Telling Lives, Telling History: Autobiography and Historical Imagination in Modern Indonesia

These two memoirs, superbly rendered into English for the first time, provide unique windows into the Sumatran past, in particular, and the early twentieth-century history of Southeast Asia, in general. Originally published soon after the Indonesian Revolution (1945-1949) liberated the island chain from Dutch control, these unusually insightful narratives recall the authors' boyhoods in rural Toba Batak and Minangkabau villages. In reconstructing their own passage into adulthood, the writer...