The lady and the peacock

About this book

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi known to the world as an icon for democracy and nonviolent dissent in oppressed Burma, and to her followers as simply "The Lady" has recently returned to international headlines. Until she was released in November 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi had been under house arrest in Burma for fourteen of the previous twenty years. She was already confined to her home when the party she co-founded and led, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in a general election in 1990. The result was never acknowledged by the military regime in power for many decades. This new biography offers essential reading at a moment when Burma, after decades of stagnation, is once again in flux. Suu Kyi's remarkable life begins with that of her father, Aung San. The architect of Burma's independence, he was assassinated when she was only two. Suu Kyi grew up in India (where her mother served as ambassador), studied at Oxford University, and worked for three years at the U.N. in New York. In 1972, she married Michael Aris, a British scholar. They had two sons, and for several years she lived as a self-described "housewife" but she never forgot that she was the daughter of Burma's national hero.