The Past Isn’t Over JANET STEELE George Washington University JOSEPH NEVINS. A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 273 pp. $US59.95, hardcover; $US18.95, paper. C. W. WATSON. Of Self and Injustice: Autobiography and Repression in Modern Indonesia. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde; Leiden: KITLV Press, 2006. 237 pp. US$30.00, paper. MARY S. ZURBUCHEN (ed). Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies. Singapore: Singapore University Press; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 376 pp. $US30.00, paper. In 2007, prosecutors in a number of Indonesian cities seized and burned school books that had been introduced as part of the 2004 curriculum. In defence of their actions, they cited the direct order of Indonesian Attorney General Abdul Rahman Saleh that forbade the circulation of books challenging ‘‘accepted truths’’ about the nation’s history. 1 Specifically, the banned books had dropped the letters PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] from the formulation of G30S/PKI – or ‘‘the 30th September Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party’’. The book burnings led to widespread protests from defenders of freedom of expression, who saw in them not only an effort to enforce a hegemonic explanation of the ‘‘aborted coup attempt’’ that led to the rise of Soeharto and the killing of hundreds of thousands of alleged Communists, but also a major setback in the effort to open up history to debate and discussion. Significantly, the action also spurred a widespread polemic among a younger generation of writers and intellectuals who fiercely debated whether Lekra, the cultural wing of the Indonesian Communist Party, and renowned writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer had also participated in book burnings. 2 For some of these writers, young people who were fed up with the ‘‘accepted truths’’ of the Soeharto era, it seemed almost incomprehensible that one of the most celebrated victims of the New Order regime might have also at one time tried to enforce a political orthodoxy of his own. Asian Studies Review June 2008, Vol. 32, pp. 255 – 259 ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/08/020255-05 Ó 2008 Janet Steele DOI: 10.1080/10357820802065184