This volume explores the life stories of ordinary Burmese by drawing on the narratives of individual subjects and using an array of interdisciplinary approaches. The constituted stories highlight the protagonists' survival strategies in everyday life that demonstrate their constant courage and frustration in dealing with numerous social injustices and adversities.

This volume explores the life stories of ordinary Burmese by drawing on the narratives of individual subjects and using an array of interdisciplinary approaches. The constituted stories highlight the protagonists' survival strategies in everyday life that demonstrate their constant courage and frustration in dealing with numerous social injustices and adversities.

"Abbeville Press, New York, NY"--Colophon.

Two Burmese boys, one a Karenni refugee and the other the son of an imprisoned Burmese doctor, meet in the jungle and in order to survive they must learn to trust each other.

'Burma's Spring' documents the struggles of ordinary people made extraordinary by circumstance. Rosalind Russell, a British journalist who came to live in Burma with her family, witnessed a time of unprecedented change in a secretive country that had been locked under military dictatorship for half a century. Her memoir carries the reader through a turbulent era of uprising, disaster and political awakening with a vivid retelling of her encounters as an undercover reporter. From the world famous democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to the broken-hearted domestic worker Mu Mu, a Buddhist monk to a punk, a palm reader to a girl band, these are stories of tragedy, resilience and hope - woven together in a vivid portrait of a land for so long hidden from view. AUTHOR: Rosalind Russell is a journalist who worked for more than a decade as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and the Independent in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Her reporting included the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and Burma's Saffron Revolution. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters. REVIEWS: "A vibrant and comprehensive depiction ... an affectionate, colourful book."- Rt. Hon. John Bercow "An extraordinarily beautiful, comprehensive and compelling story ... Rosalind Russell has written an extraordinarily beautiful, comprehensive and compelling story of Burma in a remarkably human way ... essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Burma today." - Benedict Rogers, author of 'Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads' "'Burma's Spring' is like nothing else written about Burma ... compelling, charming and unique. No other book I know of has got under the skin of such a wide variety of Burmese, bringing them to life on the page." - Peter Popham, author of 'The Lady and the Peacock, the Life of Aung San Suu Kyi'

A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2019 A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2020 “An urgent book.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times During a century of colonialism, Burma was plundered for its natural resources and remade as a racial hierarchy. Over decades of dictatorship, it suffered civil war, repression, and deep poverty. Today, Burma faces a mountain of challenges: crony capitalism, exploding inequality, rising ethnonationalism, extreme racial violence, climate change, multibillion dollar criminal networks, and the power of China next door. Thant Myint-U shows how the country’s past shapes its recent and almost unbelievable attempt to create a new democracy in the heart of Asia, and helps to answer the big questions: Can this multicultural country of 55 million succeed? And what does Burma’s story really tell us about the most critical issues of our time?

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story—that of a writer seeking to understand who she is—moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book. Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.