Word: burma
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Andrew Marshall is the author of The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire (Counterpoint...
...individual taking most of the heat is Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. After vowing to get tough with the Burmese and drugs, lately he's lately been preaching a more tolerant line. When Burma protested over Thai army exercises near the border last month, Thaksin's government halted them, and told soldiers to counter incursions by firing blanks. Tensions between the Thai government and its military are so palpable that, according to local press reports, Thaksin endured a chewing-out last week by Chief Privy Councillor Prem Tinsulanonda. Thaksin's intentions have been called into question because his company, Shin...
When Pascal Khoo Thwe was a baby, his grandmother spat three times on his head while muttering tribal incantations to protect him "from evil people and all misfortune." With all respect to the Padaung people of remotest Burma, the spit-and-spell routine didn't do much good. Poverty, dictatorship, sickness, war: Khoo Thwe had to overcome all manner of evils before finally escaping Burma to study at the University of Cambridge?the first Padaung tribesman to do so. Khoo Thwe tells the story of this escape in From the Land of Green Ghosts (Harper Collins; 304 pages), a memoir...
Khoo Thwe's education is abruptly terminated in 1987, when Burma's superstition-obsessed dictator, General Ne Win, orders the nation's bank-notes to be replaced with new denominations divisible by nine, his lucky number. The savings of millions of Burmese (Khoo Thwe's included) are wiped out overnight. To make ends meet, the author abandons his studies to wait tables at a grotty Chinese restaurant, the improbable setting for a chance encounter with a Cambridge literature don, Dr. John Casey, who will later change his life...
...regime starts liquidating all remaining dissenters?his beloved Moe among them?what began as a lyrical coming-of-age tale becomes a dark and gripping story of survival. Pursued by government soldiers, Khoo Thwe and fellow students flee into the jungle to join ethnic insurgents on the Thai-Burma border, enduring both disease and terrifying assaults by the Burmese army. Yet, even as enemy mortars explode nearby, Khoo Thwe pores over his treasured copy of The New Oxford Book of English Verse, an anomalous scene he compares to "reading the New Testament in a brothel...