The Nylon Hotel

Buying Rubies and Following the Circus in Myanmar

Description

“A ground-level description of the country .... told as a fractal of comings and goings.”
Jerry Graham

“Circling Myanmar, Mandalay, and the Nylon Hotel over three decades, Daniel Ehrlich opens a series of windows onto people and places held captive in time. Through beautifully crafted vignettes of coming and going, meeting and waiting, we are invited to get to know a prince among sidecar drivers, an anglophile living on the banks of the Irrawaddy, a long-haired freedom-fighting musician, an octogenarian English teacher who might have been a princess, and the inventor who built a helicopter out of teak. Each story, in its own way, reflects the tragedy of a country trapped under military rule. But each contains human possibilities, fragile hope for the future, and connections to deeper traditions in which darkness is 
a necessary counterpart to the light. Ehrlich writes with warmth, insight, and a good deal of humor. This book should be required reading for all who are friends of Burma and who wish a better and freer future for the Burmese people.”
Richard Axelby, SOAS, Univ. of London

“A delight … free of pretense, with enough digressions touching on weightier issues to make up for much of its light tones, and in the end I really think it has captured in words the magic of the place.”
Lilian Handlin, Historian, Harvard Univ.