Although this book is somewhat out of date (first published in 1965), it continues to be a good general introduction for students of Southeast Asian societies. There are two major drawbacks in my opinion -- first, as I said, the book is out of date since the many years of warfare in the region have had a profound effects on the peoples in this region. Second, the author devotes only one chapter to the numerous hill tribes. The book is geared toward state-level societies in the lowlands. At any rate, the reader will come away with a good general understanding of state-level societies in mainland Southeast Asia. It's a good starting point for further study.

I had to read this book for my Intro to Linguistics course, and I thought it did a fairly decent job of going over all the basics. If you don't know anything about linguistics, you might want to take a look at this book, although it would still be helpful to have someone who does know something about it around to explain some things. The author's descriptions of what the phonetic symbols sound like don't always help very much. The organization of this book is a bit odd; the most obvious example is that phonetics isn't discussed in detail until Chapter 5, even though the author makes use of phonetic symbols in the previous chapters. If you read the book from the beginning to the end, you may get a little confused - reading the chapters out of order is practically a must. Also, there are far too many examples. I found myself skimming over a lot, because, after the first example, I understood what was being discussed and didn't need the next page or so of examples. The charts are wonderful, though, and there are a lot of them.

This book is a summary of learning methods, but deals mostly with theory, philosophy, details of research etc. I wonder why a scientist advertises approximated pronunciation- should he also advise approximations in the matter of his research??? This is not a book for linguists - here the language is just a tool. I could find on the net more than in this book. Alan Healey wrote a realy good one, maybe SIL still has it on microfiche.