Letters from Burma - an unforgettable collection from the Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi In these astonishing letters, Aung San Suu Kyi reaches out beyond Burma's borders to paint for her readers a vivid and poignant picture of her native land. Here she celebrates the courageous army officers, academics, actors and everyday people who have supported the National League for Democracy, often at great risk to their own lives. She reveals the impact of political decisions on the people of Burma, from the terrible cost to the children of imprisoned dissidents - allowed to see their parents for only fifteen minutes every fortnight - to the effect of inflation on the national diet and of state repression on traditions of hospitality. She also evokes the beauty of the country's seasons and scenery, customs and festivities that remain so close to her heart. Through these remarkable letters, the reader catches a glimpse of exactly what is at stake as Suu Kyi fights on for freedom in Burma, and of the love for her homeland that sustains her non-violent battle. Includes an introduction from Fergal Keane 'Aung San Suu Kyi has become a global symbol of peaceful resistance, courage and apparently endless endurance' Guardian 'A real hero in an age of phony phone-in celebrity, which hands out that title freely to the most spoiled and underqualified' Bono, Time Aung San Suu Kyi is the leader of Burma's National League for Democracy. She was placed under house arrest in Rangoon in 1989, where she remained for almost 15 of the 21 years until her release in 2010.

No Marketing Blurb

This book explains how Burma's booming drug production, insurgency, and counter-insurgency interrelate--and why the country has been unable to shake off thirty years of military rule and build a modern, democratic society.

A well-documented and extremely engaging account of the Burmese Communist Party that details the development of the Party and the events and forces that led to the 1989 Mutiny and subsequent fall of the CPB. This study explores the ethnic tensions that influenced the attitudes of the rank-and-file members, the support and influence of the Chinese Communist Party, the Party's involvement in the drug trade, and the complex, antagonistic relationship between the CPB and the military regime of Burma.

Burma's pro-democracy movement emerged in 1988 when massive demonstrations swept across the country. This book gives an account of the movement, its emergence and growth, and Aung San Suu Kyi's prominent leadership role since its inception. Woven into this history is an outline of how Aung San Suu Kyi herself has become a highly respected pro-democracy icon internationally while being revered nationally as the "female Bodhisattva" who will deliver the Burmese people from the evil of the military regime. Lintner considers her strengths as well as her weaknesses, and traces her life not only in Burma, but also in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, Bhutan, and Japan. She was greatly inspired by her father, Aung San, Burma's independence hero who was assassinated when she was an infant, and also by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Lintner analyzes the staying power of Burma's military regime and points out the obstacles to achieving what Aung San Suu Kyi is striving for: a free and democratic Burma.

On 1 February 2021, under the command of General Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar's military initiated a coup, apparently drawing to a close Myanmar's ten-year experiment with democratic rule. State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were arrested along with other elected officials.Mass protests against the coup ensued, led by Gen Z youths who shaped a values-based democratic revolutionary movement that in character is anti-military regime, anti-China influence, anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, and anti-sexist. Women and minorities have been at the forefront, organizing protests, shaping campaigns, and engaging sectors of society that in the past had been relegated to the periphery of national politics. The protests were broadcast to local and international audiences through social media.Simultaneously, a civil disobedience movement (CDM) arose in the shape of a massive strike mostly led by civil servants. CDM is non-violent and acephalous, a broad "society against the state" movement too large and diffuse for the military to target and dismantle. Semi-autonomous administrative zones in the name of Pa-a-pha or civil administrative organizations emerged out of spontaneously organized neighbourhood watches at the ward and village levels, effectively forming a parallel governance system to the military state.Anti-coup protests moved decisively away from calls for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected political leaders, or for a return to democracy under the 2008 constitution. Instead, it evolved towards greater inclusivity of all Myanmar peoples in pursuit of a more robust federal democracy. A group of fifteen elected parliamentarians, representing the ideals of Gen Z youths, formed a shadow government called the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) on 5 February 2021. On 1 March the CRPH declared the military governing body, the State Administrative Council (SAC), a "terrorist group", and on 31 March, it declared the military's 2008 constitution abolished.Gen Z's protests have accomplished what has been elusive to prior generations of anti-regime movements and uprisings. They have severed the Bamar Buddhist nationalist narrative that has gripped state society relations and the military's ideological control over the political landscape, substituting for it an inclusive democratic ideology.

