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What Does Courage Mean? Aung San Suu Kyi’s Courage

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Aung San Suu Kyi remains imprisoned in Myanmar. In January 2022 she was sentenced to four more years in prison for illegal possession and import of walie-talkies and breaking Covid-19 rules.
Aung San Suu Kyi was  arrested in February 2021 as the country’s military leaders staged a coup. Ms. Suu Kyi was detained for several years as she defied the military in favor of  democratic rule, for which she won a Nobel Prize. She was recently re-elected as State Counselor (Prime Minister) in a landslide victory, which the army alleges was fraudulent (sound familiar?).
Here’s the original article:
In 1967, Kathrine Switzer entered the Boston Marathon as K.V. Switzer and ran the race as the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. In a famous photo from the NY Times, you can see an official (partly obscured behind her) trying to shove her off the track as her boyfriend gives him a body block, allowing her to continue and finish the race. (By the way, she ran the Boston Marathon again 50 years later in 2017, finishing only a little behind her original time.)
Katherine’s feat took courage, in part because it was believed at the time that women were too “fragile” to compete in marathons. Every step of the way (literally), Katherine had to fight her fear and keep going.
In these studies of Women Adventurers, thoughts of courage come up often, but I haven’t been sure what that means, so this concept is the study of this article. A spoiler: I don’t come to any earth-shattering conclusions about whether the individual actions of a specific woman are courageous; I’ll let you decide for yourself.

What is Courage?

The dictionary gives two meanings for courage:
  • the ability to do something that frightens you, and

  • strength in the face of pain or grief.

Synonyms are bravery, fearlessness, daring, audacity, boldness, grit, hardihood, heroism. Two synonyms I don’t like because they refer to men are cojones or “balls.” (What’s the equivalent to “cojones” for a woman?).

Another definition says courage is, “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear.”  I disagree about the fear part. Most people have fear – it’s part of our human emotional makeup. The courage comes from feeling the fear and doing it (whatever it is) anyway.

Nelson Mandela said,

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

And General George Patton, who certainly should know, said

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

Courage comes from the Old French for “heart,” and it relates to the belief that the heart is the seat of emotions. It might be that when we experience powerful emotions, adrenaline starts working, making the heart beat faster.

Like many other classical concepts, the term “courage” has been diminished by overuse. (I think of the word “tragedy” as another example. Falling off a roof and breaking your arm is not a tragedy. If 1000 people fell off a roof when it collapsed it might be.) There is certainly everyday courage, and many people have courage when they conquer their fears. It takes courage, for example, to get on an airplane if you have a fear of flying.

Courage, as I would like to use it in my writings, is the courage to an extreme degree, the courage to do heroic things that few others would do. Climbing the Himalayas or tramping through a jungle is courageous because the fears are huge and overcoming them takes something beyond mere daily courage. Extraordinary courage is also related to the historical and social context of these women. Traveling around the world on a ship isn’t terribly dangerous or rigorous today, but it certainly was in the 1700s, when Jeanne Baret traveled. She was the first woman to circumnavigate (travel around) around the globe.

When you read about the women in this Women Adventurers series, ask yourself if they have courage, and think about how that courage shows in what they do. What would you have done in their circumstance?

These women all wanted something so badly they had to:

  • give up much of their lives, families, and connections,
  • live on “the kindness of strangers,“
  • face extreme perils (mountains, jungles, strange new lands, unsafe modes of travel)
  • fight physical and mental limitations and the limits of increasing age,
  • overcome the social restrictions of their time, and
  • move forward constantly toward their goal.

If that isn’t extraordinary courage, I don’t know what is. Now, for a recent example:

Was Aung San Suu Kyi Courageous?

Photo by Simon Graham / Harrisons/via flickr

Aung San Suu Kyi was State Counselor of Myanmar  (formerly Burma). She is a world-renowned freedom fighter, was a political prisoner from 1988 to 2010, and in 1991 (while she was still under house arrest) she won a Nobel Peace Prize for her courage as a political dissident.

Born in 1945, she is the daughter of Aung San, who was central to the independence of Myanmar from Britain. After she graduated from the University of Delhi and Oxford, she held positions in the Myanmar government. In 1988, she participated in peace protests with a group trying to get a democratic government in the country. She was placed under house arrest in 1989 and was kept under arrest off and on until 2010 when she was released for the last time. At one point, she was granted her freedom if she would leave the country forever. She refused because of her loyalty to the independence of her country.

