The Burma Spring: Aung San Suu Kyi and the New Struggle for the Soul of a Nation

Veteran journalist and former U.S. State Department speechwriter Pederson (writing, Southern Methodist Univ.; The Lost Apostle) tells the story of Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and the country she hopes one day to lead, Burma. Although focused predominantly on telling Suu Kyi's story—she remained under house arrest for most of the years from 1989 to 2010—Pederson devotes space to contextualizing her subject's struggle for democracy within the history of postcolonial Burma and detailing the atrocities and political miscalculations committed by the generals in charge, thus making Suu Kyi's quiet defiance of the military junta that much more remarkable. One of the more fascinating disclosures readers will learn about is the extent to which Laura Bush (who wrote the foreword to the book) kept Suu Kyi and Burma on the agenda in policy circles within the Bush Administration.