Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World
Author: Jean Shinoda Bolen
Mother is calling! This polemic, infused with Jungian examination and new age theories, explores the psychological, spiritual and scientific aspects of women as collaborators for change. Now available in paperback edition.
What People Are Saying
Isabel Allende
"This is the most inspiring and optimistic book I've read in years. It tells how women working together can bring us peace and save the planet. Jean Shinoda Bolen invites us all to join the next, most powerful wave of the women's movement. Count me in!"
Desmond Tutu
"Jean Shinoda Bolen's Urgent Message from Mother is a book whose time has come. Our earth home and all forms of life in it are at grave risk. We men have had our turn and made a proper mess of things. We need women to save us. I pray that many will read Bolen's work and be inspired then to act appropriately. Time is running out"
Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Prisoner of Conscience
Author: Justin Wintl
"The trouble is that I know too much."—Aung San Suu Kyi
Burma is a country where, as one senior UN official puts it, "just to turn your head can mean imprisonment or death." Aung San Suu Kyi is considered to be Burma's best hope for freedom, and, because of her unwavering commitment to nonviolent resistance to the country's brutal military junta, she has been under house arrest since 1989.
Elected Prime Minister, she was prevented from taking office, but despite failing health, vilification at the hands of the Burmese media, and actual imprisonment in one of the world's most appalling jails, Suu Kyi has persevered in a campaign of nonviolent protest as unflagging as those of Gandhi, King, and Mandela, which earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
In Perfect Hostage, the most thorough biography of Suu Kyi to date, Justin Wintle tells both the story of the Burmese people and the story of an ordinary person who became a hero. 43 b/w photographs.
The New York Times - Seth Mydans
This thoroughly researched biography sets out to explicate the personality of a leader who found herself by chance (though also by birth) at the head of her country's struggling pro-democracy movement. By delving into her childhood and her years as a student at Oxford University, Wintle, a journalist and the author of books on Vietnam, finds the seeds of her commanding personality, her straight-backed moral certainty and a "fierce purity" that gave her, as one friend said, "the knack of putting one on one's best behavior"…the book presents readers with the complexity of Myanmar's history and its present tensions, and of Aung San Suu Kyi herself, who is described as both flexible and inflexible, ready to cooperate with her oppressors but unbending in calling for international sanctions against them.
Publishers Weekly
Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi seems both the least likely and the most natural person to become "the world's best-known prisoner of conscience," and Wintle's thoroughly engrossing book magnificently illustrates both sides of this elusive yet very public figure. Her education at Oxford and self-effacing demeanor did not prime her for the life of a dissident. Behind her reserve and English veneer, however, was a resolutely stubborn streak and a family life steeped in politics. Wintle's research has been prodigious; he brings encyclopedic knowledge of just about anything that can be linked to Suu Kyi. In rendering his subject, he weaves in Burmese history and folklore, Buddhism, Indian politics and portraits of Suu Kyi's intimates and enemies; that he delivers all this in an absorbing fashion is a marvel. Entertaining and instructive, charming and persuasive, Wintle mingles sober history and gossipy chat. Obscure political in-fighting is made comprehensible; unfamiliar colonial history is made accessible. Still, Wintle (Romancing Vietnam; Furious Interiors) can skewer in a sentence ("About Sanjay [Gandhi] there was something palpably uncouth, while the vainglorious Rajiv [Gandhi] was lacking in intelligence"). Suu Kyi's developing political activism, her house arrests, her honors are delineated in draftsman's detail that Wintle manages to keep vibrant. He is a biographer smitten with his subject, who cares enough to note the smallest detail, such as that Suu Kyi prefers Simenon's Maigret to Christie's Poirot. In making the reader care about the smallest things, Wintle makes the reader really care about the big thing-that "the world's best-known prisoner of conscience" is notfree. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Harold M. Otness - Library Journal
There have been several publications by and about Myanmar's 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Suu Kyi, whose work for democracy in her country (formerly Burma) has placed her under house arrest in Rangoon for much of the last 20 years. Wintle (New Makers of Modern Culture), a British author who has written extensively on Asia, here compiles an impressively thorough account of Suu Kyi's life, brought up to date with a postscript to cover the Monks' Revolt of November 2007. He sets that uprising and its suppression against the recent tragic history of Myanmar. Unable to meet with his subject, he has drawn upon a wide variety of sources to present a convincingly sympathetic portrait of a woman considered the most courageous of human rights advocates. Wintle explores the network of international relationships and the global economic aspirations of China and India to show why Suu Kyi's struggles are more than just a problem of her backward country and why the West has not been able to resolve the matter. One can hope that Suu Kyi will eventually be able to write and publish her own book. In the meantime, Wintle's book will be sought out in both public and academic libraries.
Table of Contents:
Illustrations xiPrincipal Burmese Personae xiii
Glossary (including acronyms) xv
Map xx
Prologue xxiii
Land and Father
At the Shwedagon 3
The Shwe Pyidaw 9
After the Mongols 18
The Salami Wars 27
British Burma 41
Saturday's Child 50
From Campus Oddball to National Hero (aged 20) 63
'1300': The Year That Never Was 74
Desperate Times, Desperate Remedies 81
Bo Teza: Reluctant Collaborator 92
Snakes, Ladders and a Wife 104
Old Enemies, New Friends 115
Getting There 124
The Daughter
19th July 141
The Golden Rain is Brown 151
An Indian Idyll: The 'Ugly One' Takes Wing 162
The Daughter of Some or Other Burmese General 172
Things Fall Apart 181
Between Three Continents 196
Thimphu, Kyoto, Simla 209
Sixteen Months
Number One and Number Nine 225
White Bridge, Red Bridge 239
8.8.88 249
Shadow of the HundredFlowers 265
Digging In 277
Squaring Up 287
Suu Kyi's Tightrope 298
Danubyu 308
The Door Slams Shut 317
The Political Madonna
Egg on the Generals' Faces 329
Soldiers at the Gate 341
Famously Alone 354
Freedom on a Leash 370
The Saddest Thing 385
The Widowed Road to Depayin 397
Back to Mandalay 413
Postscript: The Monks' Revolt 430
Acknowledgements 439
Sources/Further Reading/Websites 441
Index 449
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