A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma

It helps that David Eimer has been a correspondent in Southeast Asia since 2012 with prior experience in China. His vast language skills must have come in very handy in his travels throughout Burma with some eight hundred dialects. It is not merely the language barriers that present substantial challenges to most westerners in this part of the world, but also customs and governmental restrictions that offer layers of detours.

This is not a travel guide for leisure vacationers, but instead a descriptive look at a struggling country that squeezed itself into democracy after half a century of military rule. Despite the ravaged families in the south who are still climbing out from under the rubble from the 2008 cyclone that killed tens of thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands, or the racial minorities living in the fringes of Burmese outlands where roads are rare and often non-existent, Eimer details the beauty of the people who live in this golden triangle between India, China, and Thailand.

This particular work freeze-frames a time of transition for a developing country that is in many ways stuck in the past. While the potential is there for explosive technological advances, the traditional cultures cling to a history the rest of the modern world has forgotten. Eimer gives Burma a voice by letting her people tell their stories.