The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (paperback edition)
Thant Myint-U
W.W. Norton & Company: 2021
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Historian Thant Myint-U offers rare glimpses into the events and characters that helped chart Myanmar’s course in the last two decades. In The Hidden History of Burma, he reveals the outfit Aung San Suu Kyi wore when she first appeared before the UN envoy Razali Ismail; what musical compositions Suu Kyi likes to play on her old Yamaha piano; how Obama’s impromptu visit to the Shwedagon Pagoda in 2012 came about; and what former dictator Than Shwe said about Suu Kyi after he met her in 2015.
These rich details are no doubt the product of Thant Myint-U’s meticulous research, but also of his access to the political elites: the NLD inner circle (‘a group of septuagenarian “uncles”, mainly ex-military men who had thrown in their lot with the Nobel Prize laureate’); the activists from the 1988 uprising; and the generals who traded in their army uniforms for the parliamentarians’ gaung baung (headdress) to join the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).
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- Tags: Issue 23, Kenneth Wong, Myanmar, Thant Myint-U