in to tint everything you see a weird Kodak yellow the next day.” Her experiences lead her to intriguing insights, such as that “heat drives people apart like a centrifugal force, for it becomes hard to sustain unity after a few hours of baking outside” (p. 79). Building upon all of these observations, Lee elucidates the tension between the practical discomforts of enacting successful street actions—heat, boredom, thirst, doubt—and the consequential seriousness that somehow transcends the petty personal concerns of the moment. Lee’ s study offers a valuable expansion of research presented in complementary works, including Meredith Weiss’ s monograph, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2011), and the more comprehensive collection of essays, Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), co-edited by Weiss and Edward Aspinall. It should be of interest to students and other scholars from a range of disciplines concerned with the ephemerality and endurance of demo- cratic transitions. Finally, Lee’ s study is theoretically rich, drawing on works of key theo- rists and adding provocative insights to the literature on youth activism, which should be a growing field of study given the vital role youth play in virtually all social movements and the importance of understanding how generations cohere and influence political transi- tions over time. MARY E. MCCOY University of Wisconsin–Madison mccoy2@wisc.edu Siam’ s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand. By SAMSON LIM. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. viii, 213 pp. ISBN: 9780824855253 (cloth, also available as e-book). doi:10.1017/S0021911818000852 Sherlock, a renowned British crime drama broadcast since 2010, presents a twenty-first-century version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’ s Sherlock Holmes, who is still in a traditional overcoat and a hat, but looks at his smartphone to Google from time to time. An amalgamation of the late nineteenth-century aristocratic elite investigator and the twenty-first-century consulting detective—but still aristocratic—invokes viewers’ desire as well as disappointment. The seemingly irreconcilable gaps between traditional and modern policing in this popular television series are what Samson Lim’ s Siam’ s New Detectives fills by bringing new attention to a history of the visualization of policing and crime in Thailand from the end of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. Lim states the book is a study of “the visual culture of policing” and “an epistemo- logical history of how people, as actors … make visible a specific category of action called crime” (p. 2). The first three chapters of the book therefore examine Thai and European elites’ adaptation and application of the Western scientific investigatory tools like fingerprinting, photography, report-writing, statistics, and mapping to enhance their understanding of criminal acts in Thai urban and rural settings. The first gap that Lim’ s work bridges in these chapters is a conventionally assumed asymmetric and/or antagonistic relationship between the impulsive Western modernity and receptive Eastern traditionalism. Be they aggressive Westerners or passive Easterners, they all eventually submitted to the hegemony of modern investigative methods. More 844 The Journal of Asian Studies at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911818000852 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 96.37.94.106, on 02 Aug 2018 at 03:14:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available