As captivating as the most thrilling novel, Burmese Looking Glass tells the story of tribal peoples who, though ravaged by malaria and weakened by poverty, are unforgettably brave. Author Edith Mirante first crossed illegally from Thailand into Burma in 1983. There she discovered the hidden conflict that has despoiled the country since the close of World War II. She met commandos and refugees and learned firsthand the machinations of Golden Triangle narcotics trafficking. Mirante was the first Westerner to march with the rebels from the fabled Three Pagodas Pass to the Andaman Sea; she taught karate to women soldiers, was ritually tattooed by a Shan "spirit doctor," has lobbied successfully against U.S. government donation of Agent Orange chemicals to the dictatorship, and was deported from Thailand in 1988.

“Burmese Looking Glass is a contribution to the literature of human rights and to the literature of high adventure.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review As captivating as the most thrilling novel, Burmese Looking Glass tells the story of tribal peoples who, though ravaged by malaria and weakened by poverty, are unforgettably brave. Author Edith T. Mirante first crossed illegally from Thailand into Burma in 1983. There she discovered the hidden conflict that has despoiled the country since the close of World War II. She met commandos and refugees and learned firsthand the machinations of Golden Triangle narcotics trafficking. Mirante was the first Westerner to march with the rebels from the fabled Three Pagodas Pass to the Andaman Sea. She taught karate to women soldiers, was ritually tattooed by a Shan sayah “spirit doctor,” lobbied successfully against US government donation of Agent Orange chemicals to the dictatorship, and was deported from Thailand in 1988. “A dramatic but caring book in which Mirante’s blithe tone doesn’t disguise her earnest concern for the worsening conditions faced by the Burmese hill tribes.” —Kirkus Reviews

The Glass Palace Begins With The Shattering Of The Kingdom Of Burma, And Tells The Story Of A People, A Fortune, And A Family And Its Fate. It Traces The Life Of Rajkumar, A Poor Indian Boy, Who Is Lifted On The Tides Of Political And Social Turmoil To Build An Empire In The Burmese Teak Forest. When British Soldiers Force The Royal Family Out Of The Glass Palace, During The Invasion Of 1885, He Falls In Love With Dolly, An Attendant At The Palace. Years Later, Unable To Forget Her, Rajkumar Goes In Search Of His Love. Through This Brilliant And Impassioned Story Of Love And War, Amitav Ghosh Presents A Ruthless Appraisal Of The Horrors Of Colonialism And Capitalist Exploitation. Click Here To Visit The Amitav Ghosh Website

Lisa Joy Pruitt offers a new look at women's involvement in the mission movement, with a welcome focus on the often overlooked antebellum era. Most scholars have argued that the emergence of women as a dominant force in American Protestant missions in the late nineteenth-century was an outgrowth of nascent feminist activism in the various denominations. This new contribution suggests that the feminization of the later mission movement actually stemmed in large part from images of the "degraded Oriental woman" that popular evangelical literature had been circulating since the 1790s, and that the increasing focus on and involvement of women was supported by male denominational leaders as an important strategy for reaching the world with the Christian gospel. In the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth-centuries, popular evangelical literature began circulating descriptions of women of the "Orient" designed to illustrate the need of those women for the Christian gospel. Such powerful and widely disseminated images demonstrated to young American women their relatively privileged position in society and, throughout the nineteenth-century, led many to support the cause of missions with their money and sometimes their lives. A belief in the desperate need of "Oriental" women for salvation and social uplift was largely responsible for feminizing the American Protestant foreign mission movement. "A Looking-Glass for Ladies": American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth Century traces the creation and dissemination of images of women who lived in that part of the world known to nineteenth-century Westerners as the "Orient." It examines the emotional power of those images tocreate sympathy in American women for their "sisters" in Asia. That sympathy catalyzed many evangelical women and men to argue for vocational roles for women, both married and single, in the mission movement. The book demonstrates the ways in which assumptions about the condition and needs of "Oriental" women shaped American evangelical women's self perceptions, as well as the evangelizing strategies of the missionaries and their sending agencies.

