The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

What do we really know about Burma and its history? And what can Burma's past tell us about its present and even its future? For nearly two decades Western governments and a growing activist community have been frustrated in their attempts to bring about a freer and more democratic Burma--through sanctions and tourist boycotts--only to see an apparent slide toward even harsher dictatorship.

Now Thant Myint-U tells the story of modern Burma, and the story of his own family, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Through his prominent family's stories and those of others, he portrays Burma's rise and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through a sixty-year civil war that continues today--the longest-running war anywhere in the world.

The River of Lost Footsteps is a work at once personal and global, a "brisk, vivid history" (Philip Delves Broughton, The Wall Street Journal) that makes Burma accessible and enthralling.

Author: Thant Myint-U
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 01/08/2008
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.70w x 1.07d
ISBN: 9780374531164

Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 02/14/2008 pg. 36
New York Times Book Review 03/09/2008 pg. 28
New York Review of Books 06/05/2014 pg. 54

About the Author

Thant Myint-U, born in 1966, was educated at Harvard and Cambridge. He has served on United Nations peacekeeping operations in Cambodia and Bosnia, and was more recently the head of policy planning in the UN Department of Political Affairs.

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