Last week’s Rose Cafe was one of the most entertaining to date. The speaker, Dr. Mertha, gave an extremely interesting and enthusiastic talk about Cambodia and his novel. I had very little knowledge of pre-Vietnam War Cambodia before this talk, and Mertha did a fantastic job of extremely briefly summarizing this period. Surprisingly, I was extremely interested in his talk, which was aimed specifically at China’s role in Cambodia at the time; this is surprising because usually, when I do not have knowledge of the topic, these types of discussions can be extremely dry. Mertha used his extensive knowledge on the time period to extract the essential information without boring the audience at all.

It was also very interesting to hear about his experiences in writing his novel and obtaining the information for said book. As he conceded, discussing one’s own novel can be very boring for the audience, but this was not the case for this cafe series. Again, Mertha brought excitement and enthusiasm into this portion of the discussion, bringing up interesting and entertaining points about his journey of gaining knowledge. The book seems very interesting, and perhaps he should consider a career as a book salesman if the professor gig does not work out.

Overall, this talk kept me interested for the entire hour, even though it was a last-minute decision due to unfortunate circumstances. I am extremely glad that I was able to attend this discussion and hope to hear from Dr. Mertha again at some time in the future.