Biographie de l'auteur
Thant Myint-U is a senior officer in the executive office of the United Nations Secretary-General. He has worked for the UN peacekeeping operations in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia. He was educated at Harvard and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was subsequently made a Fellow. He is also the author of The Making of Modern Burma.
Présentation de l'éditeur
In "The River of Lost Footsteps", Thant Myint-U tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family's history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and appalling. His maternal grandfather, U Thant, rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the UN secretary-general in the 1960s. And on his father's side, the author is descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma's Court of Ava for nearly two centuries. Through their stories and others, he portrays Burma's rise and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through the decades of British colonialism, the devastation of World War II, and a sixty-year civil war that continues today and is the longest-running war anywhere in the world.
