Finding George Orwell in Burma
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Narrated by:
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Emily Durante
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By:
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Emma Larkin
About this listen
Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she has come to know all too well the many ways this police state can be described as "Orwellian". The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. The connection between George Orwell and Burma is not simply metaphorical, of course; Orwell's mother was born in Burma, and he was shaped by his experiences there as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. Both his first novel, Burmese Days, and the novel he left unfinished upon his death were set in Burma. And then there is the place of Orwell's work in Burma today: Larkin found it a commonplace observation in Burma that Orwell did not write one book about the country but three - the other two being Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmeseman if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet."
Finding George Orwell in Burma is the story of the year Larkin spent traveling across this shuttered police state, using the life and work of Orwell as her guide. Traveling from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places Orwell worked and lived and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its network of spies and informers.
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Emma Larkin is the pseudonym for an American journalist born in Asia who has been traveling through Burma off and on for almost two decades. The pseudonym is necessary to protect her safety within the county, allowing her to continue to report on the ruling military junta and the citizens whose freedom continues to be crushed under this oppressive regime. George Orwell is the pseudonym for Eric Blair, a young man whose time in the British Imperial Police gave him an intimate knowledge of Burmese life that ultimately contributed to his fame as a writer of books that oppose totalitarianism. Emily Durante is Emily Durante's real name, and she has been narrating audiobooks for over 10 years, including both of Emma Larkin's books on Burma.
In this first book, Larkin charts a course through the country based on landmarks and people that are significant in the life of George Orwell. Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days, is actually only one of four major works to which Larkin continually refers. As Burma is on intellectual lockdown, it is a clear influence on Orwell's ideas of governance and censorship in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The novel Orwell was working on when he died was also set in Burma. Durante reports Larkin's observations as objectively as possible. Her voice work is detached but factually astounding, appropriately emotive but not overly polemical. Like Orwell's deep characterizations, Durante lets Larkin's prose speak for itself. The moral of the story becomes all too obvious and the outcomes descend with a resounding inevitability.
For those not familiar with Orwell's work, this book stands alone by providing enough background and appropriate quotation to keep the flow of information both interesting and logical (but beware of spoilers here, if you intend to read Orwell's work in future). For die-hard Orwell fans, the very many parallels to modern Burma will be a striking new way of reading your old favorites. And no matter how much or how little you know about Burma, Durante's approach to Larkin's approach to Orwell's approach to Burma will shed a unique and much-needed light on the secretive police state through an incredibly rare first-hand account. Megan Volpert
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- By: Kapka Kassabova
- Narrated by: Emily Gray
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and grew up under the drab, muddy, gray mantle of one of communism’s most mindlessly authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka’s childhood and return explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
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Good start, but ended up not liking the author
- By Giselle on 11-02-21
By: Kapka Kassabova
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When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
- A Memoir of Africa
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.
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Worth the listen.
- By SEE on 09-06-21
By: Peter Godwin
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The Cut Out Girl
- A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
- By: Bart van Es
- Narrated by: Bart van Es
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: A young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war and after? So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life and change it.
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a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
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The Fear
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in what’s now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returns to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe’s brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to “dance on Mugabe’s political grave” in the wake of the tyrant’s defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risks his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe’s ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call “The Fear.”
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Read at your own Risk!
- By Jim on 05-05-15
By: Peter Godwin
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Black Dog of Fate
- A Memoir
- By: Peter Balakian
- Narrated by: Peter Balakian
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
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All the Lives We Never Lived
- By: Anuradha Roy
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
By: Anuradha Roy
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City of Thorns
- Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp
- By: Ben Rawlence
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of Northern Kenya, Dadaab is a city like no other. Its buildings are made from mud, sticks, or plastic; its entire economy is gray; and its citizens survive on rations and luck. Over the course of four years, Ben Rawlence became a firsthand witness to a strange and desperate limbo-land, getting to know many of those who have come there seeking sanctuary.
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Compelling but dry
- By Megan on 09-16-16
By: Ben Rawlence
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Stasiland
- Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
- By: Anna Funder
- Narrated by: Denica Fairman
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”
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A Great Achievement
- By Sil A. on 08-11-21
By: Anna Funder
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Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
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The Naked Don't Fear the Water
- An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees
- By: Matthieu Aikins
- Narrated by: Nick Nikon
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this extraordinary book, an acclaimed young war reporter chronicles a dangerous journey on the smuggler’s road to Europe, accompanying his friend, an Afghan refugee, in search of a better future.
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Great story, horrible narration
- By AB on 02-25-22
By: Matthieu Aikins
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Street of Eternal Happiness
- Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road
- By: Rob Schmitz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace's Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city's sleek skyline a brighter future, and a chance to rewrite their destinies.
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Deserving of better audio
- By Rachael on 02-19-18
By: Rob Schmitz
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Sahara
- By: Michael Palin
- Narrated by: Michael Palin
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Abridged
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Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet.
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A wonderful journey.
