cover image Burmese Looking Glass: A Human Rights Adventure and a Jungle Revolution

Burmese Looking Glass: A Human Rights Adventure and a Jungle Revolution

Edith T. Mirante. Grove Press, $22.95 (333pp) ISBN 978-0-8021-1457-0

New Jersey-born Mirante moved to Thailand in 1982 to paint, but found herself visiting the Thai/Burmese border, where she became caught up in the rebel struggle against Burma's repressive government, the same government that has kept Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest since 1989. Mirante's chronicle of his six years as an adventurer and ``human rights pirate''--ending before the recent upsurge of protest in Burma--contains lively descriptions and vivid anecdotes, but it never gains coherence; its endless references to names and reconstructed quotes suggest the meandering tone of an expanded journal. With her tattoo, taste for rock music and romance with a photojournalist from New Zealand, Mirante is an interesting character. She is also a brave one, surviving arrest twice in Thailand, taking temporary jobs back home to finance a human rights survey and launching a campaign against the Burmese government's use of a U.S.-supplied herbicide as chemical warfare. But her book would aid the ``refined and noble people'' of Burma more if she had shaped her adventures into a tighter narrative. (Jan.)