"There was a time when the small community of professional Burma-watchers in the West could claim with some confidence that they were conversant with most, if not all, the academic and non-scholarly literature about the country. That situation has changed and it is now very difficult, if not impossible, to keep fully abreast of the outpouring of publications devoted to Burma (or Myanmar, as it is now called). There are a number of reasons for this. After the Second World War, Burma was largely forgotten by the West. Except for events like Burma?s independence from Britain in 1948 and Ne Win?s military coup in 1962, it was rarely reported in the popular press. It featured in a few Hollywood movies, but they tended to hark back to the war. Even when the threat of communist ?subversion? in Southeast Asia began to attract global attention, Burma?s problems were not considered as important as those of states like Vietnam. It was not until the 1980s that the work of pioneering journalists like Bertil Lintner, writing in the old Far Eastern Economic Review, encouraged observers to look more closely at the country..."