Double Karma – A Novel

May 28, 2021 It’s a deal! I’m very pleased to announce that Marc Côté and Cormorant Books will be publishing my first novel, Double Karma, in Spring 2023. The publishing deal was posted on Quill & Quire’s website on May 27 with the following notice: “Cormorant Books’ Marc Côté has acquired world, dramatic, and audio rights to Daniel Gawthrop’s Double Karma. The first novel from the five-time nonfiction author is described as the story of…

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Burma as failing state: The road to civil war

  More than two months into the unfolding nightmare of Burma’s latest military dictatorship, a grim new reality has become apparent to the people of this country, also known as Myanmar, and to others around the world who have been following events there with growing concern: the longer the national army (Tatmadaw) keeps killing innocent civilians and otherwise terrorizing the population while the United Nations does nothing, the more likely the country is to descend…

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Burma: We’ve seen this movie before (Or have we?)

  Change has come to stay in Burma, but the question is whether a transfer of power will come through peaceful elections or by violence…Either way, the general consensus in Burma in the spring of 1990 is that the movement towards democracy which began exactly two years ago is irreversible. —Bertil Lintner, “Outrage” (1990) One morning in Rangoon during the Fall of 2013, as heavy sheets of monsoon rain pelted the corrugated metal rooftops of…

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Permanent military rule might just be a fact of life for Burma

Commentary by Daniel Gawthrop posted on straight.com (Georgia Straight) on February 1, 2021       In the face of international outrage over this week’s military coup in Burma, the country’s generals no doubt see a moral advantage they didn’t have in 1990 when they refused to hand over power to the National League for Democracy after losing that year’s elections by a similar landslide: it’s hard to take Western calls for due process seriously…

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Thant Myint-U: The unbearable burden of history

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century By Thant Myint U Norton, 288 pp In all my years of writing and journalism, the only time I recall ever being turned down for an interview at an arts event was when Thant Myint-U, pre-eminent historian on Burma and grandson of U Thant, third Secretary-General of the United Nations (1961-71), snubbed me before his appearance at the Irrawaddy…

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