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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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