The Lady and the Peacock

April 16, 2012
Popham (Tokyo: The City at the End of the World) paints a sympathetic and well-rounded portrait of Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi in this timely biography. In 1988, Suu, daughter of Aung San, the man widely regarded as the founder of modern Burma, returned from Britain to her homeland to care for her elderly mother. Over the next six years, Suuâknown to her fellow citizens as "The Lady"âwould rise to the fore of the country's largest popular revolution to democratize, receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and finally find herself consigned to house arrest by a military junta, an imprisonment that would last for 15 of the past 20 years. Drawing on secret trips to Burma, meetings with Suu, letters, diaries, interviews, and published materials, Popham tells of Suu's meteoric rise to "the heart of the Burmese conundrum," her unwavering quest for democracy, and her unwillingness to abandon her supporters and party, the National League for Democracy (whose flag features a fighting peacock). In addition to recounting Suu's remarkable life story, Popham, a foreign correspondent for The Independent, deftly outlines the political climate of the troubled nation, and shows how this revolutionary woman became a global symbol of democracy, resolve, and freedom. While outlining her honesty, perfectionism, and commitment to nonviolence, Popham deals gently with criticisms of her efforts, conceding that her greatest strength was not her political savvy, but her moral compass. Photos.

March 15, 2012
An inspiring biography and a rare glimpse of what Burma could have been, and could still be. Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world's most famous female politicians, is unusual in that she has never held an official position of power. The daughter of Aung San, Burma's national hero, Suu Kyi was a housewife, scholar and low-level functionary of the United Nations before her mother's illness forced her to return to the land of her birth in the late 1980s. Thrust to the head of the nation's protest movement, she helped found the National League for Democracy and led the party to a landslide victory at the polls. However, the results of the election were nullified, and she has spent most of the years since under house arrest. Independent foreign correspondent Popham (Tokyo: The City at the End of the World, 1985) ably chronicles the trials and tribulations of a nation that has been imprisoned and brutalized by an avaricious, paranoid military junta, an entity that has never demonstrated the slightest hint of concern for its victims' welfare. The picture that emerges is of a stoically determined woman of uncommon fortitude who gave up the chance to say goodbye to her dying husband in order to stay in Burma when her country needed her, and who has never considered shying away from the duty she inherited to shepherd her people to self-determination. Against the odds, she has survived assassination attempts. Finally set free in 2011, "she emerged, to the jubilation of thousands of her supporters and the relief of the world, into a new landscape where she had no role." In the aftermath of the first, tentative loosening of the military's death grip over the country, Suu Kyi's next chapter remains to be written. For now, enjoy this compassionate biography of an exemplary leader.

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May 1, 2012

The history of Burma since World War II has been nothing but chaotic, with uprisings, endemic social unrest, economic disasters, rebellions among tribal groups, and iron-fisted military rule. The military junta, moreover, carefully controls access to information for both the domestic and the foreign press, and travel in and out of Burma is very limited. Repression is severe and civil rights for dissidents minimal. Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, the first of Burma's democratic leaders after the war, has for three decades been trying to change all that. Her story is one of heroic and purposeful resistance, strength of character, prudence in her statements, and care about the welfare of her followers and Burma's people. Popham (foreign correspondent, Independent; Tokyo: The City at the End of the World) has written a dense and highly detailed book, as much a history of modern Burma as it is a biography of Suu Kyi. VERDICT Although there is almost too much information to absorb and almost too many disparate political and social "players" to keep track of, readers interested in modern Asian history and current events will find this book well worth reading.--James F. DeRoche, Alexandria, VA

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