Seattle book talk: essays from Burma and far afield

Dear Blue Ear Books community,

If you’re in or near Seattle, please join us next Friday, April 10, at the wonderful Couth Buzzard bookstore in the Greenwood neighborhood for a talk by Edith Mirante, author of Where the Mithuns Are: Essays on War, Art and Beasts, published last fall by Blue Ear Books. From the back cover:

In these exhilarating essays, Chatwinesque adventurer Edith Mirante reveals remote Chinland, pandemic Yellowstone, Manzanar, Cahokia, Heizer’s City. Interwoven are themes of Indigenous resistance, land rights, wildness, art in times of conflict, the guns and tanks of Burma. Bison, elk, muskox and mithuns roam. There could be heroes: World War II artists Anthony Gross and Clive Branson, labor firebrand Karl Yoneda. There will be revolution, and enchantment.

A couple gushing endorsements of Edith and her work:

“These essays provide wonderful snapshots of Burma, art and history. They visit parts of Burma that we don’t usually read about or see in the news. I found them fascinating and enlightening.”
— Zoya Phan, author of Undaunted: My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma

“If ever you wondered how to connect Asian ungulates to antifascist fighters, Mississippian earth mounds to desert land art, Manzanar to the wars in Burma, past and present: look no further. Edith Mirante has illuminated the path with contagious curiosity and wry humor, lighting out on this quintessentially anarchist quest for nothing less than truth, freedom, and beauty.”
— Mark Sundeen, author of Delusions + Grandeur and The Man Who Quit Money

Here’s my own endorsement: Edith is a longtime friend of mine - I’ve known her more than thirty years - but more than that, she’s a role model, not only as a tireless human rights advocate but above all as a traveling writer, a payer of attention to the contemporary world and a serious reader of history. I first met Edith in 1993 in Berkeley, California. En route to seeking my fortune as a journalist based in Bangkok, I happened to see a flyer on a telephone pole advertising a talk Edith was giving on the UC campus, sponsored by Amnesty International. Her first book, Burmese Looking Glass, had just been published.

All these years later, I still consider Burmese Looking Glass a legitimate classic of modern Asian travel. One memorable passage gives any thoughtful reader plenty to reflect on about how the past, as William Faulkner put it, is not even past:

The longer I spent around the Burma war zone, the more interested I became in World War II’s China-Burma-India theater of operations. “The war in Burma is World War II,” I often told people who required a simple explanation of what it was all about. “The Karens and other tribes backed the British and Americans against the Japanese invaders. The Burmese had helped the Japanese, thinking it would be a good way to get rid of the British colonists. The war supposedly ended. The Japanese left, the Americans left, even the British left - but the Burmese and the ethnic minorities kept right on fighting.” Burma had always had ethnic rivalries, but outright warfare had stopped until World War II brought it all boiling to the surface again.

As the reader of Burmese Looking Glass becomes, from one page to the next, vicariously more deeply involved, Edith’s personal story and the story of Burma become inexorably - even exhilaratingly - enmeshed.

If this sounds like something very much in the spirit of what Blue Ear Books tries to do, that’s not a coincidence. As I said, I’ve long taken Edith as a role model, even to the extent of modeling my own book Alive and Well in Pakistan in large part on Burmese Looking Glass.

I’m immensely proud, all these years later, to have the privilege of being Edith’s publisher. The essays in Where the Mithuns Are - Mithuns, as you’ll learn (as I did), are a semi-domesticated breed of bovine native to parts of Southeast Asia - are richly Mirantean in approach and execution.

Edith is also impressively well read and a wonderfully engaging speaker. Join us at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, April 10, at the Couth Buzzard, 8310 Greenwood Avenue N, Seattle.

Ethan