An illumining look at a country torn between two emerging superpowers.
Former UN diplomat Myint-U (The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma, 2006, etc.) takes readers through his home country in this mixture of travelogue and history. The author begins by discussing the rising powers of China and India, and then turns to the small country caught in the middle, which has served as a buffer between these two countries for centuries. With crisp, clear, authoritative prose, Myint-U chronicles his journeys from Rangoon to Mandalay, explaining the complex culture and history of the Burmese. Aware that most Western readers will not be overly familiar with the history of his country, the author takes great pains to explain the most basic details of Burmese history and geography without being patronizing. From the unfinished Burmese civil war to their wars against the British, Myint-U successfully conveys how Burma’s past has affected what it has become. The author then turns to China and India, journeying to the areas closest to Burma. He provides comprehensive insight into Burma’s precarious situation, as well as an understanding of its possibilities for the future. He leaves readers pondering the implications of a democratic Burma and how that might affect the Sino-Indian rise to power in the region. In a whirlwind tour through Burma’s history, politics, culture and geography, Myint-U makes a successful case for its importance in South Asia’s future.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-29907-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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