Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British ...
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Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country--his first novel, "Burmese Days"--but in fact he wrote three, the "trilogy" that included "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four." When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!" In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And George Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book--the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written. A brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world's grimmest and most shuttered police states, using as its compass the life and work of George Orwell, the man many in Burma call simply "the prophet"
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Good. Hardcover This item shows wear from consistent use but remains in good readable condition. It may have marks on or in it, and may show other signs of previous use or shelf wear. May have minor creases or signs of wear on dust jacket. Packed with care, shipped promptly.
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Very Good. Very Good condition. Good dust jacket. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp.
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Very Good in Unclipped, unchipped, and immacu jacket. Stated "First American Edition; " first printing; 294 p., immaculate and unmarked; binding firm; boards pristine.
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Very Good in Very Good jacket. Size: 5x1x8; Penguin, 2005; first American edition, with full number line; 294pp. Binding is tight, sturdy, and square; boards also very good; titling remains bright and bold. Ends of spine bumped. Wear to jacket is very minor. Interior is free of markings. Ships same or next day from Dinkytown, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Like New in Like New jacket. An exceptional hardcover with a crisp dust jacket, a tight binding and an unmarked text. First edition, with a full number line. From a private smoke free collection. Shipping within 24 hours, tracking number and delivery Confirmation.
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First American Edition [stated], First printing [stated]
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Penguin Press
Published:
2005
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English
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18034692368
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Carl Rosenstein (Jacket photograph) Very good in Very good jacket. The format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.5 inches. [8], 294, [2] pages. A profile of the police state in Burma and its effect on the writings of George Orwell discusses the author's mother's origins in Burma at the height of the British raj, Orwell's work with the British Imperial Police, and local reverence for his literary works. Her book, which has elements of biography, travelogue, and investigative reporting, argues that Orwell did not only write one book about his time in Burma, but that Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were based on his experiences as a police officer in colonial Burma. In addition, these two dystopian novels uniquely prophecised what life under the Burmese military dictatorship would be like: from the naming of government departments, to the idea that the government can control the past when the sharing and recording of individual recollections is forbidden. Her identity has been the subject of speculation. Larkin has stated that, despite wishing to publish under her real name, she used a pseudonym to protect the identities of her sources. Because she was obliged to sign forms using her real name when boarding buses and trains and staying in hotels, the regime would have been able to piece together where she had been and who she had spoken to. This strategy which had been successful as of 2010. She spoke of the paranoia that affects foreign writers in Myanmar due to the surveillance and possibility of being searched at any time. This paranoia led her to destroy written notes or pass them to others who are leaving the country. In 2021, her photograph was published in her novel. Emma Larkin is the pseudonym of an American journalist and author. Born in The Philippines to an American mother, her family moved to Thailand when she was one year old, where she lived for the next nine years. At least part of this time was spent in Bangkok, where she now lives. Larkin was educated in the UK from the age of ten, going on to study the Burmese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Larkin has given conflicting accounts of her early years: in 2010, she told New Statesman that she has lived in Thailand her whole life. She has been visiting Burma since around the year 2000. Here she covers the military dictatorship that rules the country. She is known for her coverage of Myanmar and George Orwell's experience within it in her debut book, Finding George Orwell in Burma. Speaking to the Democratic Voice of Burma, Larkin stated that she began that book in 2002 and travelled back and forth between Bangkok and Myanmar over the next two or three years. The only way this could be accomplished at the time was by fraudulently using business visas that entitled her to stay in Myanmar for months at a time. As a cover story to hide her journalistic work in the country, she received business visas under the pretext of studying the Burmese language. Despite engaging a tutor and taking great pains to appear legitimate, she reported being followed by undercover police. Derived from a Kirkus review: A courageous, important examination of the bleak totalitarian state of Myanmar. It was known as Burma in the 1920s, when Orwell worked there as an officer of the British Imperial Police. The British were in the process of perfecting their reign of oppression in Burma, and much of Larkin's portrait traces the development of Orwell's social conscience through what he learned and witnessed. Though Burmese Days, Animal Farm and 1984 were all written by the time Burma became independent in 1948, these three novels "effectively tell the story of Burma's recent history, " she argues. Following in his footsteps three-quarters of a century later, Larkin traveled to Myanmar, nestled idyllically between India and Thailand, and uncovered uncanny parallels between its abysmal social and political conditions and Orwell's fictional depictions. Despite the façade it presents to the world of...