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...ever since the brutally suppressed popular uprising of 1988, more and more foreigners have tried to isolate the country still further, through the sanctions called for by Burma's main opposition figure, Aung San Suu Kyi. Meanwhile, the country's 47 million people suffer through what Thant Myint-U calls both "the longest-lasting military dictatorship in the world" and "the longest-running armed conflict in the world," a civil war involving a tangle of groups and now in its seventh decade...
...Thant, such histories are not an abstract or far-off thing. Fully Burmese himself, he is descended from courtiers, and grew up (in Riverdale, New York) in the same house as his maternal grandfather, U Thant, the onetime small-town Burmese headmaster who became the U.N.'s third Secretary-General. The author's first trip to Burma came in 1974 when, just 8 years old, he returned to help bury his grandfather. That visit set off confrontations in the streets between rebellious students calling for a state funeral and the hard-line government eager to downplay the event-eerily prefiguring...
...profession a writer and sometimes his pages are so clotted with detail that they read like a dusted-off doctoral thesis. But as a storehouse of facts about a history too little known, his book is fascinating. In the 17th century, he tells us, the Burmese capital of Mrauk-U was seen as a "second Venice" for its rivers as well as its mix of Japanese samurai, Islamic customs and Portuguese priests. To this day the highlands around the Irrawaddy Valley, crowded with minority groups, are "one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world." And as late...
...village (and the ongoing Karen insurrection), and of his own unlikely passage from guerrilla and waiter to Cambridge student. Even Amy Tan's last novel, Saving Fish From Drowning, is set in Burma, among American tourists who bat back and forth the arguments for and against boycotts. Thant Myint-U does not command the page as these others do, but he gives us both the savory details and the cruelties of colonialism, as well as a rare feel for palace intrigue. In the process, he suggests that isolation is in fact just what the military regime feeds...
...harder to sell college to some students, especially those from low-income families, said Robert Jones, a guidance counselor at Louisville's Central High School. "Every year, we have seniors that are always worried about how they can afford a college education," said Jones, who welcomed the changes at U of L. "It is becoming more and more expensive. ... There are a lot of students who feel they just can't afford it, and they are opting to go to two-year college first...