General Ne Win's state reformation in the name of the "Burmese Way to Socialism" contributed to the expansion of the political role of the Myanmar Armed Forces, the tatmadaw, but the underlying dynamics of this change remain poorly understood. Drawing on propaganda publications, profiles of the country's political elites, and original documents in Burma's military archives, Yoshihiro Nakanishi offers a fresh look at the involvement of the tatmadaw in Burma's ideological discourse and civil-military relations.       The tatmadaw's anti-communist propaganda during the 1950s was a key element in state ideology under the Ne Win regime, and the direct participation of tatmadaw officers in the Burma Socialist Programme Party and government ministries at the national and local level transformed the political party system and civilian bureaucracy. Personal relationships -- between Ne Win and the tatmadaw officer corps, and within the military -- were central to the growing influence of the military, and to the outcome of the political crisis and subsequent military coup d'état in 1988.         Nakanishi's discussion of these processes reveals many heretofore-unknown facts about this "dark age" in the country's political history, and highlights its institutional legacy for the post-1988 military regime and the reformist government that succeeded it. His thought-provoking conclusions are significant for Southeast Asia specialists and for students of politics generally, and his insights will be useful for anyone seeking to engage with Myanmar as it comes to terms with an outside world it once kept at arm's length.

Not Out of Hate--published in Burmese in 1955 and set in 1939-42--was Ma Ma Lay's fifth novel and one that further cemented her status as one of twentieth-century Burma's foremost writers and voices for change. A journalist by trade, Lay applied her straightforward observational style with compassion and purpose to the story of Way Way, a teenage village girl whose quiet life assisting her father in his rice-brokerage business is disrupted by the arrival of U Saw Han, the cosmopolitan Burmese rice trader twenty years her senior. When she first encounters him, Way Way is entranced by his Western furnishings, servants, and mannerisms. The two marry, but before long, it becomes clear that U Saw Han's love is a stifling one that seeks to obliterate her traditional ways. Not Out of Hate was enormously popular in Burma and went through several editions in the 1950s and 1960s. When Ohio University Press published its English translation, in 1991, it became the first significant fictional account of prewar Burma available in English since George Orwell's Burmese Days, and provided a Burmese counterpoint to Orwell's novel. Translated into English here for the first time, the novel is an engaging drama, finely observed work of social realism, and stirring rejection of Western cultural dominance.

Honest and evocative, George Orwell's first novel is an examination of the debasing effect of empire on occupied and occupier. Burmese Days focuses on a handful of Englishmen who meet at the European Club to drink whisky and to alleviate the acute and unspoken loneliness of life in 1920s Burma--where Orwell himself served as an imperial policeman--during the waning days of British imperialism. One of the men, James Flory, a timber merchant, has grown soft, clearly comprehending the futility of England's rule. However, he lacks the fortitude to stand up for his Indian friend, Dr. Veraswami, for admittance into the whites-only club. Without membership and the accompanying prestige that would protect the doctor, the condemning and ill-founded attack by a bitter magistrate might bring an end to everything he has accomplished. Complicating matters, Flory falls unexpectedly in love with a newly arrived English girl, Elizabeth Lackersteen. Can he find the strength to do right not only by his friend, but also by his conscience?

