Boldly examines Burma’s tumultuous climate and nuanced cultural ethos with colorful prose and gritty self-reflection.
An American journalist explores Burma in the mid-1990s, witnessing its tyrannical regime, defiant resistance groups and distinct customs.
Burma—or Myanmar, as renamed in 1989 by a militaristic government—has been steeped in political turmoil for decades. Known more for its political oppression and resolute opposition leaders than its rich heritage and lush geography, Burma’s strife has been well-documented through reportage and personal journals, including political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi’s Letters from Burma (1998) and Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts (2003). Orange Broadband Award winner Connelly (The Lizard Cage, 2007, etc.) bluntly chronicles her experience from the front lines in varying contexts: conducting investigative research in teeming Bangkok, watching a brutal street protest with Buddhist monks in Rangoon, seeing a child with malaria perish as his mother watched, working at resistance camps in the Burmese jungle and navigating a budding romance with one of the opposition's key leaders, Maung. Ever-cognizant of her Western perspective, the author approached each new person and situation with a reverential but dogged thirst for insight. As her knowledge of Burmese sensibilities broadened, so did the breadth of her love for Maung. The author wrestled mightily with the growing realization that commitment to him would mean a lifelong devotion to a struggle that supersedes their lives. Throughout the narrative, the author works hard to summon the patience and compassion that is native to Maung, examining her motivations and frustrations with rigor and humility. Putting both her safety and heart on the line, Connelly renders deft passages on sexual longing and satiation that help anchor the book’s harsh sociopolitical themes.
Boldly examines Burma’s tumultuous climate and nuanced cultural ethos with colorful prose and gritty self-reflection.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52800-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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