Rating: 
Summary: Travel, journalism and history meet and - they rock!
Review: This is really very good indeed. I read a lot of travelogue-meets-history and generally come away pretty dissatisfied. It's not easy for a journalistic writer to merge an account of personal adventuring with controversial historical analysis and not end up annoying the reader. But there's never any doubt that Marshall succeeds - the intrepid stuff is as lightly done as the scholarship and he - as any expedition leader must - wins the reader's trust at the first hazard (in this case the smuggling of himself over the Thai border to a rebel camp in the damp and dangerous Karen highlands). It's quite a feat. The difficulties of the territory are not just geographic; Marshall takes on the evils of modern Burma under the Generals and the peculiar pleasures of British late-period colonialism and dares to draw the links - hardly uncontentious. But he convinces, and provides a lot of entertainment, too. He has some great characters. George Scott, the Victorian conqueror of Upper Burma (sometimes by football), is a treasure of eccentric fun from an age that usually churned out bullies and bores to run the British colonies. The modern Burmese Marshall meets and travels with are vivid people whose endless sad story is at the centre of the book - when so often the Natives in this sort of writing end up being merely the author's supporting cast. And Marshall, as character in his own book, wandering with cheeky inquisitiveness through the Burmese generals' land of horrors, is witty, self-deprecating and never boasts about being brave at all. Best of its kind since Redmond O'Hanlon.
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