John Brock is a British spy who knows something his enemies are desperate to learn. After being forcibly abducted and transported to Burma for interrogation, he finds himself imprisoned with an unlikely cellmate. Caroline Wells is a Canadian widow waylaid and imprisoned by the cruel military junta oppressing Burma. Bereaved yet seeking a new purpose in life, she has relied on her faith to survive her captivity so far, but her hope has been waning. Now, with Brock as a cellmate, she sees change ahead for both of them. These two people from very different worlds must now learn to trust each other enough to find a way out of prison and out of Burma, pursued all the while by soldiers, leopards, and foreign spies. What love can be forged in the jungles of Burma?

In 2012, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president ever to visit Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. This official state visit marked a new period in the long and sinuous diplomatic relationship between the United States and Burma/Myanmar, which Kenton Clymer examines in A Delicate Relationship. From the challenges of decolonization and heightened nationalist activities that emerged in the wake of World War II to the Cold War concern with domino states to the rise of human rights policy in the 1980s and beyond, Clymer demonstrates how Burma/Myanmar has fit into the broad patterns of U.S. foreign policy and yet has never been fully integrated into diplomatic efforts in the region of Southeast Asia. When Burma, a British colony since the nineteenth century, achieved independence in 1948, the United States feared that the country might be the first Southeast Asian nation to fall to the communists, and it embarked on a series of efforts to prevent this. In 1962, General Ne Win, who toppled the government in a coup d’état, established an authoritarian socialist military junta that severely limited diplomatic contact and led to a period in which the primary American diplomatic concern became Burma’s increasing opium production. Ne Win’s rule ended (at least officially) in 1988, when the Burmese people revolted against the oppressive military government. Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as the charismatic leader of the opposition and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Amid these great changes in policy and outlook, Burma/Myanmar remained fiercely nonaligned and, under Ne Win, isolationist. The limited diplomatic exchange that resulted meant that the state was often a frustrating puzzle to U.S. officials. Clymer explores attitudes toward Burma (later Myanmar), from anxious anticommunism during the Cold War to interventions to stop drug trafficking to debates in Congress, the White House, and the Department of State over how to respond to the emergence of the opposition movement in the late 1980s. The junta’s brutality, its refusal to relinquish power, and its imprisonment of opposition leaders resulted in public and Congressional pressure to try to change the regime. Indeed, Aung San Suu Kyi’s rise to prominence fueled the new foreign policy debate that was focused on human rights, and in that climate Burma/Myanmar held particularly large symbolic importance for U.S. policy makers. Congressional and public opinion favored sanctions, while U.S. presidents and their administrations were more cautious. Clymer’s account concludes with President Obama’s visits in 2012 and 2014, and visits to the United States by Aung San Suu Kyi and President Thein Sein, which marked the establishment of a new, warmer relationship with a relatively open Myanmar.

MI-5 agent John Brock is back in this explosive thriller that pits him against a ruthless enemy from the past. Using his cunning, expertise, and international contacts, Brock, head of counterterrorism for Great Britain's secret service, uncovers a trail of industrial espionage that leads from Beijing to Mumbai and, finally, to an international summit in Vancouver. But Brock's pursuit of the nations' enemies is disrupted by a threat to his own life-and his wife's. Stalked by danger, Brock is ruthlessly pursued across the globe by a band of assassins hired by an unknown adversary. Someone on his long list of enemies wants him dead; Brock seeks clues to his nemesis in India, Norway, and even South Korea. Brock risks everything to protect his beloved wife from the demons of his past. But when she falls victim to his enemy, will Brock be able to save her or will the assassin's trap end it all? From the dark streets of London to the backwater villages of South Korea, Assassin's Trap delivers a fast-paced, gripping story of one man's fight to protect the woman he loves.

Irv and Mary Reiss (aka Dad and Mom) wrote this book as two letters per day for fifteen months from late 1943 through March 1945. Friends and relatives added more letters to bring the total to nearly 1,000. Virtually all of their letters ended with "I love you very very much" and "I miss you very very much." It's easy to empathize with their frustrations and anxieties about being separated and worried, especially with the birth and nurturing of their first child Stephen (aka me) in June 1944. This book title of From Burma With Love is an understatement. Irv Reiss served in the US Army from June 27, 1941 until September 17, 1945 for a total of 4 years, 2 months, and 20 days. Foreign service in India and Burma (Myanmar) was 1 year, 1 month, and 23 days. The foreign service in Burma was very intense and is the heart of this book -- hence the name, From Burma With Love. Irv was a labor officer along the Ledo Road from August 28, 1944 until December 11, 1944. His job was to hire and feed and pay several thousand native laborers (and a few elephants) to help build that road from Ledo, India to Mongyu, Burma. Read his letter of October 7, 1944.

In this intrepid and brilliant memoir, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent travelling through Burma, using as a compass the life and work of George Orwell, whom many of Burma's underground teahouse intellectuals call simply "the prophet". In stirring, insightful prose, she provides a powerful reckoning with one of the world's least free countries. Finding George Orwell in Burma is a brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world's grimmest and most shuttered dictatorships, where the term "Orwellian" aptly describes the life endured by the country's people. This book has come to be regarded as a classic of reportage and travel and a crucial book for anyone interested in Burma and George Orwell.

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

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SELECTED BY THE ECONOMIST AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR “A rambunctious book that is itself alive with the animal spirits of the marketplace.”—The Wall Street Journal Freedom’s Forge reveals how two extraordinary American businessmen—General Motors automobile magnate William “Big Bill” Knudsen and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser—helped corral, cajole, and inspire business leaders across the country to mobilize the “arsenal of democracy” that propelled the Allies to victory in World War II. Drafting top talent from companies like Chrysler, Republic Steel, Boeing, Lockheed, GE, and Frigidaire, Knudsen and Kaiser turned auto plants into aircraft factories and civilian assembly lines into fountains of munitions. In four short years they transformed America’s army from a hollow shell into a truly global force, laying the foundations for the country’s rise as an economic as well as military superpower. Freedom’s Forge vividly re-creates American industry’s finest hour, when the nation’s business elites put aside their pursuit of profits and set about saving the world. Praise for Freedom’s Forge “A rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry . . . Arthur Herman has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.”—The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . It’s not often that a historian comes up with a fresh approach to an absolutely critical element of the Allied victory in World War II, but Pulitzer finalist Herman . . . has done just that.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A compulsively readable tribute to ‘the miracle of mass production.’ ”—Publishers Weekly “The production statistics cited by Mr. Herman . . . astound.”—The Economist “[A] fantastic book.”—Forbes “Freedom’s Forge is the story of how the ingenuity and energy of the American private sector was turned loose to equip the finest military force on the face of the earth. In an era of gathering threats and shrinking defense budgets, it is a timely lesson told by one of the great historians of our time.”—Donald Rumsfeld

“It all started on 7 December 1941, when Japan unleashed its surprise attack on a place called Pearl Harbor. To think that something that was happening a thousand miles away would affect the lives of so many people, including me, was unimaginable then. But it did touch my life. In fact it dictated my whole future.” Ramesh Benegal, recipient of the Maha Vir Chakra, was born in Burma and was seventeen when the Japanese captured British-occupied Burma. He tells this extraordinary, first-person story of his career with the Indian National Army in Burma and Japan in the years from 1941 to 1945. A series of chances lead the young Ramesh to enrol for the selection of cadets to be sent to Japan for military training at the initiative of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. We follow his journeys on land, sea and air as the young voice narrates in sharp and often visceral detail the experience of travelling from Burma to Thailand, Singapore and Japan. The years are long and hard and alternate between deprivation and plenty and between disaster and hope—before the turning point of the War changes everything. What opens before us is not only a war memoir but the transformation of a boy as he steeps himself in the cultures of food, behaviour, customs and the ethnic aspirations of the countries he finds himself in.