Aung san suu kyi books biography book

I confess: my admiration is endless. It is especially important in South and Southeast Asia, where many women have risen to power due to family backgrounds and have not lived up to the ideals of freedom and democracy, that Aung San Suu Kyi provides a different model of leadership. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! About the author Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations. Jesper Bengtsson. Read more about this author Read less about this author. Customer reviews. How customer reviews and ratings work Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon. Review this product Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Images in this review. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. I don't know what she believes. She just rubbed me the wrong way. This was probably not helped at all by the fact that this is simply a terribly written book.

I lost respect for all the people who blurbed about it like Archbishop Desmond Tutu who said 'Masterly He must have been blinded by the name of the subject matter and didn't bother actually reading the manuscript because this book is a travesty. It's incredibly difficult to follow, it's organized badly, it jumps through time like a drunk sailor.

It starts out with her father, then jumps forward in time to her first political speech, the backtracks to her childhood, then jumps to her first imprisonment, then back to her mother's life, then back to her political campaigning, then to her marriage, then to life in Burma in the s, then back to the 80s. It's incredibly difficult to keep track of the timeline.

The book is full of incredibly irrelevant details. Details that only reinforce my impression of Aung San Suu Kyi as No, that is definitely not the word Superficially strong and dedicated, and then inside quick to lose interest and wander off to some other thing The opposite of industrious. Quick to blame other people. Why do I find her superficial?

The first half of the book is excerpts from the journals kept of her political campaigning, and those journal excerpts are full of descriptions of what she was wearing.

Aung san suu kyi books biography book

I kid you not. What she was wearing. Now, this could be because that's what her confidant was interested in. But at the same aung san suu kyi books biography book, thanks to these entries we now have written down for posterity that she wore a different outfit to every political speech on that journey. And that she carried with her name brand French lipstick, sandals, and perfume.

That she hated being sprayed by cheap perfume by the adoring Burmese populace. That's entirely too much focus on appearance for my taste. I mean, granted, appearance is very important, if you don't look the part of a leader, people won't follow you. It's just the focus of the book is there. Surely there were more important issues?!

What were this woman's beliefs?! I still don't know! Okay, but you kind of have to explain how those concepts apply to her political belief. The author at one point sneers at the 'superficial understanding of Buddhism in the west' but then never went on to explain anything about Buddhism!! And wearing name brand lipstick while her people were literally starving to death?!

That makes my blood boil, I'm not going to lie. When your people wear the same clothes for days on end and you change every day, I cannot help but see you as an elite of the elite. Maybe that's what the Burmese people wanted from her. Maybe they wanted a queen, maybe she was just responding to their expectations, but it seemed more like she was just a idealist elite who didn't even notice that she was living a life so far above those that she was with.

Blind to her own advantages. I sound like an SJW. I'm not saying that because she was privileged she was therefore bad. It just seems like that maybe a little bit of self-awareness would have been in order. But, then again, I may just be reading far too much into the discussion of lipstick and clothing and hair adornments and complaining because the mosquito net that people sacrificed to give her was too pink.

The part about being She got a useless degree in political science because her mother forced her to, so she didn't put any effort into it and scraped by. Then when she tried to apply for something more interesting like literature it was denied because of her prior record, then instead of acknowledging her own fault, she blames it on her mother and gives up on the literature degree.

Then she goes off to another degree, finds it too difficult and wanders off into something else. She decides to work for the UN, but doesn't like it either so wanders off again. I think that she did have strength of character to stick to her guns about bringing democracy to her country, but first she was like 'don't attack the junta' 'attack the junta' 'no tourism' 'yay tourism' 'no sanctions' 'yay sanctions'.

As for my opinion of the book after finding out about the Rohinga, let's just say I wasn't that surprised. Nonviolence is a good thing, and no one can say that Aung San Suu Kyi is not a courageous woman, she is. Anyone who can walk straight at people holding guns on her is incredibly courageous. But, I think there are other values besides nonviolence.

Transparency is one of them. Transparency about what you believe, about what your plans are, about what kind of negotiations are happening and with who. Transparency was a problem from the very beginning of her political activity. Another one that I think is important is being open to advice, it seems like she makes her decisions entirely on her own.

Her political rallies were her talking to a hundreds of thousands of people, but not a whole lot of her listening to them. I think those weaknesses are what have led to the issues today. Reading this book made me think about two biblical truths that are really true. The first is that "without council plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.

Maybe that's the fault of the junta who jailed everyone and made it so that she didn't have anyone to listen to and so she came to the opinion that she had only herself to depend on which led to the issues Burma is facing today where she has solidified power to herself and is trying to micromanage everything and doing it badly. The one that got me more was the verse in 1 Timothy "Do not lay hands upon anyone too hastily and thereby share responsibility for the sins of others; keep yourself free from sin.

