Burmese History Book Reviews

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Sub-title: Nearly a decade ago, Myanmar threw off its military dictatorship. But what has happened since is troubling
Description: "When Thant Myint-U was eight he travelled from the US to Burma with his parents to bury his grandfather U Thant, the first non-European secretary general of the United Nations. But the funeral was not a family affair. A group of students and Buddhist monks seized Thant’s coffin and demanded a state ceremony from the country’s military overlords: the corpse became a rallying point for protests. Burmese troops overran the Rangoon University campus where Thant’s body had been held and killed many protesting students. Riots broke out against the army regime and hundreds were killed or imprisoned in the retaliatory crackdown. Myint-U’s parents were told to leave the country quickly. “I missed my fourth-grade classes,” Myint-U writes in The Hidden History of Burma, and instead “experienced firsthand a dictatorship in action”. Starker encounters followed over the years. After graduating from Harvard in 1988, Myint-U helped a group of Burmese dissidents who were planning a revolution from across the Thai border. As a historian, human rights campaigner and UN policy planner, he advocated for the brutally suppressed Burmese democracy movement through the 1990s and 2000s, while remaining undecided on the usefulness of economic sanctions. In the wake of Cyclone Nargis, he worked to convince the country’s generals to accept international aid and address the country’s abysmal poverty rates. After the dissolution of the junta in 2011, Myint-U was made an adviser in the Burmese president’s office..."
Creator/author:
Source/publisher: "The Guardian" (UK)
2020-01-15
Date of entry/update: 2020-01-16
Grouping: Individual Documents
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Description: "Thant Myint-U, author of the new book 'The Hidden History of Burma', discusses his native Myanmar with Asia Society Executive Vice President Tom Nagorski. (1 hr., 18 min.)..."
Creator/author:
Source/publisher: "Asia Society" (New York)
2019-11-19
Date of entry/update: 2019-11-23
Grouping: Individual Documents
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Description: "Thant Myint-U has titled his reflective and illuminating new book “The Hidden History of Burma,” even though he gently suggests that the country’s past wasn’t so much obscured as it was hiding in plain sight. For decades, especially after a ruthless crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in 1988, Burma had drawn international ire for the brutal rule of its military junta, which for a time went by the grotesque-sounding acronym SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council). Against the depredations of the dictatorship stood the charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi: a tireless civilian advocate for democracy who spoke consistently of hope, enduring years of detention and house arrest with a serene smile and a flower in her hair. Her public image weighed heavily in the international community’s imagination, which was decidedly more familiar with the morality play of “The Lady Versus the Generals” than with the longer history of Burma. That history proved to be stubborn and consequential — its effects only aggravated by how much its convolutions were simplified or ignored. “In the early 2010s,” Thant Myint-U writes, “Burma was the toast of the world.” (The junta had changed the country’s name in English to “Myanmar” in 1989; a prefatory note explains why this was an “ethno-nationalist” move — the equivalent of Germany demanding that English speakers refer to it as “Deutschland.”) The generals seemed to be ceding power, the country seemed to be ending its long isolation, tourism seemed to be on the rise; a number of rebel groups signed cease-fires, and in 2015 the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won enough seats in the country’s first free elections in a generation to form a government..."
Creator/author:
Source/publisher: "The New York Times" (USA)
2019-11-19
Date of entry/update: 2019-11-20
Grouping: Individual Documents
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Description: THANT MYINT-U. "The Making of Modern Burma". Reviewed by MARILYN LONGMUIR... ROBERT H. TAYLOR (ed.). "Burma: Political Economy Under Military Rule". Reviewed by J?RG SCHENDEL
Creator/author: Marilyn Longmuir, JÖRG SCHENDEL
Source/publisher: SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 1, No., 1, Spring 2003
2003-03-20
Date of entry/update: 2011-01-07
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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Description: "In the aftermath of the 1988 uprising in Burma, a new generation of military autocrats decided a makeover was in order. The rebranding of the Union of Burma into the Union of Myanmar in 1989 was as much to confuse memory in the wake of the mass killings of protestors by the army as it was to stamp a new look on the repression that had occurred since 1962. One of the military government?s leading chroniclers is the academic Robert Taylor, whose landmark book "The State in Burma" was released in 1987 and gets its own rebranding in the updated "The State in Myanmar" by Robert H. Taylor. National University of Singapore Press, 2009. P 540... Taylor has been widely maligned for his conclusions in the first book, whose final paragraph declares "for better or worse the state is accepted as inevitable" and that despite dissatisfaction amongst many Burmese with the ruling Burma Socialist Program Party, its disastrous economic management and reclusive foreign affairs, the system itself was in more or less sound shape. This was repudiated not just by the popular uprising that rocked Burma several months after the book?s release, but by the architects of the socialist system itself. They included Burma?s strong man Ne Win, who admitted not just to the system?s unpopularity but also to its unsustainability under modern conditions. The socialist system was swept away and multi-party democratic elections promised. The disagreements created by "The State in Burma"shouldn?t necessarily detract from its sweep of Burmese political history, at the time unprecedented since the work of the colonial scholar J S Furnivall..."
Source/publisher: "The Irrawaddy" Vol. 17, No. 5
2009-08-00
Date of entry/update: 2009-12-26
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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