"John Clifford Holt’s Myanmar’s Buddhist-Muslim Crisis: Rohingya, Arakanese, and Burmese Narratives of Siege and Fear makes a timely contribution to the growing literature on the Rohingya affairs in Myanmar. A scholar of Buddhist studies whose primary work is on Sri Lanka and Laos, Holt lends his expertise in the comparative analysis of Myanmar’s ongoing ethno-religious turmoil among Bamar Buddhists, Arakanese (or Rakhine), and Rohingya with its neighboring, predominantly Buddhist countries, Thailand and Sri Lanka. In addition to a thorough historical context that introduces Buddhism on a global scale, the narratives in the book are organized based on three geographical locations in Myanmar: Yangon (Part One), Arakan (Part Two), and Mandalay (Part Three) because “many of the referents within the discussions are locale, and [his] conversational partners were steeped in those specific concerns” (p. xvi). Holt provides a disclaimer in the Preface that his limited linguistic skills in Burmese led him to conduct the interviews primarily in English. The author notes that interviewees’ command in English indicates their well-educated backgrounds, and therefore, the narratives in the book are by no means “representative of most Rohingya, Arakanese, and Burmese” (p. xii). While I appreciate the disclaimer about the possible limitations of the author’s interviewees, it is also important to keep those of the author’s own (lack of linguistic command in local languages) and his researcher positionality (Sri Lanka as his primary field of study) in mind when reading this book. The book is accessible with little to no academic jargon. The interlocutors’ narratives are coherently interlaced with the author’s own reflexive thoughts. The kaleidoscopic nature of narratives situated in three different cities offers much needed context that is nuanced, and provides first-hand perspectives for any layperson who is concerned with Myanmar’s Buddhist-Muslim conflict, but exasperated by the over-generalized and sensationalized nature of news media stories about the topic..."