Thant

Thant Myint-U's Where China Meets India is a vivid, searching, timely book about the remote region that is suddenly a geopolitical center of the world. From their very beginnings, China and India have been walled off from each other: by the towering summits of the Himalayas, by a vast and impenetrable jungle, by hostile tribes and remote inland kingdoms stretching a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangtze River. Soon this...

"How did one of the world's "buzzy hotspots" (Fodor's 2013) become one of the top ten places to avoid (Fodor's 2018)? Less than a decade ago, the world cheered as a dictatorship crumbled and internationally beloved Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from twenty years of house arrest. Yet just three years after her landslide victory at the polls, the country stands accused of war crimes and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims....

Thant tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family's history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and appalling. His maternal grandfather, U Thant, rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the UN secretary-general in the 1960s. And on his father's side, the author is descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma's Court of Ava for nearly...

U Thant reflects on the critical days of his appointment as Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1961 and recollects the ten turbulent years that followed.