In granting her the Nobel Peace Prize, the committee said,

…Suu Kyi’s struggle is one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades. She has become an important symbol in the struggle against oppression…

What Happened to Suu Kyi?

In recent years, Suu Kyi’s reputation has taken a hit because of her stance on the continuing Rohingya refugee crisis. Briefly, almost 1 million Muslims lived in an area of western Myanmar called the Rakhine area. The primarily Buddhist country (and government) of Myanmar has denied the Rohingya citizenship and considers them to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Since violence in 2017, more than 670,000 of the Rohingya have been forcibly removed to Bangladesh and about one-third of their villages have been destroyed. The United Nations has called this a “classic example of ethnic cleansing” and says it’s the “fastest growing refugee crisis” in the world. And it still continues, though the Myanmar government has made some attempts to negotiate the return of some refugees.

The Myanmar government, of which Suu Kyi is the de facto head, has tried to downplay the crisis. Suu Kyi has said that “ethnic cleansing” is too strong a term for the situation. Meanwhile, some groups have withdrawn prizes and distinctions awarded to her, and some have called for her Nobel Peace Prize to be taken away. (FYI: According to the New York Times, the Nobel Committee has never and will never revoke a prize.)

Suu Kyi is a “devout Buddhist,” says Alan Cummings, in Aung San Suu Kyi: Voice of Hope, a series of conversations with this remarkable woman. She may not have as much power as people think since the military seems to be in control. I can’t take away her courage in fighting for freedom.

If you want to learn about her in her own words, here is a series of letters she wrote.

Filed Under: Women Adventurers Tagged With: Aung San Suu Kyi, book reviews, what is courage

How I Work as a Beta Reader

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

I love to read, and I enjoy doing reviews of what I read. I am available as a beta-reader, but I want to clarify what I will do, and what I won’t do.

Woman with big mug of tea reading a book and making notes

Fiction: I do very few reviews of fiction. I read very little fiction these days (that’s the subject of another blog post). I will read an occasional historical fiction book if the subject and time period are interesting to me.

Non-fiction: I will beta-read most non-fiction, including business, scientific, motivational, humor, history, and biography. I probably won’t read a biography of someone who isn’t dead.

Short stories/memoir/poetry: I’ll beta-read short stories and poetry, but almost no memoir, unless the subject really interests me.

What I will give you as a beta-reader

  • I will read through the entire book – I promise!
  • I will comment on the content giving you an overall comment on its benefits to your target audience.
  • I will give you a list of questions and comments. I’ll tell you what I think works well and what I think doesn’t work, and why. 
  • I will note places (sentences/paragraphs) that are unclear or need more explanation (my opinion).
  • I will tell you when I find inconsistencies, like two names for the same character or place, or when the gun was a pistol in Chapter 1 and a rifle in Chapter 13.
  • If I find something I think is an error or an anachronism (like having a character in 18th century England say, “awesome!”) I’ll point it out.
  • Because I have a background as an English major and teacher, I may not be able to resist  pointing out some egregious grammar/spelling/word choice errors, but I won’t sweat the small stuff.

What I won’t give you as a beta-reader

  • I won’t promise to give you a review unless I feel the book is worthy of 5 stars, I am a bit of a rebel here, because I don’t feel every book is worth a 5 star review. I know that most people want 5 star reviews to boost ratings on Amazon.  Let me know if you want me to do a review (Amazon and Goodreads) knowing this.
  • I won’t tell you how to fix things.  That’s your job.

Still want me to be a beta-reader? Send me an email (jean [at] jeanwilsonmurray [dot] com or comment on this post.

Back to writing…

Jean Murray

 

 

Filed Under: For Readers, The Writing Life Tagged With: Amazon, beta readers, book reviews, Goodreads, reading fiction, reading non-fiction

Most Book Reviewers Rate Too Highly – And Why I Don’t

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

The following is my philosophy of book reviews and my methodology for reviewing books. I’m a contrarian in this, as I believe book reviewers today rate books too highly. I believe this phenomenon started with Amazon, but I also think it’s human nature. If you do a random sampling of Amazon book reviews, you’ll see that there are very few books that are rated less than 4 stars. The lowest rated book on Goodreads is I want to tell you by OJ Simpson (1.93 stars). Next lowest is Scientology by L Ron Hubbard (2.35 stars). Consider this book:  Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus (3.14 stars); since 3 is average, this book is judged “average.” Hubbard’s Dianetics is rated 4.3 stars, just a little lower than To Kill a Mockingbird (4.6 stars). REALLY?

