NUSANTARA
INDONESIA BUILDS A NEW CAPITAL
In Nusantara, Robert Templer brings to life the story of Indonesia’s new capital, being built in the forests of Kalimantan. The new city, planned for completion in 2045, aims to be a green and smart city, a model for future development in the world’s fourth most populous country. Although the presidential palace and several ministries have risen out of an area of plantation land more than 1000 kilometers from the old capital Jakarta, the project faces many risks. The question remains whether Indonesia can build a city that will be a model for future urbanism or if it will be a jungle white elephant.
A BASILISK GLANCE
POISONERS FROM PLATO TO PUTIN
Poison— invisible, unknown, hard to detect and deadly— taps into hard-wired anxieties about the risks of the world around us. From ancient times to the modern age, it has always created more fear than any other threats. In A Basilisk Glance: Poisoners from Plato to Putin, author Robert Templer takes us through the dark maze of poison. He traces its path from when Hercules dipped his arrows in the blood from the severed head of the Hydra to the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War in 1980s, from the death of Socrates to the use of toxins as a weapon of assassination, from the mass suicide of Jonestown in 1979 to the sarin attack in the Tokyo metro system. Today, as the war in Ukraine rages, we are reminded of the use of radioactive and nerve weapons by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kill his opponents. His targets— like other victims of poison through the ages— know that they are never safe; a cup of tea, a door handle or even their own underwear might be tainted with a deadly toxin
THE SHAH'S PARTY
FORTHCOMING 2025
The Shah’s Party examines the last decade of imperial rule in Iran when oil revenues exploded and the country emerged as a regional power. It tells of how grandiosity took over from policies that might have headed off the revolution of 1979 and how the populist messages of Khomeini swamped the story of economic and social progress in the tumultuos 1970s.
SHADOWS AND WIND
A VIEW OF MODERN VIETNAM
In Shadows and Wind, Robert Templer paints a fascinating and fresh picture of a country usually viewed with hazy nostalgia or deep suspicion. Here is Hanoi, an increasingly tense and troubled city approaching its millennium but uncertain of its direction. Here are people emerging from a long wilderness of malnutrition, discovering a new lifestyle of leisure and luxury. And everywhere are the anomalies that burst the bubble of optimism: a vastly expensive luxury hotel sitting empty in an unknown town six hours from an international airport; museums crammed with fake exhibits. And there remains the one-party Communist state, still wrapped in secrecy and corruption, and making for an uneasy bedfellow with the rapacious capitalism it now encourages.Drawing on hundreds of interviews in Vietnam and years of research, Templer has produced the first in-depth examination of the problems facing modern Vietnam. Shadows and Wind is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam that now has emerged from a century of conflict with both foreign powers and with itself.
