Beginning with an unusual Burmese monk who keeps a cell phone in his robes and negotiates with Thai border police regarding arms smuggled to the insurgent army fighting Burma's military regime, Marshall recounts his adventures in Burma over a five-year period, inspired by the diaries of late-19th-century Scottish adventurer Sir George Scott (The Burman). Scott furthered the interests of the British colonials (aka the trouser people) by mapping and photographing remote areas of Burma. As Marshall, chief Asian correspondent for British Esquire
and coauthor of The Cult at the End of the World, follows in Scott's footsteps, he provides an informed history and his own observations of a country where most people "have never known true peace or true freedom." Burma is ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, and its democracy movement is symbolized by the house arrest in Rangoon of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. Marshall retraces Scott's steps from Rangoon to Mandalay in 1880, when the despotic rule of King Thibaw, a reign that mirrors current political conditions, was coming to an end. All of the author's adventures will hold readers' interest, but his difficult journeys to tribal villages of the Shan Plateau, through drug-trafficking territory where head-hunting only ended in the 1970s, are particularly enthralling. Although Marshall's sardonic humor may not appeal to all, this is a valuable firsthand look at areas and living conditions in a country relatively unknown in the West. Avid readers of travel literature will love it. (Mar. 31)
