Aung San Suu Kyi, Voice of Hope: Conversations with Alan Clements

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Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize Laureate, mother of two, and devout Buddhist, is one of the most inspiring examples of spiritually infused politics and fearless leadership that the world has ever seen. Daughter of the martyred Burmese national hero who negotiated Burma s independence from Britain in the 1940s, Aung San Suu Kyi led the pro-democracy movement in Burma in 1988. The movement was quickly and brutally crushed by the military junta, and Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest.
The Voice of Hope is a rare and intimate journey to the heart of her struggle. Over a period of nine months, Alan Clements, the first American ordained as a Buddhist monk in Burma, met with Aung San Suu Kyi shortly after her release from her first house arrest in July 1995. With her trademark ability to speak directly and compellingly, she presents here her vision of engaged compassion and describes how she has managed to sustain her hope and optimism.Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, or the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi has become an international symbol of struggle against repression and brutality. In The Voice of Hope, she emerges as a human being--a mother of two sons as well as an inspirational human rights advocate and all-around moral compass. Once a soft-spoken scholar living in England, this daughter of a Burmese military hero catapulted to prominence as the spokesperson for her country s beleaguered democracy movement. Even when imprisoned by Burma s ruling junta, she continued to work for freedom and human rights, eventually winning the Nobel Peace Prize and attracting the world s attention to the plight of Burmese dissidents. The Voice of Hope chronicles nine months worth of her conversations with British-born Alan Clements, a Burma expert and former Buddhist monk. The two discuss love, truth, power, compassion, and freedom from fear as well as Aung San Suu Kyi s own brand of activist Buddhism. In the process, a portrait emerges of a profoundly religious as well as political leader, a woman who used years of house arrest to develop her meditative practice, mindfulness, and spiritual strength.