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The River of Lost Footsteps
Thant Myint-U
Histories of Burma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2006
On Sale: October 12, 2006
384 pages
ISBN: 0374163421
EAN: 9780374163426
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
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
about Burma and its history? And what can Burma’s past tell
us about the present and even its future?
In The River of Lost Footsteps, Thant Myint-U 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 two centuries.
Through their stories and others, he portrays Burma’s rise
and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese
pirates and renegade Mughal princes through the decades of
British colonialism, the devastation of World War II, and a
sixty-year civil war that continues today and is the
longest-running war anywhere in the world.
The River of Lost Footsteps is a work both personal and
global, a distinctive contribution that makes Burma
accessible and enthralling.
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