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Author: Thierry Falise
Publisher: McNidder and Grace
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780857160416
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCovering 25 years, 'Burmese Shadows' highlights the reality of living and fighting for survival for ordinary people in Burma. These harsh realities, however, are juxtaposed against the vibrant and rich traditions and cultures which combine to make the enigmatic country.
Author: Ellen Wiles
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-09-15
Total Pages: 379
ISBN-13: 0231539290
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book tells an ethnographic story of a secret literary culture that has recently emerged from its cocoon. Until 2012, Myanmar (also known as Burma) was ruled for fifty years by one of the most paranoid and repressive censorship regimes in history. The military junta enforced strict reading and writing restrictions in line with their ideology, feared writers' potential to trigger change, and did their best to keep Western books and influences out of the country. As part of an unexpected move toward democracy, the government has recently lifted the worst restrictions on reading and writing, giving rise to a new era in the country's literature and literary culture. While living in Myanmar in 2013, Ellen Wiles sought out the best of its contemporary writers and writing to begin uncovering the country's remarkable literary life and history. This book contains the experiences and recent output of nine Myanmar writers spanning three generations, featuring interviews and English-language translations of their work, along with political, legal, and artistic explorations. It includes men and women, fiction and poetry, reflecting the ripples of political and cultural change as they have moved across different groups and genres. A rare portrait of a people and place in transition, Wiles's work contributes both to the study of literature and culture in Myanmar and to the general study of art under censorship.
Author: Andrew Marshall
Publisher:
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9786167339184
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn unforgettable adventure story of two journeys, one hundred years apart, into the untravelled heart of Burma. Part travelogue, part history, part reportage, The Trouser People is an enormously appealing and vivid account of Sir George Scott, the unsung Victorian adventurer who hacked, bullied and charmed his way through uncharted jungle to help establish British colonial rule in Burma. Born in Scotland in 1851, Scott was a die-hard imperialist with a fondness for gargantuan pith helmets and a bluffness of expression that bordered on the Pythonesque. But, as Andrew Marshall discovered, he was also a writer and photographer of rare sensibility. He spent a lifetime documenting the tribes who lived in Burma's vast wilderness and is the author of The Burman, published in 1882 and still in print today. He also not only mapped the lawless frontiers of this "geographical nowhere" - the British Empire's eastern-most land border with China - but he widened the imperial goalposts in another way: he introduced football to Burma, where today it is a national obsession. Inspired by Scott's unpublished diaries, Andrew Marshall retraces the explorer's intrepid footsteps from the mouldering colonial splendour of Rangoon to the fabled royal capital of Mandalay. In the process he discovers modern Burma, a hermit nation misruled by a brutal military dictatorship, its soldiers, like the British colonialists before them, nicknamed "the trouser people" by the country's sarong-wearing civilians. Wonderfully observed, mordantly funny, and skilfully recounted, The Trouser People is an offbeat and thrilling journey through Britain's lost heritage and a powerful expose of Burma's modern tragedy. AUTHOR: Andrew Marshall is a British journalist living in Bangkok, Thailand, who specialises in Asian topics. He is co-author of The Cult at the End of the World, a study of the Aum Shinrikyo and is a contributor to many daily and weekly publications. SELLING POINTS: One of the most significant and revealing books on Burma published Fully revised and updated edition Includes the author's eyewitness account of the 'Saffron Revolution' of 2007 REVIEWS "A witty, beautifully turned travelogue.. enlivened by Andrew Marshall's eye for the absurd" -The Daily Telegraph "An evocative travel book" -New York Times 30 b/w photographs
Author: Simon S C Tay
Publisher: World Scientific
Published: 2020-10-06
Total Pages: 477
ISBN-13: 9813273569
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat are the political and economic challenges facing Myanmar as it opens to the world? And what are the opportunities and responsibilities for the international community to influence and also invest in the country?This book aims to provide readers with an assessment that integrates analysis with on-the-ground experience and insights, drawn from closely engaging with Myanmar since the country began to move towards democracy and open to the world. In order for readers to appreciate emerging trends and developments, the book evaluates the efforts of the recent Thein Sein administration and current National League of Democracy government up to the present day. It also identifies key events from the colonial period through to the decades when the country was under military rule, cut off from much of the international community. The on-going crisis in Myanmar's Rakhine State and the controversial situation of the Rohingya are examined at length, with an effort to contextualise these events in wider challenges of geopolitics and national reforms to rehabilitate the government and the economy.The book presents readers with a clear view of how the country might progress beyond current obstacles, and highlights the opportunities that remain for those willing to engage constructively for the longer term in the opening of this frontier economy and once-pariah state. As Myanmar moves ahead with its transition to democracy and with economic development, this book is recommended for both those who watch the country with interest and those who consider the ways in which the international community interacts with the region and Myanmar.
