Excellent news for Myanmar watchers – Wendy Law-Yone has taken up blogging at wendylawyone.com. The author of a series of novels situated in key phases of the country’s modern history, Wendy has also published an acclaimed memoir of Burma viewed through the life of her father. As proprietor of The Nation, Edward Law-Yone was a leading newspaperman in Burma’s fragile parliamentary years. Arrested and jailed by Ne Win in the early 1960s, he subsequently joined U Nu’s quixotic attempt to raise a force on the Thai-Burma border capable of reclaiming a premiership abruptly and unjustly ended in March 1962. In this passage from the prologue to Golden Parasol, Wendy describes the scene at 290 40th Street in the 1950s, one of the happier decades in her father’s remarkable life: “I remember as a child wandering into The Nation‘s printing room, on nights when I was allowed to stay up late at my father’s office. I remember the uneasy thrill of watching one of those monster machines in action, wheels turning, levers pumping, cylinders spinning, trays shuttling back and forth. Alarm bells rang and rang, unheeded, while a river of newsprint went streaking past, spewing out printed sheets that required urgent folding and stacking. The floor buzzed, it shook, it sent a steady shock up through my feet, all the way to my fingernails. The roar was so deafening that the pressmen only spoke in sign language. I could never bear it for very long: I had to get out of the way, before I too was sucked up, chewed up, and spat out as pulp by that insatiable, unstoppable giant.”