When a reluctant President Sukarno gave Lieutenant General Soeharto full executive authority in March 1966, Indonesia was a deeply divided nation, fractured along ideological, class, religious and ethnic lines. Soeharto took a country in chaos, the largest in Southeast Asia, and transformed it into one of the 'Asian miracle' economies - only to leave it back on the brink of ruin when he was forced from office thirty-two years later. Drawing on an astonishing range of interviews with leading Indonesian generals, former Imperial Japanese Army officers and men who served in the Dutch colonial army, as well as years of patient research in Dutch, Japanese, British, Indonesian and US archives, David Jenkins brings vividly to life the story of how a socially reticent but exceptionally determined young man from rural Java began his rise to power - an ascent that would be capped by thirty years (1968-98) as President of Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation on earth. Soeharto was one of Asia's most brutal, durable, avaricious and successful dictators. The first volume in a trilogy, Young Soeharto provides a highly readable introduction to the complex and utterly absorbing social, political, religious, economic and military factors that have shaped, and continue to shape, Indonesia.

'Jenkins has succeeded, in a manner like none before him, to convey the feel, spirit, energy and texture of these formative years of Indonesia's making, marked by violence, triumph and calamitous failure, and brutal intrigue. Jenkins' Young Soeharto reveals the man and his long, mostly quiet emergence, in brilliant contextual detail, and shows how he developed his extraordinary capacity for political adroitness and concise, decisive leadership.' R E Elson