Burmese glass, developed by the Mt. Washington glass company in 1885, was named by Queen Victoria because the shaded colors reminded her of a sunset in Burma. Fenton introduced Burmese in 1970 and continues to produce it. This beautiful book includes 719 color photographs of fine examples. Each caption has a ware number, size, year of production, and price. Background history and the people who produce Burmese are included.

While a growing number of popular and scholarly works focus on Asian Americans, most are devoted to the experiences of larger groups such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian Americans. As the field grows, there is a pressing need to understand the smaller and more recent immigrant communities. Emerging Voices fills this gap with its unique and compelling discussion of underrepresented groups, including Burmese, Indonesian, Mong, Hmong, Nepalese, Romani, Tibetan, and Thai Americans. Unlike the earlier and larger groups of Asian immigrants to America, many of whom made the choice to emigrate to seek better economic opportunities, many of the groups discussed in this volume fled war or political persecution in their homeland. Forced to make drastic transitions in America with little physical or psychological preparation, questions of “why am I here,” “who am I,” and “why am I discriminated against,” remain at the heart of their post-emigration experiences. Bringing together eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines, this collection considers a wide range of themes, including assimilation and adaptation, immigration patterns, community, education, ethnicity, economics, family, gender, marriage, religion, sexuality, and work.

Winner, IACP Cookbook Award for Culinary Travel (2013) Naomi Duguid’s heralded cookbooks have always transcended the category to become “something larger and more important” (Los Angeles Times). Each in its own way is “a breakthrough book . . . a major contribution” (The New York Times). And as Burma opens up after a half century of seclusion, who better than Duguid—the esteemed author of Hot Sour Salty Sweet—to introduce the country and its food and flavors to the West. Located at the crossroads between China, India, and the nations of Southeast Asia, Burma has long been a land that absorbed outside influences into its everyday life, from the Buddhist religion to foodstuffs like the potato. In the process, the people of the country now known as Myanmar have developed a rich, complex cuisine that mekes inventive use of easily available ingredients to create exciting flavor combinations. Salads are one of the best entry points into the glories of this cuisine, with sparkling flavors—crispy fried shallots, a squeeze of fresh lime juice, a dash of garlic oil, a pinch of turmeric, some crunchy roast peanuts—balanced with a light hand. The salad tradition is flexible; Burmese cooks transform all kinds of foods into salads, from chicken and roasted eggplant to spinach and tomato. And the enticing Tea-Leaf Salad is a signature dish in central Burma and in the eastern hills that are home to the Shan people. Mohinga, a delicious blend of rice noodles and fish broth, adds up to comfort food at its best. Wherever you go in Burma, you get a slightly different version because, as Duguid explains, each region layers its own touches into the dish. Tasty sauces, chutneys, and relishes—essential elements of Burmese cuisine—will become mainstays in your kitchen, as will a chicken roasted with potatoes, turmeric, and lemongrass; a seafood noodle stir-fry with shrimp and mussels; Shan khaut swei, an astonishing noodle dish made with pea tendrils and pork; a hearty chicken-rice soup seasoned with ginger and soy sauce; and a breathtakingly simple dessert composed of just sticky rice, coconut, and palm sugar. Interspersed throughout the 125 recipes are intriguing tales from the author’s many trips to this fascinating but little-known land. One such captivating essay shows how Burmese women adorn themselves with thanaka, a white paste used to protect and decorate the skin. Buddhism is a central fact of Burmese life: we meet barefoot monks on their morning quest for alms, as well as nuns with shaved heads; and Duguid takes us on tours of Shwedagon, the amazingly grand temple complex on a hill in Rangoon, the former capital. She takes boats up Burma’s huge rivers, highways to places inaccessible by road; spends time in village markets and home kitchens; and takes us to the farthest reaches of the country, along the way introducing us to the fascinating people she encounters on her travels. The best way to learn about an unfamiliar culture is through its food, and in Burma: Rivers of Flavor, readers will be transfixed by the splendors of an ancient and wonderful country, untouched by the outside world for generations, whose simple recipes delight and satisfy and whose people are among the most gracious on earth.

In 1948, Burma was a promising young democracy with a bustling free market economy and a standard of living that surpassed nearly all of its other Asian neighbours. Fifty years later, Burma is one of the poorest nations in the world, with a military dictatorship in Rangoon and 50,000 armed rebels from a myriad of ethnic insurgency groups. In this well documented and detailed account, well-known Burma journalist Bertil Lintner explains the nexus between Burma’s booming drug production and its insurgency and counter-insurgency, providing an answer to the question of why Burma has been unable to shake off thirty-five years of military rule and build a modern, democratic society. Lintner’s lively account is interspersed with numerous anecdotes gleaned from personal research and interviews. Individuals are given features and personality in the complicated “jigsaw” of Burma’s modern history. Beginning with the shock of Aung San’s murder in 1947, Lintner retraces events from the 1920s that led to this disastrous event and continues his narrative up to the present, navigating the reader through webs of intrigue involving power, politics and drugs. Key players are the Rangoon government, the ethnic resistance, the Communists, the Kuomintang, and the US government. This revised and updated edition includes five extensive appendixes for serious readers and Burma scholars alike: a list of acronyms, a chronology of events, a who’s who of important figures in Burma’s insurgency, an annotated list of rebel armies, and biographical sketches of the Thirty Comrades. “Bertil Lintner, one of Burma’s (Myanmar’s) closest and most incisive observers, has written an important book. It is more than a study of the drug trade and the minority rebellions. It is in a sense a history of Burma since independence. No one concerned with Burma, with Southeast Asia, or with international narcotics affairs can neglect this work”. — David I. Steinberg, Georgetown University

When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the “high status” of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho’s Romancing Human Rights maps “Burmese women” as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of “on the ground” facts, Ho’s groundbreaking scholarship—the first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burma—brings a critical lens to contemporary literature, film, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rights—and in the process offers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality. Romancing Human Rights demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho assembles an eclectic archive that includes George Orwell, Aung San Suu Kyi, critically acclaimed authors Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, and activist Zoya Phan. Her close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Using flexible, polyglot rhetorical tactics and embodied performances, these authors creatively articulate alter/native epistemologies—regionally situated knowledges and decolonizing viewpoints that interrogate and destabilize competing transnational hegemonies, such as U.S. moral imperialism and Asian militarized dictatorship. Weaving together the fictional and non-fictional, Ho’s gendered analysis makes Romancing Human Rights a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studies—a must-read for those with an interest in fields of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and women’s and gender studies.

Burma (Myanmar) is a Southeast Asian country that is emerging from crisis after more than a half century of hard-line military rule and cultural, diplomatic and economic isolation. With the dissolution of its military regime, the State Peace and Development Council, in 2011, a formally civilian but military-dominated constitutional government was inaugurated. By 2012, Burma’s president, retired General Thein Sein, had established a working relationship with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the country’s pro-democracy movement since 1988, and after a 2012 by-election she and members of her opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), entered the new Union Parliament as legislators. However, even with the election victory of Daw Suu Kyi and the NLD in the General Election of November 2015, Burma faces daunting challenges: it is still one of the poorest countries in Southeast, fissured by longstanding ethnic conflicts that have made a nationwide peace agreement elusive and its people’s security and the environment are threatened by foreign economic exploitation. Religious discord is also widely evident, as Buddhist militants instigate violence against the country’s religious minorities, especially Muslims. Today Burma’s prospects are the most hopeful they have been for over half a century, as the country takes steps along the road to a more open society and economy. This edition of the Historical Dictionary of Burma (Myanmar) encompasses not only current developments, but also Burma’s over 1,500 years-old recorded history and the most important features of its cultures, ethnicity, religions, society and economy. This is done through achronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.