I was disappointed in the book, the author clearly just picked and chose references from other works on the impact of the Indonesian crisis that suit his purposes. I find it hard to believe that we could apply the findings from his fieldwork in the two rural Java villages in other Indonesian villages like what he had suggested, since Indonesia is an archipelago with 18,000 islands and 300+ tribes/ethnic groups that are very diverse. I also wonder whether he really writes up the report based on the interviews he had with the people in the villages or just filled it up with his own opinions and ideology, since I find that throughout the book that he could not get "satisfactory" and "definite" conclusions from his interviews with the people in the field so he decided to use his judgements to form conclusions about a given problem. Finally, I did not see any quotes from his field notes, a very crucial part in any anthropological research, this clearly left me more to conclude that the book is more based on his ideology than in a well-conducted research. There are a few good points about the book, like on the conditions of Indonesian migrant workers and the failure of the social safety net program (nothing new because other researchers have also concurred on this), this is why I give it a two star instead of just one, but the book is clearly not worth the money I spent on it.
