Customer Reviews

Singing to the Dead: A Missioner's Life among Refugees from Burma

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Having spent a lot of time visiting friends in Burma over a ten year span of time, and having been priviledged to travel more than the ordinary tourist, what Armour-Hileman writes about the Mon refugees escaping into Thailand, the torture and privations and suffering a so very real. She doesn't make light of these sufferings and is very accurate in presenting them to us.
having visited the magnificent Kingdom of Siam (Thailand) often as a "rest stop" on the way out of Burma, the author showed me an entirely new facet -- the underbelly -- of this lovely country and its proud People.
I found it difficult to put the book down and it will live for a long time in my mind and heart.

It was even more "sharp" after having read Paschal Khoo Thwe's book "from the land of green ghosts" which was marvelous and a must read for anyone interested in recent and present Burma!

The author is comical, insightful, and witty. She minces no words in telling a delightful, though often tragic tale of her mission in Burma. The characters in this book are so inspiring and left me wondering what I could do to help people like them who suffer so much at the hands of ruthless governments. This book should be better publicized than it is. I had never heard of it, I just happened to see it at a local book place. I'm so glad I found this treasure of a book, it is absolutely beautiful.

This autobiography is an beautifully written book chronicling the life of Mon refugees in Thailand. It's also a story about friendship, love, and perseverance.

Vicki Armour-Hileman's auto-biographical tale, Singing to the Dead, would be an astonishing success as a novel. Here the human heart is opened for us to see in a most illuminating manner, using the novelist's tricks of suspense and phraseology to keep us turning the pages. And we do!

I fear the title might be off-putting. Not that it is inappropriate, but when one reads on the jacket that the book is about oppression in Burma and Thailand of the unheard of Mon people, and written by a Catholic Missioner, and with such a title, the temptation is to give it a pass as probably rather dreary. Wrong impression. The author interposes herself and her humor between us and the suffering, and we come away enriched by sharing in this, her distillation of an extraordinary experience.