The Burma Road by Donovan Webster
The harrowing story of one of the greatest chapters of World War II---the building and defense of the Burma Road The Burma Road tells the extraordinary story of the China-Burma-India theater of operations during World War II. As the Imperial Japanese Army swept across China and South Asia at the war's outset--closing all of China's seaports--more than 200,000 Chinese laborers embarked on a seemingly impossible task: to cut a seven-hundred-mile overland route--which would be called the Burma Road--from the southwest Chinese city of Kunming to Lashio, Burma. But with the fall of Burma in early 1942, the Burma Road was severed, and it became the task of the newly arrived American General Stilwell to re-open it, while, at the same time, keeping China supplied by air-lift from India and simultaneously driving the Japanese out of Burma as the first step of the Allied offensive toward Japan. In gripping prose, Donovan Webster follows the breathtaking adventures of the American "Hump" pilots who flew hair-raising missions over the Himalayas to make food-drops in China; tells the true story of the mission that inspired the famous film The Bridge on the River Kwai; and recounts the grueling jungle operations of Merrill's Marauders and the British Chindit Brigades. Interspersed with vivid portraits of the American General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, the exceedingly eccentric British General Orde Wingate, and the mercurial Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, The Burma Road vividly re-creates the sprawling, sometimes hilarious, often harrowing, and still largely unknown stories of one of the greatest chapters of World War II.
Donovan Webster has written two books and co-authored a third. His first book, Aftermath: The Remnants of War, received Canada's Leonard Gelber Prize and was turned into a television documentary. He has also written dozens of articles for major magazines including Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic. His writing often has highly charged political content: For example, he personally interviewed the famous hooded Iraqi prisoner in 2005, and that encounter resulted in The Man in the Hood in Vanity Fair. His 2004 Vanity Fair article The Making of a Sniper, about Lee Boyd Malvo, was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He has recently been centrally involved in the Running the Sahara project, a 111-day run from West Africa to the Sinai being produced as a documentary film by Matt Damon.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780374117405 |
| ISBN 10 | 0374117403 |
| Title | The Burma Road |
| Author | Donovan Webster |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Farrar Straus Giroux |
| Year published | 2003-10-01 |
| Number of pages | 370 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |