Myanmar Books

Finding George Orwell in Burma

Emma Larkin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Orwell the Prophet: biographical footnotes 4 out of 5 stars.
18 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I learned some new things about Orwell. Most importantly: did you know that O. wrote 3 books about Burma, not just 1 as I had thought, naively?
After 'Burmese Days', there was also 'Animal Farm' (how the pigs with the dogs overthrew the farmers to take power) and then '1984' (how the powers control the minds and the records). These are predictions on Burma! Who would doubt it?
Second: when O was on his death bed, dying from TB at a much too young age, he was working on another novel or story about Burma. That was really new to me.
This book by an American journalist written under a pseudonym works on 3 levels, like a layer cake.
There is the Orwell biography; and frankly speaking, that is a disappointing part, because when the author followed O's traces in Burma, she didn't really find much. That is mainly because she was travelling as a tourist and couldn't do open research. Not her fault. What she injects is from other sources, like visits to London libraries and the Orwell archive. The visits to O's Burma places serve more for background colour than for new insights.
Second layer: this is a travel book about the places where O lived in Burma. We get to look at Mandalay, the Delta, Rangoon, Moulmein, and Katha.The book delivers the travel account without much passion. Let's put it this way: Larkin as a travel writer isn't exactly sparkling. She may never make it to the top ten of the genre.
Third layer: maybe the most important part or level of the book is the description of the totalitarian routine of life in Burma. While even this lacks spark, it is certainly an important contribution to the international knowledge of a tough subject to be informed about. The descriptions of daily life are continuously set against a background of 1984 scenes.
In short: a book worth reading that somehow remains short of expectations.

Editorial Review:

In one of the most intrepid travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma, using as a compass the life and work of George Orwell, whom many of Burma’s underground teahouse intellectuals call simply "the Prophet." In stirring prose, she provides a powerful reckoning with one of the world’s least free countries. Finding George Orwell in Burma is a brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world’s grimmest and most shuttered police states, where the term "Orwellian" aptly describes the life endured by the country’s people.

Myanmar (Burma) (Country Guide)

Robert Reid, Michael Grosberg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Best Guide for Visiting Burma/Myanmar 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

There is no other guide which comes close to being as useful for visiting Burma, either as a first-time tourist or an veteran traveller. Its overall descriptions, information on transport, reviews of hotels etc are all generally reliable and up-to-date. The accounts of restarants in Rangoon however is probably somewhat dated, as the restaurant scene in Rangoon changes quickly and there are many new restaurants today (more than a year and half since publication) which are not mentioned.

I would recommend reading The River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U for an excellent and entertaining history of the country, either before going or during your trip. The LP Myanmar and The River of Lost Footsteps are the only two books you'll need.

Editorial Review:

Explore the vast, ancient ruins of Bagan, voyage up myriad waterways by riverboat, relax at a remote teahouse or sample fresh seafood beside white-sand beaches. Let this considered and responsible guide show you the adventure of a lifetime, while at the same time showing you how your travel experience best benefits the local people.

SHOULD YOU GO? Weigh up the pros and cons of going to Myanmar by reading this special chapter.

BE INSPIRED - new highlights, itineraries and planning sections to help you plot your path.

BENEFIT THE LOCALS by choosing private, locally owned hotels and eateries.

MAKE YOUR OWN WAY with detailed maps, including a full-color country map.

CONNECT WITH CULTURE - detailed History and Culture chapters provide insight into Myanmar's rich and complex heritage.

Letters from Burma

Aung San Suu Kyi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Much more than just a book ! 5 out of 5 stars.
41 of 43 people found this review helpful.

This is not just a book. Along with Aung San Suu Kyi's two other major books ("Freedom from Fear" and "Voice of Hope"), this book is destined to be at the heart of the struggle - and eventually the victory - for democracy in Burma. Among the three, this is the one I found most wonderful. Vivid, direct, it makes the reader feel as if she/he is listening to Suu Kyi, with her wonderful Asian voice and Oxford accent. Suu Kyi talks about Burma, about her people, about herself. She tells of the tragedies of her people, in the most natural and serene way, as if she were telling of everyday life - because indeed, this is the Burmese everyday life. She does not inflate things, she does not push for her views, yet she reaches the reader's heart immediately - at least she did with me ! She simply expresses views and feelings along with plenty of thrilling facts and anecdotes. I can't imagine of any reader who won't love this book and won't feel inspired by this account from Burma's heroine. After reading this and the other books, I felt so close to Burma's struggle that I absoliutely had to go there and meet Suu in person. So I did, I took off for Burma and managed to meet her. I had met many world personalities before, but this was truly a unique event in my life. The pages of the book kept coming back to my mind, as I could finally see the source of all that strength and hope, the incarnation of Burma's struggle. In the end I was deported from Burma for having made contact with her. Now these books are my inspiration to keep fighting on for democracy in Burma in all ways I can.

Editorial Review:

Human-rights activist and leader of Burma's National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to six years' house arrest in Rangoon in 1989 by the ruling military junta SLORC. She paints a vivid, poignant yet optimistic picture of her native land in this collection of writings from her imprisonment. Aung San Suu Kyi won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight to Save Tigers in a Land of Guns, Gold, and Greed

Alan Rabinowitz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Dubbed the Indiana Jones of wildlife science by The New York Times, Alan Rabinowitz has devoted—and risked—his life to protect nature’s great endangered mammals. He has journeyed to the remote corners of the earth in search of wild things, weathering treacherous terrain, plane crashes, and hostile governments. Life in the Valley of Death recounts his most ambitious and dangerous adventure yet: the creation of the world’s largest tiger preserve.

The tale is set in the lush Hukaung Valley of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. An escape route for refugees fleeing the Japanese army during World War II, this rugged stretch of land claimed the lives of thousands of children, women, and soldiers. Today it is home to one of the largest tiger populations outside of India—a population threatened by rampant poaching and the recent encroachment of gold prospectors.

To save the remaining tigers, Rabinowitz must navigate not only an unforgiving landscape, but the tangled web of politics in Myanmar. Faced with a military dictatorship, an insurgent army, tribes once infamous for taking the heads of their enemies, and villagers living on less than one U.S. dollar per day, the scientist and adventurer most comfortable with animals is thrust into a diplomatic minefield. As he works to balance the interests of disparate factions and endangered wildlife, his own life is threatened by an incurable disease.

The resulting story is one of destruction and loss, but also renewal. In forests reviled as the valley of death, Rabinowitz finds new life for himself, for communities haunted by poverty and violence, and for the tigers he vowed to protect.

Down the Rat Hole: Adventures Underground on Burma's Frontiers

Edith Mirante

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Adventure with Benefits 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Edith Mirante's "Down The Rat Hole" is the best kind of adventure story: as we voyage with this black belt, collage making, irony sensing delightfully brave woman, we make clean get aways, relish successful disquise, mingle with murderers and develop tribal allies who, sadly, are later murdered. Socializing with war lords, drug lords and human rights activists and guerrillas and other agitators for peace and justice in South East Asia, Mirante picks a remarkable path, through mossy rainforest as well as waterfalls of trash. Mirante displays what could be viewed as an amazing experiment and illustration of an American ideal: this writer/researcher feels every pinprick of the Burmese heroin addicts, every hole cut into the skin of cultural possibilities, but she isn't afraid. Acting always as diplomat, yet everything about her is unofficial. This fearless approach to travel and intercultural communications takes her through a cyclone, where afterwards, "Tun and I wandered around in the mud, talking to people, taking some pictures, and the storm survivors with their gracious innate hospitality gave us coconut milk, or tea. If they had nothing else, they gave us water, germ-laden disaster water, which we drank and it did not hurt us."

Mirante guards her sense of humor as the valuable weapon that it is, injecting perspective into the difficult relations between tribes which despite their own best interests (and Mirante's soldierly yearning), can't seem to get it together to build a unified front of opposition against the brutal Tatmadaw dictatorship of Burma/Myanmar.

As a mother of two teenage girls, I'm giving this to my daughters (along with Julia Butterfly Hill's books). Clearly, wimps just don't have as much fun as brave people, and so Mirante is no wimp. This particular little volume is noteworthy also for it's backpack-able size. She's included great color photographs, and typical of her style, there is not even one tiny little image that includes her.

The Kachin's can't seem to get over the idea that this amazing Rambo lady of marriageable age isn't quite married at the time of the story. Here, she does describe herself, and in so doing describes so much of this culture, as she's being dressed up for a ceremony with the Jinghpaw.

"Lu Ra borrowed the outfit for me to wear. The Jinghpaw women's garments were so elaborate that they had become heirlooms, brought out only for special occasions like weddings and dance performances. I put on the knee-length woven red sarong and matching leggings, and the black velvet jacket trimmed with silver disks the size of silver dollars. Then I was trimmed like a Christmas tree by Lu Ra, Ja Seng Hkawn and Mai Mai, one of the girls from the War Office. They pinned my hair up and tied an embroidered headdress over it. Necklaces of silver fringes and silver circlets, plus pearls and coral, wound around my throat. Hoops of rattan rested on my hips and a red sash bound my waist. Somebody's pink lipstick, a swoop of eyeliner, and I was worthy of photo-ops. I posed with the Kachin Women's Association members, and the KIO Central Committee. For my `Kachin wedding photograph,' they produced the only bachelor around who was older than me, a stout genial officer well into his sixties. A least he was inches taller than me, unlike most Kachin men who leveled out below my imposing 5'3".

By getting to know Burma, Mirante finds out a lot about all of us: that, regarding `anger, brutality, addiction...everybody has something of that sort," yet women can be powerful. A fantastically brave voyage into a shaky war to defend human rights, with the added drama of being entirely true.

Editorial Review:

This is a new memoir of the author's journeys among the brave indigenous peoples of some of Asia's most remote and violent regions.

Golden Earth: Travels in Burma

Norman Lewis

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Editorial Review:

"a simple blueprint for Utopia" - the best travel book on Burma since World War II - despite travelling at a time of massive internal insecurity, Norman Lewis still found the eternal Burma, where pagodas are the only punctuation on the horizon and strangers are treated with an overwhelming friendliness - an overnight best-seller when first published - revisits the tragic Burma road, treked by so many refugees fleeing Burma before the Japanese advance in 1942

Land of a Thousand Eyes: The Subtle Pleasures of Everyday Life in Myanmar

Peter Olszewski

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Land of a Thousand Eyes 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 16 people found this review helpful.

This is a very intimate look into the present culture of Myanmar. The author, a journalist, accesses the ways of the Burmese as well as any forigner is able. It is not a traveloge so much as a narrative on the ways of the people.Perhpas I would have enjoyed more information on the politcs or land but there is much to gain in understanding the culture. Also throws in some opportunites to re-examine aspects of democracy. An enjoyable read.

Editorial Review:

A vivid, insider’s account of one of the most inaccessible and mysterious countries in Asia, this book looks beyond topographical features to discover the psyche of the people of Myanmar. Appointed to train local journalists for 18 months at the English-language weekly The Myanmar Times, and despite a measure of danger in accepting the assignment, Peter Olszewski throws himself into the daily life and culture of Yangon—even finding himself in a real-life, fairy-tale romance. Myanmar has recently been the focus of humanitarian and political outrage in developed countries, and this book gives a surprising, new perspective on the question of democratization.

Culture Shock! Myanmar: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (Culture Shock! Guides)

Saw Myat Yin

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Among Insurgents: Walking Through Burma

Shelby Tucker

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Comments from the US Distributor 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

A BOOK OF THE YEAR! (The Sunday Telegraph, UK)

"For near-lunatic courage and a unique mine of information, [this book] by Shelby Tucker might belong to another century. At the age of 53, Tucker, a maverick American lawyer, decided to cross North Burma, entering illegally from China and departing illegally into India. He was captured by Burmese Communist guerrillas, passed on to Christian Kachin rebels (with whom he was soon consorting), was arrested by the Indian army, and six months later emerged to write this astonishing book: a surreal mixture of "Boy's Own" derring-do and expert knowledge of an almost unknown region."

--Colin Thubron, for The Sunday Telegraph (UK), in "Books of the Year" Column

Editorial Review:

At the age of 53, Shelby Tucker set out to cross Burma on foot from China to India when land access to Burma was forbidden. Tucker had a rucksack, a diary and some inaccurate maps. He recruited a 6ft 4" Swede, Mats, whom he had met on the train to Beijing. Near the beginning of their walk through the jungle they encountered a group of naked boys bathing - they realized too late that the boys' Chinese Army uniforms were on the banks. With typical sangfroid, Tucker leapt in to join them, shouting incomprehensible English greetings. Before long they were in the hands of the Kachin Independence Army and managed to survive many near misses with the Burmese Army. Despite pain and constant danger, Tucker recorded each day the vivid beauty of the country, and the courtesy and hospitality of the Kachins (the most important of Burma's hidden colonies, about whom very little has been written). "Among Insurgents" was Colin Thubron's Book of the Year.

The Treasures and Pleasures of Thailand and Myanmar: Best of the Best in Travel and Shopping (Impact Guides)

Ron Krannich

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Welcome to two of the world's most fascinating and seductive places. Going far beyond the standard eat-sleep-sightsee-history-culture-budget approach to travel, The Treasures and Pleasures of Thailand and Myanmar introduces you to the richly rewarding world of travel-shopping.

Designed for discerning travelers who enjoy exploring roads less traveled, meeting local talent, and discovering the best a country has to offer visitors, this guidebook literally takes you on an adventure of a lifetime. Indeed, it may well change your life as it has hundreds of others who have used the authoritative books in the Impact Guides series.

Charming, colorful, and chaotic, exotic Thailand and Myanmar are filled with unique treasures and pleasures that will touch your life forever. Visit these neighboring Southeast Asian countries and you'll discover intriguing lands of exceptionally friendly and gracious people, talented craftspeople, bustling cities and towns, picturesque countrysides, idyllic beaches and villages, colorful festivals, exciting cuisine, gorgeous hotels and resorts, fun activities, and fascinating cultures.

Thailand and Myanmar also are shopping paradises where you can literally "shop til you drop" and still want to come back for more.

Representing the first "how-to" travel-shopping guide for these destinations, the book unravels in enormous detail the many hidden treasures and pleasures of Thailand and Myanmar.

Focusing on the "best of the best" of Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and nine other locations in Thailand, as well as Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan, and Inle Lake in Myanmar, two seasoned travel-shoppers explore key markets, shops, factories, department stores, shopping centers, studios, and homes for acquiring quality arts, antiques, furniture, jewelry, textiles, clothes, handicrafts, and home decorative items.

Combining great shopping with fine restaurants, hotels, sightseeing, and entertainment, this insightful book represents the ultimate lifestyle adventure. Like a personal local guide, the book introduces you to quality products, outstanding buys, and talented, interesting, and friendly people.

Special highlights of this guidebook include:
- 24 key shopping rules (14 for Thailand, 10 for Myanmar)
- 12 rules for effectively bargaining
- Tips for buying gems, jewelry, and tailoring services
- Savvy shipping methods and shippers
- Scams, rip-offs, and commission games
- Popular cosmetic surgery services in Bangkok
- Approaching "politically incorrect" Myanmar
- Fortune tellers in Yangon to discover your "good luck"
- Shopping for illegal goods and using the black market

Jam-packed with seasoned strategies, tips, advice, and detailed contact information complete with the names, addresses, phone/fax numbers, e-mails, websites, maps, and photos of the best places to shop, dine, and relax this rich and reliable resource will become your special passport to places that will forever enrich your life!

Foreword by William Warren, a leading authority on Thai history and culture. 11 maps, 39 color photos, and 185 black and white photos.