Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986 — xii, 269 p. — ISBN10: 0809312751; ISBN13: 9780809312757.
An American in Thailand paints a vivid picture of a fascinating society in this account of his year as a Fulbright professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Garrett shows what the Fulbright program is really like, including such details as dealing with the “web of bureaucratic eccentrics,” finding housing, and coping with “live-in” snakes. M. Carlota Baca, Director of Academic Liaison at the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, describes these diary entries as a “graceful blend of personal reminiscence, travel literature, rumination on past U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia, and rather deft portraiture of human types.” Mr. Garrett is a political scientist, and his Fulbright grant happened to place him in a Bangkok university just two years after the student uprising of October, 1976, possibly the most important expression of popular political awareness, and the most brutal and uncharacteristic response to popular political awareness, in Thailand's history. Imagine being a college professor just four semesters after gangs of government sponsored thugs (named "khrating daeng," or Red Bulls, who gave their name to the popular energy drink) stormed the campus of a major university and beat, hanged and burned to death scores of students, all of them unarmed and most of them women. Granted, Mr. Garrett was teaching on the other of Bangkok's two great campuses, but still, his candid and informed conversations with fellow lecturers and his students give the reader a remarkable and valuable insight into the political atmosphere of the time, an atmosphere still just as noticeable today as that tactile Bangkok air.