Jay Kantner presents Oddball Cambodia: Dispatches From Asia's Most Peculiar Country

Known for having the world's most magnificent ancient temple ruins, Cambodia also brims with singular, outlandish people, sites, history and cultural nuances few visitors ever see. "Oddball Cambodia" immerses readers in the hidden pleasures, foibles, horrors and whimsicalities--most never written about before--of pound-for-pound the most peculiar kingdom on earth.

The world's worst airline,history's most notorious grandmother,Pol Pot's last and largest executioners, families with active gem mines in their living rooms, tribal effigies that insult rather than honor the dead and Asia's lousiest waitresses. The author discovers Cambodia's very first Killing Field and the jungle ruins of a World War 2 Japanese airbase-both previously unknown. He visits a hair salon that specializes in styling hair like that of a dead US president, a bridal shop that also sells live crocodiles, a hellish squatters community inside what was once Cambodia's grandest movie palace and observes the perplexity and near hysteria caused when the country opened its first escalators in 2006.

Kanter, like a more waggish version of Robert Ripley, has spent decades questing after the curious and unusual in Cambodia and throughout Southeast Asia. He whisks readers on a madcap tour through the fetchingly absurd and compellingly crackpot kingdom that is Cambodia.