Why do people reviewing books rate them so highly?

1. You received the book as a gift.  Many books reviewed on Amazon are given in review or pre-review programs. We’re taught that it’s not nice to trash something you received as a gift. Check out the discussion of reciprocation in Influence by Robert Cialdini. It’s about psychology and the way our minds work, and it should be required reading for anyone in politics or marketing. Cialdini did his research, and backs up his assertions with many examples.

I’ve just started reviewing books on NetGalley, and there is definitely a tendency to rate a little higher. If I rate books too low, the publishers won’t be interested in giving me more books to review.

2. The Garrison Keillor principle. Do you know Keillor’s closing line in his Lake Wobegon tales, in which “all the children are above average?” Everyone can’t be above average; it’s mathematically and logically impossible. All books, like all of anything, are not created equal. Most books, like most of everything, fall into the middle, and are not bad, not great, but just good.

3. The “everything is my favorite” people. I asked someone once what was her favorite book and she said “the one I read last.” That’s an inability to discriminate. And I mean “discriminate” in its general sense, as the ability to distinguish between good and bad and great and awful. Many people seem not to be able to judge experiences. As I mentioned above, some books are just awful and should not be read. Some books are excellent, and most are good. Everyone has an ability to discriminate, but we are taught not to. It’s not nice to discriminate between people, so we extend this discrimination to other things, like books. But we MUST discriminate. There are too many books in the world to read them all.

One of my favorite quotes is from Francis Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” I once wrote a review on Amazon trashing a book (West of Here, by Jonathan Evison) and saying I hadn’t finished it. I got some nasty comments back. One said I had “poisoned the well,” whatever that means. Others said I didn’t have the right to comment on the book unless I had read it completely. NO WAY was I going to waste my time on a really bad book. I could tell in the first 50 pages that it was bad. I didn’t need to read the whole thing.

***

Now that I’m done ranting, I’ll give you my philosophy of book reviews. As I’m reading a book, I start out by giving it 3 stars. I assume it’s going to be average unless something happens to change my rating. Then, as I’m reading, I’m mentally moving it up or down depending on how well I like it, and how well it’s written.

In my review of a non-fiction work, I look at citations. Did the author provide an appropriate number of citations? Did he/she delve into speculation? Did the author make up stuff? In biography, were the words the subjects said made up? Did the author have an axe to grind? Was he/she trying to be objective? Was he/she trying to make the subject out to be a hero? a villain? Was there ample justification for this point of view?

In business or motivational or some psychology books, I usually don’t read the entire work, because I can get the main point by about a third of the way in. Only in special cases will I read the entire book in these genres.

In my review of a fiction work, in most cases, I keep reading unless, as above, the book is just awful  Did the author keep the book moving, with enough description but not too much? Were there places where the book dragged? Did the author use fresh language, no cliche’s? Were the characters attractive and appealing? In a mystery, was the solution guessable, but not too easily? In fiction reviews, I usually reserve final judgment until I have read the ending, which has to be satisfactory, tying up loose ends, believable and in accord with the rest of the story.

By the end of my reading, I can tell how many stars to give a book. I give 5 stars very very seldom. Only one book in a year, maybe, gets 5 stars. The same with 1 star; a book has to be truly awful to get 1 star. The rest are 2 stars, 3 stars, 4 stars. And I don’t give many 4 stars. A book has to be really well done to get 4 stars. Not even Stephen King gets 4 or 5 stars from me all the time.

Am I stingy with my stars? Maybe, but what’s the point if you give every book 4 or 5 stars?

I love reading books, and you can tell by my Goodreads book list that I am a voracious reader of both fiction and non-fiction. I try to discriminate, in the best sense, and give those who read my reviews an honest assessment of a book. Not everyone will agree with me. I really don’t care if you agree with me. It’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.

Filed Under: For Readers, The Writing Life Tagged With: Amazon.com, book reviews, Goodreads, Literature, NetGalley, Review

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