In one of the most intrepid travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling 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 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 police states, where the term “Orwellian” aptly describes the life endured by the country’s people. BACKCOVER: “A truer picture of authoritarianism than anyone has written since, perhaps, Orwell himself.”—Mother Jones
“Mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic . . . an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue.”—The New York Times
“Combining literary criticism with solid field reporting, [Larkin] captures the country at its best and, more often, its worst.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“[A] sobering, journalistic memoir . . . A disquieting profile of a country and its people.”—Newsweek
Emma Larkin is the pseudonym for an American journalist who was born and raised in Asia, studied the Burmese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and covers Asia widely in her journalism from her base in Bangkok. She has been visiting Burma since the mid-1990s.
这个故事很流行:缅甸有这么一个传说:有一条恶龙,每年要求村庄献祭一个处女,每年这个村庄都会有一个少年英雄去与恶龙搏斗,但无人生还。又一个英雄出发时,有人悄悄尾随。龙穴铺满金银财宝,英雄用剑刺死恶龙,然后坐在尸身上,看着闪烁的珠宝,慢慢地长出鳞片、尾巴和触角...
评分书所记录的内容,是一个极佳的纽带,连接奥威尔时代的殖民缅甸与奥威尔语言之下的极权缅甸,值得我们反思帝国主义与极权主义的关联与本质差别。虽然知道缅甸是军人独裁国家,但确实没有深入了解过这个国家的历史与人民生活状况,毕竟在亚洲,远一点有东西朝鲜两朵奇葩竞相争艳...
评分这篇书评所遭遇的,恰是对本书最好的评论。 国人向来喜欢看国际新闻,并给以羡慕或庆幸的褒贬,同时不屑于那些只关心身边事的某些发达国家人民。国人对国内新闻事件的褒贬,基本如出一辙条件反射似地因昨天、今天、明天所看到的消息而愤怒于时时完全对立的双方。不及真相揭开,...
评分 评分#阅读时光#《在缅甸寻找乔治·奥威尔》 辅助材料:电影《昂山素季》(吕克贝松导演);《缅甸岁月》(作者乔治·奥威尔) 在读这本书之前,对缅甸的历史和现在其实并没有什么了解,这十几年来缅甸发生了天翻地覆的变化。这本书的作者美国记者艾玛·拉金于20世纪90年代在缅甸旅...