Myanmar

The definitive biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's pro-democracy leader.

Until she was released in November 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi had been under house arrest in Burma for fourteen of the previous twenty years. She was already confined to her home when the party she co-founded and led, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in a general election in 1990. The result was never acknowledged by the military regime in power for many decades. Yet, headline, tragic events have happened in Burma in recent years: the brutally put down uprising of the monks and nuns in 2007, the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and then Aung San Suu Kyi's trial following the entry into her home of an American intruder who swam across a lake to reach her. Since then there have been sham elections held in November 2010, and 'Daw Suu' (as the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is known) was released into an uneasy stand off with the junta.

Praised all over the world for her martyrdom, a matchless emblem of Buddhist fortitude and good humour to her people, there is no public figure in the world today who can compare to her. Yet no book has yet been written that does justice to her extraordinary story: brought up mostly in India, settled in North Oxford with her English scholar husband and two sons, called back to Burma to look after her sick mother, then caught up in a revolutionary uprising for which she became leader, yet trapped inside the country -- never to see her husband again.

The Lady and the Peacock is the first, accessible biography of Aung San Suu Kyi. It will become the definitive work on this extraordinary woman, of whom Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said: "Aung San Suu Kyi is a remarkable and courageous human being. Listen to her voice and be inspired..."


From the Trade Paperback edition.

In the past two decades, Burma/Myanmar has become a front-page topic in newspapers across the world. This former British colony has one of the most secretive, corrupt, and repressive regimes on the planet, yet it houses a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is and in and out of house arrest. It has an ancient civilization that is mostly unknown to Westerners, yet it was an important--and legendary--theater in World War II. A picturesque land with mountain jungles and monsoon plains, it is one of the world's largest producers of heroin. It has a restive Buddhist monk population that has captured the attention of the west when it faced off against the regime. And it recently experienced one of the worst natural disasters in modern times, one effect of which was to lay bare the manifold injustices and cruelties of the regime. Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know offers a concise synthesis of this forbidding yet fascinating country. David Steinberg, one of the world's eminent authorities on the region, explains the current situation in detail yet contextualizes it in a wide-ranging survey of Burmese history and culture. Authoritative and balanced, it will be standard work on Burma for the general reading public.

In these unforgettable letters, Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world's most inspiring figures, reaches out beyond Burma's borders to paint a vivid and poignant picture of her native land. She celebrates the courageous army officers, academics, and everyday people who have supported the National League for Democracy, often at great risk to their own lives. She reveals how state oppression has adversely affected everything from the national diet to traditions of hospitality. She also evokes the beauty of the country's seasons and scenery, customs and fetivities, which remain-after everything-so close to her heart.

Loet Velmans was 17 when the Germans invaded his native Holland in 1940.Almost immediately, he and his family decided to escape to London, which they did on board the Dutch Coast Guard cutter, Seaman's Hope.Deciding theyt would be safer in the Far East, the family sailed to the Dutch East Indies-now Indonesia-where Loet joined the Dutch army.In March 1942, the Japanese invaded the archipelago, conquered it in a week, and made prisoners of the local Dutch soldiers.For the next three and a half years Loet and his fellow POW's were sent to slave labor camps to build a railroad through the dense jungle on the Burmese-Thailand border, to invade and conquer India.Some 200,000 POW's and slave laborers died in building this Railroad of Death.Loet, though suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable maltreatment, never gave up hope...and survived.Fifty-seven years later he returned to revisit the place where he should have died and where he had buried his closest friend.From that emotional visit came this stunning memoir.

