Finding George Orwell in Burma (2004)

In one of the most intrepid travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma, using as a compass the life and work of George Orwell, whom many of Burma's underground teahouse intellectuals call simply the Prophet. 

In stirring prose, she provides a powerful reckoning with one of the world's least free countries. Finding George Orwell in Burma is a brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world's grimmest and most shuttered police states, where the term Orwellian aptly describes the life endured by the country's people. 

BACKCOVER: A truer picture of authoritarianism than anyone has written since, perhaps, Orwell himself.-Mother Jones Mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic . . . an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue.-The New York Times Combining literary criticism with solid field reporting, [Larkin] captures the country at its best and, more often, its worst.-San Francisco Chronicle [A] sobering, journalistic memoir . . . A disquieting profile of a country and its people.-Newsweek