All of the biographers including this one who describe her as 'pure' and 'ghandilike' and those who dare to speak against her as 'craven' 'cowards' 'traitorous' etc. It makes me think that biographers really should wait until someone's political career, and even maybe their life, is over before writing their accolades. Interview them by all means, gather information and research while they live, but wait for a bit afterwards to make sure that everything comes to life, then write a glowing eulogy if it's warranted.

But this glorification of living sainthood is a problem and that was the biggest thing I came away with from reading this book. There is no denying that Aung San Suu Kyi is a remarkable person and there is a fair amount of interesting detail. But the author has at times rather obscured this with gushing as her "delicate beauty" and the incessant references to her "fringe" and yes one of the chapters of the book is called "Super woman"!

By all means in journalism one has to support one's case and to represent what you write with facts and to always have catchy headings. But is Peter Popham writing a book or a very one sided long article for some "sensational" newspaper? I find Popham can't seem to distinguish between the two. So much is at stake here. The definition of democracy, how it is relevant to countries where the governor of the land was a king, a series of kings down through generations and not only that but a country that went from kingdom to being pressed into colonial yoke by some distant remote insipid monarch, George IV.

So does a transition from democracy work and can it? What democracy would it be regardless of such a thing were possible? Could it be like India as referenced in this book on more than one occasion where voting takes place, parties put themselves forward and then the most corrupt takes office and as in other "democratic" countries in the world the poor get poorer and the rich get richer?

The history of Burma is very much a myriad of intrigues, battles fought, won and lost, dreams created and shattered and myth and legend is rampant. Which I must add for those living under the yolk there is nothing good from a colonial power. Absolutely nothing! America may have been a colony once, however, it was the First Nations and Black people that felt what it really meant to be brutalised and what it meant to be subservient to a foreign power.

The families that came on the Mayflower had no idea what it meant to be slaves to colonialists. To say otherwise is an outright lie. Having had past generations of my family in Burma as part of the invading force I can say without hesitation no good came of the British being in Burma. So what of Aung San and his desire for an independent Burma? There is the current mantra "anybody is better than this guy You can't vote for someone just because they are not the guy in power right at this moment.

You need to know who you are dealing with before you invest something in that person. As it was Aung San didn't know what he was dealing with when he signed up with the Japanese. Japan may share the same part of the world and they were keen to broker a deal with Burma to rid Asia of the British, however, neighbours make strange bed fellows.

As history showed Japan wasn't interested in helping out Burma for independence, all empires are hungry for land and will grab it by any means necessary. But it could be seen that Aung San was hopping between bed fellows to get what he wanted most, at any cost. Up to a point he got it. Burma became independent of both British interests and Japanese, however, that resulted in the death of Aung San.

By this time he had made himself a dynamic personality and like all leaders of movements, he was the one and only to be able to achieve what he did. Aung San Suu Kyi has inherited that from her father. Whether intentionally or not. Popham writes frequently how the people of Burma see her as a reincarnation of a Bodhisattva. She alone can save Burma through their eyes.

So what aung sans suu kyi books biography book that mean? If she dies before her time or even if not there will surely be another vacuum in Burma? History has shown that when many rely on one person and they die everything tumbles. For many years all eyes were Burma and wondering who this woman was? Popham has that she described herself once as an Oxford housewife.

No identity whatsoever, she was married to a house, somewhere in Oxford and had two children. Includes her response to the Rohingya crisis and discusses underlying motivations. Explores the public and private roles of her parents the national hero Aung San and his wife, Khin Kyi. Share this item:. Pin It. Default Title - Aung San and the Struggle for Burmese Independence Civilized Woman, A: M.

Boonlua Debyasuvarn and the Thai Twentieth Century What drives her to make such enormous personal sacrifices for her country? First placed under house arrest by the military junta inshe spent fifteen of the subsequent twenty-one years in captivity, separated from her husband and two children. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize inshe saw her reputation and her international stature grow the longer she was under house arrest.

Upon her release in Novembershe immediately took up her work with the democracy movement and proved that she remains the most important political force in Burma. Genres Biography Nonfiction Politics. Loading interface About the author. Jesper Bengtsson 11 books. Write a Review. Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews. Search review text. Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews. Out of the 15 chapters, only a few are written about Aung San Suu Kyi's life or upbringing. However, it's still a nice book and offer an insider view of Burma and what the people went through. The report was also quite a detailed one. Myers Mystore. Good read. Did not think it aged well though.

Gut geschrieben und aufgebaut. Stellenweise trotzdem etwas langatmig. Gerard Guzzo. Thoroughly detailed about the plight of Burma over the decades and her role in it.