An account of a young girl who leaves Brighton for the Kingdom of Mandalay and Burma where she becomes the favourite of the Burmese Queen. When she falls in love the destiny of that magnificent kingdom is changed forever.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND LOS ANGELES TIMES "A rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland-- a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire."--Los Angeles Times Book Review Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls "a master storyteller." Praise for The Glass Palace "An absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity."--J. M. Coetzee "There is no denying Ghosh's command of culture and history. . . . [He] proves a writer of supreme skill and intelligence."--The Atlantic Monthly "I will never forget the young and old Rajkumar, Dolly, the Princesses, the forests of teak, the wealth that made families and wars. A wonderful novel. An incredible story."--Grace Paley "A novelist of dazzling ingenuity."--San Francisco Chronicle

The Burmese army took political power in Burma in 1962 and has ruled the country ever since. The persistence of this government--even in the face of long-term nonviolent opposition led by activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991--has puzzled scholars. In a book relevant to current debates about democratization, Mary P. Callahan seeks to explain the extraordinary durability of the Burmese military regime. In her view, the origins of army rule are to be found in the relationship between war and state formation.Burma's colonial past had seen a large imbalance between the military and civil sectors. That imbalance was accentuated soon after formal independence by one of the earliest and most persistent covert Cold War conflicts, involving CIA-funded Kuomintang incursions across the Burmese border into the People's Republic of China. Because this raised concerns in Rangoon about the possibility of a showdown with Communist China, the Burmese Army received even more autonomy and funding to protect the integrity of the new nation-state.The military transformed itself during the late 1940s and the 1950s from a group of anticolonial guerrilla bands into the professional force that seized power in 1962. The army edged out all other state and social institutions in the competition for national power. Making Enemies draws upon Callahan's interviews with former military officers and her archival work in Burmese libraries and halls of power. Callahan's unparalleled access allows her to correct existing explanations of Burmese authoritarianism and to supply new information about the coups of 1958 and 1962.

Precariously positioned between China and India, Burma's population has suffered dictatorship, natural disaster, and the dark legacies of colonial rule. But when decades of military dictatorship finally ended and internationally beloved Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from long years of house arrest, hopes soared. World leaders such as Barack Obama ushered in waves of international support. Progress seemed inevitable.As historian, former diplomat, and presidential advisor, Thant Myint-U saw the cracks forming. In this insider's diagnosis of a country at a breaking point, he dissects how a singularly predatory economic system, fast-rising inequality, disintegrating state institutions, the impact of new social media, the rise of China next door, climate change, and deep-seated feelings around race, religion, and national identity all came together to challenge the incipient democracy. Interracial violence soared and a horrific exodus of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fixed international attention. Myint-U explains how and why this happened, and details an unsettling prognosis for the future.Burma is today a fragile stage for nearly all the world's problems. Are democracy and an economy that genuinely serves all its people possible in Burma? In clear and urgent prose, Myint-U explores this question--a concern not just for the Burmese but for the rest of the world--warning of the possible collapse of this nation of 55 million while suggesting a fresh agenda for change.

Burma has often been portrayed as a timeless place, a country of egalitarian Buddhist villages, ruled successively by autocratic kings, British colonialists and, most recently, a military dictatorship. The Making of Modern Burma argues instead that many aspects of Burmese society today, from the borders of the state to the social structure of the countryside to the very notion of a Burmese identity, are largely the creations of the nineteenth century - a period of great change - away from the Ava-based polity of early modern times, and towards the 'British Burma' of the 1900s. The book provides a sophisticated and much-needed account of the period, and as such will be an important resource for policy makers and students as a basis for understanding contemporary politics and the challenges of the modern state. It will also be read by historians interested in the British colonial expansion of the nineteenth century.

The lush photography in this pictorial study of tribes -- many of whom have never been recorded on film -- makes it one of the most evocative cultural portraits ever published.As an anthropological study, the 28 tribes of Burma, most of whom have not even been seen by the majority of Burmese themselves, reflect the wide diversity of this nation's races. Some groups living only a few miles apart have entirely different languages and ways of life. As these tribes are being dispersed and resettled by the present government of Myanmar, this stunning documentary may represent the last time that they can be seen in their native territories.