Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers is a fine book. Usefully divided into five sections ('East Timor: Resistance, Repression, and the Road to Independence;' 'Referendum and Independence;' 'East Timor, the United States, and the World Community;' 'East Timor and Indonesia;' and 'The Future of East Timor'), it contains chapters written by experts with long experience of Indonesia and East Timor. The carefully chosen black-and-white photographs by leading international photographers of East Timor such as Ross Bird and Steve Cox bring the suffering and reality of Indonesian-occupied East Timor vividly alive, as do the six poems by contemporary East Timorese writers. The three editors are to be congratulated for the care they have taken with their editorial task. The quality of the contributions is high, the index serviceable, and there are useful maps and glossaries of key Indonesian, Portuguese, and East Timorese terms and acronyms. This book will be read with profit by all those with a serious interest in East Timor and its post-independence future.
