Like Geoffrey Robinson's "Dark side of paradise", this book is one of the very few I read more than once and that I had to buy again because I gave my copy away. Pringle explains in his preface that he discovered that no history of Bali had yet been written and subsequently set out to fill in that gap. The book is very thoroughly documented which inevitably led Pringle to Leiden, Holland where the most important sources of Indonesian history are to be found, so apparently he masters the Dutch language which is quite remarkable. Being a Dutchman myself and having studied topics of Dutch colonial history in the same places, I can only be impressed by the skills of Pringle and Robinson. For the episode of transition from Sukarno to Suharto and the atrocities that came with it, Pringle relied - as he acknowledges - heavily on Robinson's studies. The book gives a nicely written account of the Balinese ancient and recent history up to the 'Kuta bombing' The book is a must for anyone interested in Indonesian history. It should be on the shelf of every Balinese and therefore deserves to be tranlated into Indonesian. It is always a sad discovery that these people don't know their own past. The joke says that Suharto taught his people hisstory. Pringle mentions a document that is considered by the Balinese as their ancient constitution. What he does not relate is that a copy of it is kept by a Dutch institution and that the Balinese Minister of culture recently suggested that it would be given back to the people who morally own it: the Balinese. The Dutch curator agreed that the Balinese are entitled to it but added: "If your offspring will come here in 300 years time they will still find it here and can study it; if I give it back it will not even take 5 years to disappear".

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