For nearly two decades western governments and a growing activist community have been frustrated in their attempts to bring about a freer and more democratic Burma—through sanctions and tourist boycotts—only to see an apparent slide toward even harsher dictatorship. And on his father's side, the author is descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma's Court of Ava for nearly two centuries.
Through their stories and others, the devastation of world war ii, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through the decades of British colonialism, he portrays Burma's rise and decline in the modern world, and a sixty-year civil war that continues today and is the longest-running war anywhere in the world.
The river of lost footsteps is a work both personal and global, a distinctive contribution that makes Burma accessible and enthralling. His maternal grandfather, u thant, rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the UN secretary-general in the 1960s.
The Glass Palace: A Novel
Praise for the glass palace“an absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity. J. He proves a writer of supreme skill and intelligence. The atlantic monthly“i will never forget the young and old Rajkumar, the Princesses, the forests of teak, Dolly, the wealth that made families and wars.
National bestseller • named one of the best books of the year by the new york times book review and los angeles times“a rich, in our globalized culture, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland— a literary territory that is as resonant now, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.
Los angeles times book reviewset in burma during the british invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life.
M. An incredible story. Grace paley“A novelist of dazzling ingenuity.
Under the Dragon: A Journey through Burma
A fellow of the royal society of Literature, Rory divides his time between London and Berlin. In so doing he illuminated a nation of paradoxes woven together like a basket: love and hate, kindness and cruelty, faith and hopelessness, freedom and slavery, selflessness and greed. Travelling from rangoon to mandalay and pagan, basket weavers, into the heart of the Golden Triangle, he heard stories of freedom fighters, government censors, farmers and lovers -- ordinary people struggling to survive under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world.
His ten books, including uk best-sellers ‘stalin’s nose’ and ‘under the Dragon’, have challenged and invigorated creative non-fiction writing, and – according to the late John Fowles – are among works that ‘marvellously explain why literature still lives’. Under the dragon is an important, a golden land that was shot through with desperation and fear, historical and heartbreaking portrayal of Burma in the days before the recent reforms, perceptive, but also – in even the darkest places -- with beauty and courage.
About the authorrory macLean is one of Britain’s most expressive and adventurous travel writers. He has worked on movies with marlene Dietrich and David Bowie, and written and presented over 50 BBC radio programmes. He met aung san suu kyi, the most courageous woman of our time and the embodiment of all Burma’s hope.
Finding George Orwell in Burma
The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state.
And george orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book - the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written. Using orwell enables her to show, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, effortlessly, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere.
It is the place george orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. When orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. When larkin quietly asked one burmese intellectual if he knew the work of george Orwell, "Ah, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, you mean the prophet!" In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass.
Going from mandalay and rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still.
Letters From Burma
She was placed under house arrest in rangoon in 1989, where she remained for almost 15 of the 21 years until her release in 2010, becoming one of the world's most prominent political prisoners. She also evokes the beauty of the country's seasons and scenery, customs and festivities that remain so close to her heart.
Through these remarkable letters, the reader catches a glimpse of exactly what is at stake as Suu Kyi fights on for freedom in Burma, and of the love for her homeland that sustains her non-violent battle. Includes an introduction from fergal keane'aung san suu kyi has become a global symbol of peaceful resistance, courage and apparently endless endurance' Guardian'A real hero in an age of phony phone-in celebrity, which hands out that title freely to the most spoiled and underqualified' Bono, TimeAung San Suu Kyi is the leader of Burma's National League for Democracy.
She reveals the impact of political decisions on the people of Burma, from the terrible cost to the children of imprisoned dissidents - allowed to see their parents for only fifteen minutes every fortnight - to the effect of inflation on the national diet and of state repression on traditions of hospitality.
She is also the author of the collection of writings Freedom from Fear.
Burmese Days
Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim 'Other' Asian Arguments
In this gripping and deeply reported account, francis wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite has laid the foundations for mass violence, and how, in Myanmar’s case, some of the most respected and articulate voices for democracy have turned on the Muslim population at a time when the majority of citizens are beginning to experience freedoms unseen for half a century.
For decades myanmar has been portrayed as a case of good citizen versus bad regime – men in jackboots maintaining a suffocating rule over a majority Buddhist population beholden to the ideals of non-violence and tolerance. Attacks on muslims soon spread across the country, entire neighbourhoods turned to rubble, leaving hundreds dead, and tens of thousands of Muslims confined to internment camps.
.
Greetings from Myanmar: Exploring the Price of Progress in One of the Last Countries on Earth to Open for Business Kindle Single
David bockino is an assistant professor in the School of Communications at Elon University. He was born and raised in new York and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, son, and daughter. In just a few years, and isolation from the international community to being hailed “World’s Best Tourist Destination”—a seemingly impossible transition that led David Bockino, on a search to find out exactly what happened, in 2015, dictatorship, Myanmar has gone from destitution, and how.
.
The Trouser People – Burma in the Shadows of the Empire
. His journey is an offbeat exploration of Britain’s lost heritage – and a powerful exposé of Burma’s modern tragedy. This new edition includes marshall’s gripping eyewitness account of the Saffron Revolution, the 2007 democratic uprising led by Burmese monks. Immensely readable. The trouser people towers above all other contemporary books on Burma.
Bertil lintner, author of Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy. Inspired by the diaries of a forgotten victorian adventurer called Sir George Scott, Andrew Marshall set out to discover the real Burma – an impoverished nation ruled by a repressive regime. Scott was a die-hard imperialist who hacked, bullied and charmed his way through uncharted jungles to help establish British colonial rule.
Braving government spies and the after-effects of some powerful local hooch, Marshall retraces Scott’s intrepid footsteps into Burma’s remote tribal heartlands to encounter the bewitching ‘giraffe women’ and the former headhunters of the Wild Wa. Marshall is a gifted writer. The new york times‘The stuff of ripping yarns.
Miss Burma: A Novel
Viet thanh nguyen, husband and wife, pulitzer prize–winning author Miss Burma tells the story of modern-day Burma through the eyes of Benny and Khin, and their daughter Louisa. At once beautiful and heartbreaking . . . An incredible family saga. Refinery29 “miss burma charts both a political history and a deeply personal one—and of those incendiary moments when private and public motivations overlap.
Los angeles Times. Years later, benny and khin’s eldest child, has a danger-filled, Louisa, tempestuous childhood and reaches prominence as Burma’s first beauty queen soon before the country falls to dictatorship. World war ii comes to southeast asia, and benny and Khin must go into hiding in the eastern part of the country during the Japanese occupation, beginning a journey that will lead them to change the country’s history.
Based on the story of the author’s mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom. After attending school in calcutta, then part of the British Empire, a woman who is part of a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, and falls in love with Khin, Benny settles in Rangoon, the Karen.