DAMNED IF YOU DO

An official with the World Bank reflects on her experiences in Myanmar in this debut memoir.

Aung San Suu Kyi is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and was, until 2010, one of the world’s most widely known political prisoners before leading Myanmar as it shifted into democracy. Later, however, she became the target of criticism as the Myanmar military pursued a campaign of genocide against the country’s Muslim Rohingya population. This memoir, written by a former country director of the World Bank who knew Suu Kyi personally and worked with her administration in allocating billions of dollars to alleviate poverty, offers a firsthand look at the paradoxes of Myanmar’s nascent democracy. When Goldstein first arrived in the Southeast Asian nation in 2017 as a high-level World Bank representative, she believed that Suu Kyi “embodied everything we were trying to do there.” The book documents the author’s reaction to the horrors of the Rohingya genocide, and it blends her reflections on recent Myanmar history with an account of her own life as a Jewish girl who experienced antisemitism growing up in the American Midwest. Goldstein defied gender norms, rising through the ranks of a male-dominated organization. Over more than 60 chapters, the author offers poignant vignettes that provide a portrait of the international community’s realization of the moral failures of a humanitarian icon. Although the book, which is dedicated to those “fighting for human rights, rule of law, and true democracy in Myanmar,” offers a gripping story, its best passages are reflective in nature. One chapter, for instance, finds Goldstein questioning if the “good things” she helped facilitate (“The children educated, the babies vaccinated, the villages electrified”) were sufficient or “devastatingly too little.” Scholars of international relations will be drawn to the insights of a high-ranking global bureaucrat, but the book offers ample historical context and accessible prose to satisfy readers of all backgrounds.

An important chronicle of a modern Southeast Asian crisis.