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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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