A crucial exposé of a scandalous regime.
From an American journalist writing under a pseudonym, a courageous, important examination of the bleak totalitarian state of Myanmar.
It was known as Burma in the 1920s, when Orwell worked there as an officer of the British Imperial Police. The British were in the process of perfecting their reign of oppression in Burma, and much of Larkin’s portrait traces the development of Orwell’s social conscience through what he learned and witnessed. Though Burmese Days, Animal Farm and 1984 were all written by the time Burma became independent in 1948, these three novels “effectively tell the story of Burma’s recent history,” she argues. Following in his footsteps three-quarters of a century later, Larkin traveled to Myanmar, nestled idyllically between India and Thailand, and uncovered uncanny parallels between its abysmal social and political conditions and Orwell’s fictional depictions. Despite the façade it presents to the world of smiling natives and pretty pagodas, the country’s military dictatorship has one of the worst human-rights records anywhere. “We are a country of 50 million hostages,” noted one intrepid man, talking with Larkin (who speaks Burmese) at one of the ubiquitous teashops where people congregate, despite the peril of being watched and recorded. Since the ill-fated democratic uprising of May 1988, history is being eerily rewritten in Myanmar. Dissidents are whisked away to prison, their names vaporized—much like the dystopia portrayed in 1984. Larkin traveled the route along which Orwell was variously posted and uses the colonial names he knew. She went from Mandalay, where he attended Police Training School, to the mosquito-rich Delta. She visited the grandly constructed city of Rangoon and the nearby town of Insein, site of a jail built by the British that is now a notoriously brutal lock-up for the regime’s political prisoners. Dogged by military intelligence wherever she went, Larkin sought out teachers, psychologists and writers who longed to tell the truth.
A crucial exposé of a scandalous regime.Pub Date: June 2, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-052-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Among the more amusing facts in this cultural history of the telephone is that, back in the old days, women were called upon to be telephone operators because boys, who initially had the jobs, ``were ill-suited to the delicate work of telephony. Rowdy and restless, they took pleasure in insulting callers, pulling pranks, and crossing wires.'' Filled with movie stills and posters, ads, and text from all kinds of sources, this lively documentary is less concerned with the evolving technology of the telephone than with the way it has been used and represented. Maxwell Smart's shoe phone is here, as is an excerpt from Nicholson Baker's Vox, as Stern (Best Bets, not reviewed) and Gwathmey (Wholly Cow!, not reviewed) rush happily from Alexander Graham Bell to the age of the fax-modem. Still, there's probably a good argument to be made that the pranks of punk kids were preferable to the icy contempt of voice mail.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100086-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Alexander sets a standard of thoroughness for future works on Paton, but the treasures unearthed by his impressive research are few and far between in this tell-too-much biography. Published in 1948, Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was a major force in drawing international attention to both literature and apartheid in South Africa. This comprehensive account covers his boyhood; his university years; his teaching career; his long tenure as principal of a reformatory; his emergence as a novelist and persecuted political figure; and his second marriage and later life. Alexander (English/Univ. of New South Wales) knew Paton and had the cooperation of his widow and two sons. His exclusive access to intimate diaries and correspondence allows him to fill out and correct Paton's autobiographies and various memoirs of him by friends and family. He counters Paton's published assertions that he was a lenient teacher by presenting the future novelist as a despised schoolmaster whose students went so far as to cheer wildly when he was nearly blinded by a chemistry demonstration gone awry. Alexander also covers Paton's extramarital affairs, of which he had at least two, and his first, sexually unfulfilling marriage to a widow who wore the wedding band from her first marriage. Since Paton did not write Cry, the Beloved Country until he was in his 40s, much of the story centers on the novelist's frustrated political ambitions. After becoming a celebrated author, much of his political work was organizational and not really the stuff of exciting storytelling. Alexander tries to show Paton as a man who cared most about serving others, but the dominant narrative thread portrays a self-assuming, sometimes calculating man. Paton achieved the rare feat of writing a novel that perceptively changed the way people looked at part of the world. His own story, however, turns out to be mundane. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-811237-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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