946, it covers every major event through to June of this year, highlighting every change in government and major social trend in between. The book draws heavily from the Bangkok Post archives, and I don't know if anything this all-inclusive has ever been attempted to shed light on modern Thai history. Many will no doubt be frustrated by certain exemptions, cultural developments they remember clearly that aren't covered, but few books available can reenact our time as well as this one.

A chronicle is a written account of important events in their order of occurrence, and that is exactly what this book is, with its 1,800 photographs and images and some 2,300 news stories - on politics and international relations, wars and conflicts, terrorism, health, high and low culture, shopping, natural and man-made disasters, religion, violent or white-collar crimes, food, fashion, cinema, TV and music - set more or less in sequence.

A prelude by William Warren begins the volume and brings us up to date on the upheavals of the war and the immediate post-war period, Japan's retreat, ethnic tensions in the capital and HM King Ananda Mahidol's tragic death. What follows is 63 years of history, brought back to life through headlines, articles and photographs. The book ends with an imagined glimpse into the future, with a recap of the year 2073 by Dominic Faulder and artwork by Navin Rawanchaikul.

One complaint in the Newsweek article was that Thailand had never properly reconciled the military's abuses during the student protests of the early '70s, but this compilation doesn't turn a blind eye or try to gloss over what might make some uncomfortable - rather it focuses the photojournalist's lens on events and helps us understand them a little better. Major developments - HM the King's return to the country in 1950, the October uprising in 1973, Asian financial crisis of 1997, Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 - get a special two-page spread, or news-heavy years (2006) get extra pages. World history isn't neglected either, with two dozen or so snippets of major global developments for each year.

There is probably more hindsight involved in the selections than the compilers will admit, and a few odd blank spaces are sprinkled throughout the layout, but whether you grew up in the news depicted closely or more peripherally, the volume is a fascinating time machine of glimpses into the past. Even the things that never happened - an Eiffel Tower-like structure once planned to be erected in Lumphini Park, for example - make us wonder how different the capital might look now if a certain government had stayed in power longer, or a certain coup hadn't happened, or a social trend hadn't stayed in fashion as long as it might have.

But for better or worse this is the world we've inherited, and it is fascinating to leaf through the pages and piece together how we got here. Ambitious, hardly comprehensive yet rich in detail and cerebrally and nostalgically satisfying, this is a chronicle of our times and, as such, a chronicle of our own lives.

CHRONICLE OF THAILAND: Headline News Since 1946 Nicholas Grossman, editor-in-chief Editions Didier Millet, 444 pp, 1,450 baht ISBN 978-9814217125