A memoir following Pascal Khoo Thwe, born into Burma's Padaung hill tribe, from an animist-Buddhist-Catholic village childhood through seminary and university at Mandalay, as mounting political upheaval under military rule begins to pull him into a resistance he never expected to join.
In the hill tribe the book describes, new religions were added on top of old ones rather than replacing them. People were baptised Catholic and also took Buddhism seriously, while still living among spirits that fill the jungle. The result is a single way of seeing in which these systems sit together and lend each other meaning.
Under a dictatorship, schooling can become training in praising the man in charge rather than learning. A national ideology that promised a special road to socialism produced absurdity and ruin, not progress. A once-rich country can be hollowed out by a corrupt regime while its classrooms praise that regime.
When a regime's brutality reaches into the universities and touches students' own lives, it can turn quiet scholars into protest leaders and fighters. They rally around a hope for a free country shared by all its ethnic groups. Rebellion has heavy costs, though, and the book counts its perils as plainly as its ideals.
A way of seeing formed in one small place is sharpest when it meets that place's familiar sights and sounds. Carried into big cities, war and a foreign country, the same outlook strains, wavers and has to remake itself.