Struggle for Freedom - Aung San Suu Kyi : A Biography

Just like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of Burma's democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi has become an icon for freedom - throughout the world, she is associated with a peaceful struggle for democracy and human rights. But what is she really like? What drives her to make such enormous personal sacrifices for her country? In Struggle for Freedom, journalist and author Jesper Bengtsson draws a portrait of one of the most most talked-about political personalities of our times. He describes her background as the daughter of Burma's liberation hero Aung San, the years in England and New York and her return to Burma in the 1980s. The military junta placed her under house arrest as early as 1989. Yet she remained as a uniting factor for Burma's democracy movement. Internationally her fame grew the longer she was in house arrest. Bengtsson demonstrates that Aung Sun Suu Kyi's magnetism is a matter of charisma and courage, but also that she personifies one of the major questions of our era: what conditions are necessary for the emergence of democracy out of profoundly authoritarian systems?