During the late 1930s an armament race developed between bombers and the fighters that were bent on stopping them. The development of multi-engined, multi-gun, all-metal bombers forced a corresponding increase in fighter armament which, in turn, led to further attempts to improve bomber armament to ensure its ability to survive in the face of hostile fighters. The US Army Air Corps (USAAC) requested that powered gun turrets be fitted to its two principal long-range bombers, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator. In reviewing reports of air combat from Spain, China and the early stages of the war in Europe, the USAAC assumed that the greatest danger to the bomber would be attacks from the rear quarter, and thus took steps to ensure that both the B-17 and the B-24 had tail turrets. A powered turret above and behind the cockpit could deal, it was felt, with attacks from the frontal quarter so that the nose armament for the B-17 and the B-24 consisted of several hand-held 0.50-cal machine guns, but not a powered turret. German and Japanese fighter pilots would soon discover and exploit this weakness. The JAAF's response to the increase in bomber armament was to develop a so-called heavy fighter in parallel to the development of the Army's main fighter, the Ki-43 Hayabusa (known as the 'Oscar'), which sacrificed armament for superior manoeuvrability. Yet the inability of the Japanese aircraft industry to produce these heavier fighters (the Kawasaki Ki-60 and Nakajima Ki-44) in sufficient quantities meant that the JAAF had no alternative but to rely on the Ki-43 to intercept American heavy bombers. Under the ideal conditions that existed in the Burma and China theatres for much of 1943, the absence of escort fighters allowed the Ki-43 pilots to press home their attacks to devastating effect.

During World War II, in the skies over Rangoon, Burma, a handful of American pilots met and bloodied the "Imperial Wild Eagles" of Japan and in turn won immortality as the Flying Tigers. One of America's most famous combat forces, the Tigers were recruited to defend beleaguered China for $600 a month and a bounty of $500 for each Japanese plane they shot down—fantastic money in an era when a Manhattan hotel room cost three dollars a night.

To bring his prize-winning history of the American Volunteer Group up to date, Daniel Ford has completely rewritten his 1991 text, drawing on the most recent U.S., British, and Japanese scholarship. New material from AVG veterans—including Erik Shilling and Tex Hill—help fill out the story, along with newfound recollections from Japanese and New Zealand airmen. Ford also takes up the rumors that Royal Air Force pilots "sold" combat victories to the Flying Tigers in order to share in the bounties paid by the Chinese government.

"Admirable," wrote Chennault biographer Martha Byrd of Ford's original text. "A readable book based on sound sources. Expect some surprises." Even more could that be said of this new and more complete edition.

Winner of the 2002 Kiriyama Prize in Nonfiction

In 1988 Dr John Casey, a Cambridge don visiting Burma, was told of a waiter in Mandalay with a passion for the works of James Joyce. Intrigued by this unlikely story, he visited the restaurant, where he met Pascal Khoo Thwe. The encounter was to change both their lives.

Pascal grew up as a member of the tiny, remote Kayan Padaung tribe, famous for their 'giraffenecked' women. The Padaung practiced a combination of ancient animist and Buddhist customs mixed with the Catholicism introduced by Italian missionaries. Theirs was a dream culture, a world in which ancestors were worshipped and ghosts were a constant presence. Pascal was the first member of his community ever to study English at university. But in Burma, English books were rare, and independent thought was discouraged. Photocopies of the few approved texts would be passed from student to student, while tuition consisted of lecturers reciting essays that the students learned by rote.

Within a few months of his chance meeting with Dr Casey, Pascal's world lay in ruins. Successive economic crises brought about by Burma's military dictatorship meant he had to give up his studies. The regime's repression grew more brutal, and Pascal's student-lover, who had become involved in the movement for democracy, was arrested, raped and finally murdered by the armed forces. Pascal fled to the jungle, becoming a guerrilla fighter in the life-or-death struggle against the government and seeing many of his friends and comrades die in battle. At a moment of desperation, he remembered the Englishman he had met in Mandalay and wrote him a letter, with little expectation of ever receiving a reply.

Miraculously, the letter reached its destination on the other side of the world. Not only that, it would lead to Pascal's being rescued from the jungle and enrolling to study English at Cambridge University, the first Burmese tribesman ever to do so.

From the Land of Green Ghosts is the autobiographical tale of a remarkable triumph of hope over despair, and of an encounter between two very different worlds. Hauntingly and poetically written, it unforgettably evokes the realities of life in modern-day Burma and one young man's long journey to freedom despite almost unimaginable odds.