Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Prisoner of Conscience
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"The trouble is that I know too much."—Aung San Suu KyiBurma is a country where, as one senior UN official puts it, "just to turn your head can mean imprisonment or death." Aung San Suu Kyi is considered to be Burma's best hope for freedom, and, because of her unwavering commitment to nonviolent resistance to the country's brutal military junta, she has been under house arrest since 1989. Elected Prime Minister, she was prevented from taking office, but despite failing health, vilification at the hands of the Burmese media, and actual imprisonment in one of the world's most appalling jails, Suu Kyi has persevered in a campaign of nonviolent protest as unflagging as those of Gandhi, King, and Mandela, which earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.In Perfect Hostage, the most thorough biography of Suu Kyi to date, Justin Wintle tells both the story of the Burmese people and the story of an ordinary person who became a hero. 43 b/w photographs. The New York Times - Seth Mydans This thoroughly researched biography sets out to explicate the personality of a leader who found herself by chance (though also by birth) at the head of her country's struggling pro-democracy movement. By delving into her childhood and her years as a student at Oxford University, Wintle, a journalist and the author of books on Vietnam, finds the seeds of her commanding personality, her straight-backed moral certainty and a "fierce purity" that gave her, as one friend said, "the knack of putting one on one's best behavior"…the book presents readers with the complexity of Myanmar's history and its present tensions, and of Aung San Suu Kyi herself, who is described as both flexible and inflexible, ready to cooperate with her oppressors but unbending in calling for international sanctions against them.
Illustrations xiPrincipal Burmese Personae xiiiGlossary (including acronyms) xvMap xxPrologue xxiiiLand and FatherAt the Shwedagon 3The Shwe Pyidaw 9After the Mongols 18The Salami Wars 27British Burma 41Saturday's Child 50From Campus Oddball to National Hero (aged 20) 63'1300': The Year That Never Was 74Desperate Times, Desperate Remedies 81Bo Teza: Reluctant Collaborator 92Snakes, Ladders and a Wife 104Old Enemies, New Friends 115Getting There 124The Daughter19th July 141The Golden Rain is Brown 151An Indian Idyll: The 'Ugly One' Takes Wing 162The Daughter of Some or Other Burmese General 172Things Fall Apart 181Between Three Continents 196Thimphu, Kyoto, Simla 209Sixteen MonthsNumber One and Number Nine 225White Bridge, Red Bridge 2398.8.88 249Shadow of the HundredFlowers 265Digging In 277Squaring Up 287Suu Kyi's Tightrope 298Danubyu 308The Door Slams Shut 317The Political MadonnaEgg on the Generals' Faces 329Soldiers at the Gate 341Famously Alone 354Freedom on a Leash 370The Saddest Thing 385The Widowed Road to Depayin 397Back to Mandalay 413Postscript: The Monks' Revolt 430Acknowledgements 439Sources/Further Reading/Websites 441Index 449
