Product Details
The Burma Chronicles

The Burma Chronicles
By Guy Delisle

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Product Description

A timely and incisive portrait of a country on the tipping point
 
After developing his acclaimed style of firsthand reporting with his bestselling graphic novels Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Guy Delisle is back with The Burma Chronicles. In this country notorious for its use of concealment and isolation as social control—where scissors-wielding censors monitor the papers, the de facto leader of the opposition has been under decade-long house arrest, insurgent-controlled regions are effectively cut off from the world, and rumor is the most reliable source of current information—he turns his gaze to the everyday for a sense of the big picture.

Delisle’s deft and recognizable renderings take note of almsgiving rituals, daylong power outages, and rampant heroin use in outlying regions, in this place where catastrophic mismanagement and ironhanded rule come up against profound resilience of spirit, expatriate life ambles along, and nongovernmental organizations struggle with the risk of co-option by the military junta. The Burma Chronicles is drawn with a minimal line, and interspersed with wordless vignettes and moments of Delisle’s distinctive slapstick humor.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #28588 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-09-30
  • Released on: 2008-09-30
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 208 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
DeLisle's (Pyongyang) latest exploration of Asian life is probably the best possible argument against the ruling junta in the embattled (and now nearly obliterated) nation also known as Myanmar. Readers will find themselves initially shocked and surprised at the country's differences, then awestruck by the new traditions and finally in love with and yet enraged by Burmese daily life. DeLisle's wife is a French aid worker with Medecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), leaving DeLisle alone with their son, Louis, and his cartooning. DeLisle's style is simple but highly eloquent, and he tells more about the depth and breadth of the Burmese experience in the book's little nonfiction vignettes than he ever could in an artificially imposed narrative. Burma Chronicles is not merely a neat piece of cartooning but a valuable artifact of a repressive and highly destructive culture that curtails free speech with unparalleled tenacity. Like Joe Sacco's The Fixer and Safe Area Gorazde, DeLisle uses cartooning to dig into a story that demands to be told. (Sept.)
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From The New Yorker
In previous graphic memoirs, Delisle, a Qu�b�cois animator, has documented in spare, whimsical black-and-white line drawings his visits to North Korea and China. Here, he turns his hand to another authoritarian Asian regime, Burma, where he spent a year after the 2004 tsunami with his wife and their infant son. Drawn with charming simplicity and brio, the book mixes traditional travelogue with glimmers of the unexpected, as when Delisle notes that in the local newspaper �some articles contain nothing but a list of officials present at a given event,� or discovers a lit light bulb placed in a drawer to keep paper dry during monsoon season. Delisle takes a whimsical approach but also logs political realities�the increasing difficulty of getting travel permits for humanitarian work, the abrupt banishment of foreign videos from stores.
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Review

Praise for Guy Delisle:

“Like last year’s Pyongyang . . . Shenzhen is a casual, dryly witty series of observations . . . A thoroughly engaging memoir.” —The New York Times Book Review

Customer Reviews

Exile In Guyville4
This is Delise's richest book yet, and probably his most detailed. It's another travel journal, similar to Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China, this time with a Doctors Without Borders-style group in Burma. Even though his drawings are deliciously simple and compact, with his pen, Delise evokes a real sense of place and the culture, character, and quirks of the people. I love his work.

Great book; wonderful drawings5
Once I started this book, I couldn't stop sneaking off to read it. It actually sucked me in and my whole world for 3 days was Burma, in black and white,

Not much else to say except that it is really like a blog with drawings and humor peppered here and there. Very easy to digest, and would be a great addition to any PoliSci course or literature course looking to go multi-modal or just change it up a bit.

I loved the fact that the hardcover does NOT have a (useless and gratuitous) dustjacket. The image that would be on the dustjacket is actually the hard cover.

Welcome to Myanmar...5
Burma Chronicles is the third book I have by Guy Delisle. I also read Pyongyang and Shenzhen, which were both interesting in their own way. Burma Chronicles is, I think, the overall best. He has learned how to deliver the humor, the sadness, the landscape of another place, another country, giving us the feel in both images and words. From him I learned about the Noble Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, about how the nation is run, about the water festival and many other things like malaria.
In fact the last few weeks Burma...excuse me, Myanmar, was in the news BECAUSE of that American who ended up staying with Aung San Suu Kyi. So I have gained knowledge that helped me understand the morning news. Amazing! A comic book helping me to learn. I hope he writes and draws more about the places he has been.