From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey
10 best books like From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey (Pascal Khoo Thwe): The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong, The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma, Stay Alive, My Son, When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge, Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors, Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West, The Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, For Us Surrender is Out of the Question, Letters from Burma
The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong
| Author | Edward Gargan |
| ISBN | 0375705597 |
Along the Mekong, from northern Tibet to Lijiang, from Luang Prabang to Phnom Penh to Can Lo, I moved from one world to another, among cultural islands often ignorant of each other’s presence. Yet each island, as if built on shifting sands and eroded and reshaped by a universal sea, was re-forming itself,...
The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma
| Author | Thant Myint-U |
| ISBN | 0374163421 |
For nearly two decades Western governments and a growing activist community have been frustrated in their attempts to bring about a freer and more democratic Burma--through sanctions and tourist boycotts--only to see an apparent slide toward even harsher dictatorship. But what do we really know...
| Author | Pin Yathay |
| ISBN | 0801486998 |
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that...
When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge
| Author | Chanrithy Him |
| ISBN | 0393322106 |
In a mesmerizing story, Chanrithy Him vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields." She gives us a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps for both adults and children are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death becomes a companion in the camps,...
Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind
| Author | Loung Ung |
| ISBN | 0060733950 |
After enduring years of hunger, deprivation, and devastating loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, ten-year-old Loung Ung became the "lucky child," the sibling chosen to accompany her eldest brother to America while her one surviving sister and two brothers remained behind. In this poignant and elegiac...
Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors
| Author | Dith Pran |
| ISBN | 0300078730 |
This extraordinary book contains eyewitness accounts of life in Cambodia during Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, accounts written by survivors who were children at the time. The book has been put together by Dith Pran, whose own experiences in Cambodia were so graphically...
Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West
Zoya Phan was born in the remote jungles of Burma to the Karen tribe, which for decades has been resisting Burma’s brutal military junta. At age 13, her peaceful childhood was shattered when the Burmese army attacked. So began two terrible years of running, as Zoya was forced to join thousands of refugees...
The Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi
| Author | Justin Wintle |
| ISBN | 0091796512 |
UPDATE: not changing the book's rating, but am noting that Aung San Suu Kyi's response to the attacks on the Rohingya. After reading this book, I find her lack of response is very disapointing. I know heroes are human and politics, but no, what as happened and is happening to the Rohingya is just wrong,...
For Us Surrender is Out of the Question
| Author | Mac McClelland |
| ISBN | 1593762658 |
There are bad things going on in Burma that you don’t know about. There’s a civil war (the world’s longest running, in fact) raging between the government and ethnic rebels. Much of the United States’ heroin comes from there. And there’s the small matter that America helped make it all possible...
| Author | Aung San Suu Kyi |
| ISBN | 0140264035 |
For the last decade of Burma's traumatic history, Aung San Suu Kyi - winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize - has been the inspirational leader of attempts to restore democracy to her country. In these fifty-two pieces, originally written for a Japanese newspaper and begun soon after her release from house...
Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees
| Author | Caroline Moorehead |
| ISBN | 0312425619 |
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Traveling for nearly two years and across four continents, Caroline Moorehead takes readers on a journey to understand why millions of people are forced to abandon their homes, possessions, and families in order to find a place where they may,...
Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos
| Author | Emily Wu |
| ISBN | 0375424288 |
"It is my hope that this memoir may serve as a reminder and a memorial to all of the children who were lost in the Chaos," Emily Wu writes at the beginning of "Feather in the Storm."
Told from a child's and young girl's point of view, Wu's spellbinding account-which spans nineteen years of growing up...
Under the Dragon: Travels in a Betrayed Land
| Author | Rory MacLean |
| ISBN | 0002570130 |
This expression of the pain of Burma uses novelistic techniques to weave together the patient endurance of its stricken inhabitants, together with their fragility and immense charm. Through his studies of the lives of the individual Burmese whom he encounters, the author makes us feel the weight...
Everything Is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma
| Author | Emma Larkin |
| ISBN | 1594202575 |
Read Emma Larkin's posts on the Penguin Blog.
A deeply reported account of life inside Burma in the months following the disastrous Cyclone Nargis and an analysis of the brutal totalitarian regime that clings to power in the devastated nation.
On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical...
| Author | Norman Lewis |
| ISBN | 0907871380 |
Despite communist incursions and tribal insurrection, Norman Lewis describes a land of breath-taking natural beauty peopled by the gentle Burmese. This is a country where Buddhist beliefs spare even the rats, where the Director of Prisons quotes Chaucer and where three-day theatrical shows are...
The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire
| Author | Andrew Marshall |
| ISBN | 1582432422 |
Andrew Marshall has written an unforgettable adventure story, the wry account of two journeys into the untraveled heart of Burma. Part travelogue, part history, part reportage, The Trouser People recounts the story of George Scott, the eccentric British explorer, photographer, adventurer, and...
Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns
| Author | David Lamb |
| ISBN | 1586481835 |
When he left war-ravaged Vietnam some thirty years ago, journalist David Lamb averred "I didn't care if I ever saw the wretched country again." But in 1997, he found himself living in Hanoi, in charge of the Los Angeles Times's first peacetime bureau and in the midst of a country on the move, as it progresses...
Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know
| Author | David I. Steinberg |
| ISBN | 0195390687 |
In the past two decades, Burma/Myanmar has become a front-page topic in newspapers across the world. This former British colony has one of the most secretive, corrupt, and repressive regimes on the planet, yet it houses a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is and in and out of house arrest. It has an ancient...
Beyond the Last Village: A Journey of Discovery in Asia's Forbidden Wilderness
| Author | Alan Rabinowitz |
| ISBN | 1559638001 |
In 1993, Alan Rabinowitz, called the Indiana Jones of wildlife science by The New York Times, arrived for the first time in the country of Myanmar, known until 1989 as Burma, uncertain of what to expect. Working under the auspices of the Wildlife Conservation Society, his goal was to establish a wildlife...
The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community
| Author | Mary Pipher |
| ISBN | 0156027372 |
Over the past decade, Mary Pipher has been a great source of wisdom, helping us to better understand our family members. Now she connects us with the newest members of the American family--refugees. In cities all over the country, refugees arrive daily. Lost Boys from Sudan, survivors from Kosovo,...
