For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War

By Mac McClelland

There are bad things going on in Burma that you don’t know about. There’s a civil war (the world’s longest running, in fact) raging between the government and ethnic rebels. Much of the United States’ heroin comes from there. And there’s the small matter that America helped make it all possible with overt funding and the CIA’s very first secret war. Of course, you wouldn’t know any of this, because Burma is a country nearly shut out from the rest of the world, with the only footage of the carnage coming via groups of young, tough, booze-loving refugees who run into war zones to collect it. And with these refugees is where we find Mac McClelland embedded in her staggering debut, For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. McClelland weaves a narrative that is part investigative journalism, part popular history, and part memoir of a Midwestern, twentysomething girl living with refugee activists on the Burma-Thailand border. Driven by the community McClelland is illegally aidinga small group of brave young men and womenFor Us Surrender Is Out of the Question is an urgent and fascinating look at a weary conflict, told by a bright, new voice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781593763787

Mac McClelland

Mac McClelland is the author of For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. She has written for Reuters, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications, and has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Association for Women in Communications. Her work has also been nominated for two National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing and has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing 2011, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, and Best Business Writing 2013.