Burmese Looking Glass
A Human Rights Adventure and a Jungle Revolution
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“Burmese Looking Glass is a contribution to the literature of human rights and to the literature of high adventure.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
As captivating as the most thrilling novel, Burmese Looking Glass tells the story of tribal peoples who, though ravaged by malaria and weakened by poverty, are unforgettably brave. Author Edith T. Mirante first crossed illegally from Thailand into Burma in 1983. There she discovered the hidden conflict that has despoiled the country since the close of World War II. She met commandos and refugees and learned firsthand the machinations of Golden Triangle narcotics trafficking. Mirante was the first Westerner to march with the rebels from the fabled Three Pagodas Pass to the Andaman Sea. She taught karate to women soldiers, was ritually tattooed by a Shan sayah “spirit doctor,” lobbied successfully against US government donation of Agent Orange chemicals to the dictatorship, and was deported from Thailand in 1988.
“A dramatic but caring book in which Mirante’s blithe tone doesn’t disguise her earnest concern for the worsening conditions faced by the Burmese hill tribes.” —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Jersey-born Mirante moved to Thailand in 1982 to paint, but found herself visiting the Thai/Burmese border, where she became caught up in the rebel struggle against Burma's repressive government, the same government that has kept Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest since 1989. Mirante's chronicle of his six years as an adventurer and ``human rights pirate''--ending before the recent upsurge of protest in Burma--contains lively descriptions and vivid anecdotes, but it never gains coherence; its endless references to names and reconstructed quotes suggest the meandering tone of an expanded journal. With her tattoo, taste for rock music and romance with a photojournalist from New Zealand, Mirante is an interesting character. She is also a brave one, surviving arrest twice in Thailand, taking temporary jobs back home to finance a human rights survey and launching a campaign against the Burmese government's use of a U.S.-supplied herbicide as chemical warfare. But her book would aid the ``refined and noble people'' of Burma more if she had shaped her adventures into a tighter narrative.
