Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic...
The life of a noted Burmese newspaper editor and activist, recounted by his daughter.
Ed Law-Yone, outspoken owner, editor and publisher of Rangoon Nation, the city’s most influential newspaper, left his writings, diaries, notes and letters to his daughter, Wendy (The Road to Wanting, 2011, etc.), hoping that she would use them to tell her family’s story. She felt daunted: “The intricacies of Burmese politics! The byzantine characters and their biblical genealogies! It would take more than a labor of love to disentangle the skeins of Dad’s narrative.” In the 20-plus years since his death in 1980, she published several novels, before the author finally felt ready to investigate her “burdensome legacy.” The result is both an intimate personal memoir and a vivid history of Myanmar, formerly Burma, during decades of roiling upheaval. Ed Law-Yone took over the Nation in 1948, just as Burma won its independence from Great Britain. Sheltered by “the cocoon” of her family, the young Wendy did not see the political chaos around her as a fragile central government was attacked on all sides by groups of insurgents. Political volatility made newsgathering exciting but dangerous; her father, she discovered, kept a loaded gun in his desk. Nevertheless, he enthusiastically embraced his position as a public figure, attending international conferences, embarking on goodwill missions around the world and forging close relationships with men in power. In 1962, however, a military coup overthrew the elected government. Although at first Ed Law-Yone felt protected by his good relationship with the new leader, Gen. Ne Win, soon his role as gadfly and muckraker was quashed—he was arrested and incarcerated for 5 years. After his release, he left the country with his family and joined other Burmese exiles abroad to mount an opposition campaign to the oppressive military government—efforts that ultimately failed.
Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic story of her youth, her family, and a remarkable man’s life and work.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16936-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