Author: Clare Hammond
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2024-06-06
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 1802062041
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'On the Shadow Tracks harnesses the railway lines of Myanmar’s complicated past to its turbulent present, and the result is part travelogue, part history and completely absorbing. An astonishing achievement’ Joanna Lumley In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together. Her journey would take her from Myanmar's tropical south to the embattled mountain towns that border India and China. In dilapidated carriages, along tracks in disrepair, through contested ethnic states and former sites of forced labour, visiting temples, tea shops and festivals, Clare encountered a colourful and contradictory Myanmar through the stories of its people. Simultaneously a lush and evocative travelogue, an unsparing account of Myanmar's recent history, and an astonishing, conversation-shifting engagement with Britain's colonial legacy, On the Shadow Tracks is that rare and necessary thing: a book that finds and tells the truth.
Author: Sebastian Strangio
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-09-22
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0300256256
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA timely look at the impact of China’s booming emergence on the countries of Southeast Asia Today, Southeast Asia stands uniquely exposed to the waxing power of the new China. Three of its nations border China and five are directly impacted by its claims over the South China Sea. All dwell in the lengthening shadow of its influence: economic, political, military, and cultural. As China seeks to restore its former status as Asia’s preeminent power, the countries of Southeast Asia face an increasingly stark choice: flourish within Beijing’s orbit or languish outside of it. Meanwhile, as rival powers including the United States take concerted action to curb Chinese ambitions, the region has emerged as an arena of heated strategic competition. Drawing on more than a decade of on-the-ground experience, Sebastian Strangio explores the impacts of China’s rise on Southeast Asia, the varied ways in which the countries of the region are responding, and what it might mean for the future balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
Author: Stephen C. Mercado
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Published: 2003-03-17
Total Pages: 489
ISBN-13: 1612342175
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the history of the twentieth century, the role of the military intelligence services in the competition among nations is still murky. Among the world's foremost intelligence services, those of Imperial Japan remain the least known. Few stories are as compelling as those surrounding the Japanese Army's Nakano School. From 1938 to 1945, the Nakano School trained more than 2,000 men in intelligence gathering, propaganda, and irregular warfare. Working in the shadows, these dedicated warriors executed a range of missions, from gathering intelligence in Latin America to leading commando raids against American lines in Papua New Guinea, in the Philippines, and on Okinawa. They played major roles in operations to subvert British rule in India, and they organized Japanese civilians into guerrilla units that would have made the invasion of Japan a bloodbath. One graduate used his Nakano commando training to elude U.S. and Philippine military patrols until emerging from the jungle nearly thirty years after the war's end. In the decades after World War II, graduates of the school worked to obtain from the United States and Russia the release of imprisoned war criminals and the recovery of lost territory, including Okinawa. Based on archival research and the memoirs of Japanese veterans, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano shines a much-needed light into the shadows of World War II and postwar Japanese affairs.
Author: Steffen Rimner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-11-12
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 0674976304
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I. Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage. The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.
Author: H. Glenn Penny
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-06-15
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 0691216452
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA compelling history of the German ethnologists who were inspired by Prussian polymath and explorer Alexander von Humboldt The Berlin Ethnological Museum is one of the world's largest and most important anthropological museums, housing more than a half million objects collected from around the globe. In Humboldt's Shadow tells the story of the German scientists and adventurers who, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's inclusive vision of the world, traveled the earth in pursuit of a total history of humanity. It also details the fate of their museum, which they hoped would be a scientists' workshop, a place where a unitary history of humanity might emerge. H. Glenn Penny shows how these early German ethnologists assembled vast ethnographic collections to facilitate their study of the multiplicity of humanity, not to confirm emerging racist theories of human difference. He traces how Adolf Bastian filled the Berlin museum in an effort to preserve the records of human diversity, yet how he and his supporters were swept up by the imperialist currents of the day and struck a series of Faustian bargains to ensure the growth of their collections. Penny describes how influential administrators such as Wilhelm von Bode demanded that the museum be transformed into a hall for public displays, and how Humboldt's inspiring ideals were ultimately betrayed by politics and personal ambition. In Humboldt's Shadow calls on museums to embrace anew Bastian's vision while deepening their engagement with indigenous peoples concerning the provenance and stewardship of these collections.
Author: Larry Hancock
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2015-03-17
Total Pages: 625
ISBN-13: 161902473X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContrary to its contemporary image, deniable covert operations are not something new. Such activities have been ordered by every president and every administration since the Second World War. In many instances covert operations have relied on surrogates, with American personnel involved only at a distance, insulated by layers of deniability. Shadow Warfare traces the evolution of these covert operations, detailing the tactics and tools used from the Truman era through those of the contemporary Obama Administrations. It also explores the personalities and careers of many of the most noted shadow warriors of the past sixty years, tracing the decade–long relationship between the CIA and the military. Shadow Warfare presents a balanced, non–polemic exploration of American secret warfare, detailing its patterns, consequences and collateral damage and presenting its successes as well as failures. Shadow Wars explores why every president from Franklin Roosevelt on, felt compelled to turn to secret, deniable military action. It also delves into the political dynamic of the president's relationship with Congress and the fact that despite decades of combat, the U.S. Congress has chosen not to exercise its responsibility to declare a single state of war – even for extended and highly visible combat.