- By David on 05-22-05
By: Michael Palin
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The Upstairs Wife
- An Intimate History of Pakistan
- By: Rafia Zakaria
- Narrated by: Rafia Zakaria
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country's former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi--Bhutto's birthplace and Pakistan's other great metropolis--Rafia Zakaria's family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death.
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Mixed feelings
- By Darcy on 10-06-17
By: Rafia Zakaria
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A Russian Journal
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Steinbeck and Capa's account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune.
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Extremely Interesting
- By Jean on 12-04-14
By: John Steinbeck
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North Korea Undercover
- Inside the World's Most Secret State
- By: John Sweeney
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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North Korea is like no other tyranny on Earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and Big Brother is always watching. It is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Huge factories with no staff or electricity, hospitals with no patients, uniformed child soldiers, and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ - the Demilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins - are all framed by a relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers. Free speech is an illusion: one word out of line, and the gulag awaits.
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Highly listenable, humorous and enlightening
- By Kevin Stokes on 09-09-15
By: John Sweeney
What listeners say about Finding George Orwell in Burma
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Chase
- 10-29-18
Enlightening
I found this book a great listen as I was traveling through Burma myself, and would recommend it to others who may never make it to this country. It certainly puts things in perspective.
I also enjoyed the thread of Orwell’s books throughout, and learned quite a bit (as an engineering student I never managed to take college classes where such themes were discussed and I greatly enjoyed listening to the authors analysis of the unintentional trilogy of 1984, Animal Farm and Burmese Days)
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- Melissa
- 12-15-16
Finding George Orwell in Burma
I really enjoyed listening to the book and finding more out about the country. I have an interest in the country because an uncle of mine lived there right after WWII and told me about the country and his experiences. His stories fascinated me. One of my daughters travelled there two years ago and added more stories of life in Burma.
I probably have more interest in the country than most people so really enjoyed learning more about it. Others probably wouldn't have the interest I have and may not enjoy the book as much.
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- Suzi
- 10-01-17
Superb Myanmar stories
Having just returned from northern Thailand, and having crossed the border into Myanmar for a few hours, I was saddened to see the visible poverty in Myanmar. I lived in East Pakistan/Bangladesh as a young child with my family. I always wanted to visit Burma, our neighbor. Emma has done an outstanding job of capturing the various peoples of that country, the history, the conflicts, and the sources of those conflicts. I am astonished at her courage in exploring during a time of censorship and tyranny, and her ability to show us in the slap of a thigh, or a change of subject, all that cannot be said. By her following Orwell's time there, it gives us the ability to look at the pendulum of life in that country in the recent past and gauge it as it has swung into the present. Who would have thought Myanmar would still be slogging through many of the same troubles. The problems are complex. The cultural conflicts pronounced. I feel for this beautiful people, as we know their hearts seek peace and some level of fair infrastructure.
Bravo Emma. You have given us true insight on so many levels.
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- Adderburycat
- 10-24-16
Great book. Awful 'automated' narration
This book was fascinating, but I almost gave up because of the lifeless automated narration of the reader, as well as multiple mispronunciations. Is it really that hard to find someone that can read?
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- sara
- 10-01-19
Interesting history of Myanmar
This book was interesting, horrifying, and entertaining. I hope my own trip to Myanmar won’t be like this one.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Roger
- 09-21-10
Orwell's Horrors Brought to Life
This book has 3 intertwined themes: it’s part travelogue, describing the sights, sounds and smells of different parts of Burma; it’s part literary criticism, exploring the influence of Orwell’s experiences in Burma on his writing; and its main theme is using Orwell’s writings to illustrate the horrendous conditions in Burma today.
In expounding this main theme, Ms. Larkin draws out the eerie confluence of 3 factors: Orwell’s having worked in, and written about, Burma; his chilling novels about life under authoritarianism; and the realities of such rule in Burma today. Larkin does a good job of using Orwell’s writings to bring descriptions of life under authoritarian rule home on a personal level.
At times, the 3 themes get in the way of each other, but, at others, the contrasts between the natural beauty and current reality highlight Larkin’s descriptions of how bad things are.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Nathan
- 04-17-11
Great Book
This book was absolutely excellent. It takes the reader on a trip through Burma while giving the information needed to empathize with the oppression that the Burmese face. It follows the path of George Orwell and frequently uses quotes from 1984 and Burmese Days.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Nicole
- 06-18-20
Worth every penny-very good audio book
An unassuming and well written history/travel log with an unpremeditated chilling warning for all in these strange days.
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- Allison
- 06-04-12
Not what I expected
What did you love best about Finding George Orwell in Burma?
The characters were described vividly.
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
I don't think that the story could have been changed, it just didn't connect George Orwell and Burma in the way that the author had intended.
What does Emily Durante bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
The accents of the Burmese people.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No.
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- A. M.
- 03-01-17
An Expert on Burma and Orwell
Any additional comments?
I was impressed when the staff at the Katha Hotel in Katha, Burma said they knew Emma Larkin well. After all, she stayed there for about two years researching her subject. It's hard to beat a Burmese-speaking literary expert on this subject. And she weaves together the plight that is forever Burma into her research. I learned a lot about Orwell and Burma.
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