Pederson visited her subject several times, and she draws a deeply nuanced portrait of the enigmatic, inspiring leader.
The long, hard road to “national reconciliation” wrought by Burmese national heroine Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945).
Dallas journalist Pederson (Writing/Southern Methodist Univ.; The Lost Apostle: Searching for the Truth About Junia, 2006, etc.) evokes the quiet, stubborn dignity of this rather improbable political icon of Myanmar, a multiethnic country of mostly Buddhists. The daughter of visionary war hero and founder Aung San, who had been brokering independence from Britain when he was assassinated by the Burmese military in 1947, Suu Kyi was largely drawn into politics by accident, more out of a sense of duty than personal political engagement. Pederson looks at the factors that led the martyr’s daughter, educated at Oxford University, married to British academic Michael Aris in 1971 and the mother of two sons, to return to her homeland after years away and take up the crusade for democracy. The 20-year military dictatorship of Gen. Ne Win had essentially ruined one of the most prosperous and literate nations in Southeast Asia, relegating it to the status of “basket case” by the spring of 1988, when Suu Kyi returned to care for her ailing mother just as student demonstrations began to erupt in response to economic oppression. Urged to take up the banner of democracy in the name of her father, she began to make her first speeches about the military crackdown, referring to her father’s assassination: “People have been saying I know nothing of Burmese politics. The trouble is, I know too much.” Harassment only fed her determination and popularity, and separation from her husband and sons did not deter her. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, Suu Kyi could not claim it until the end of her house arrest 20 years later, thanks to international pressure by Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, among others.
Pederson visited her subject several times, and she draws a deeply nuanced portrait of the enigmatic, inspiring leader.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-667-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
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