January 2026 – Tejas Rao

History as Lives Lived

History, at its best, arrives not through timelines but through lives. In my primary and middle school, we were taught the 1960s through Indira Gandhi’s steely gaze or the grainy footage of moon landings; the United Nations appeared, if at all, as a backdrop to superpower posturing. Thant Myint-U’s Peacemaker upends that frame, placing U Thant – a Burmese schoolteacher turned Secretary-General – at the centre of the decade’s defining crises. What results is a narrative so compelling it reads like a novel, yet so rigorously archival that it reconfigures our understanding of the Cold War’s shadow lines.

The book’s genius lies in this biographical method: history as the choices and constraints of one man, watched in real time. Congo’s descent into chaos, the Cuban Missile Crisis’ 13 feverish days, Vietnam’s deepening quagmire, the Six-Day War’s sudden violence – these are not abstract events but episodes in which U Thant, often alone, cables presidents, dispatches envoys, and drafts memoranda that might – just might – avert catastrophe. Myint-U’s prose is crisp, almost cinematic; the archival work (thousands of footnotes attest to it) feels effortless, letting the documents speak while guiding the reader through their implications.

From Model UN to the East River

As someone who cut their teeth on Model United Nations – drafting resolutions on non-proliferation in airless school auditoriums, learning to parse the difference between General Assembly grandstanding and Security Council realpolitik – this book lands with particular force. The UN of MUN is a game of procedure; Thant Myint-U shows what it looked like when the gavel mattered. U Thant inherits the office in 1961 after Dag Hammarskjöld’s mysterious death in a plane crash, and immediately faces a world fracturing along post-colonial fault lines: newly independent African states demanding dignity, Asian nations pressing economic justice claims, and great powers treating the organisation as a useful irritant.

The Cuban Missile Crisis chapter alone justifies the book. While Kennedy and Khrushchev trade ultimatums, Thant – calm, insistent, invoking Burmese non-alignment – proposes face-saving off-ramps that both sides, grudgingly, accept. It’s a reminder of multilateralism not as lofty ideal but as crisis management: the Secretary-General as the one figure neither superpower can fully dismiss. For those of us who have watched more recent UN processes, whether that is climate negotiations, advisory opinions, biodiversity summits, the contrast is stark. Thant’s UN had agency while the one we engage with can often seem like a spectator.

The Third World’s Brief Ascendancy

What elevates Peacemaker beyond crisis chronicle is its excavation of a forgotten internationalism. U Thant arrives as the first non-Western Secretary-General at the high-water mark of “Third World” ambition: Bandung’s afterglow, the Non-Aligned Movement’s birth, demands for a New International Economic Order. Myint-U shows his grandfather championing these causes: decrying apartheid as a threat to peace, proposing environmental safeguards decades early, insisting that decolonisation includes economic sovereignty. This is history as contested terrain, where the global South briefly set terms.

Yet the erasure was swift and deliberate. Western capitals, comfortable with Thant during Cuba, bridled when he criticised Vietnam or equated Israeli actions with settler colonialism. The press followed suit; a Nobel Peace Prize was dangled, then withdrawn. Myint-U’s account of this airbrushing – US politicians belittling the “schoolmaster from Burma,” Israel’s complaints about his even-handedness – lands as a sobering lesson in whose stories endure. For a scholar of international environmental law, where similar dynamics play out today (loss and damage funds haggled over like Congo reparations), the parallels are inescapable.

Hagiography or Measured Tribute?

Does all this amount to hagiography? The question hangs over any grandson’s biography, and Peacemaker invites it. Myint-U is candid about U Thant’s flaws: excessive reserve, overfaith in the UN’s machinery, a certain naivety about power’s brute realities. But the portrait remains warm, the judgments gentle. Readers expecting dispassionate critique might cavil; those who see the book as history through biography will find it exemplary.

This is how I learned history: not as ledger of dates, but as human endeavour – Nehru navigating non-alignment, Gandhi wrestling moral absolutism against wartime necessity. Myint-U revives that method for a global stage, teaching us the 1960s through one man’s principled, often lonely, quest. It’s educational in the deepest sense: not mere facts, but a vision of what multilateralism briefly promised.

Lessons for a Fractured Present

Peacemaker arrives when the UN is widely mocked – Security Council paralysis, endless General Assembly speeches, credibility eroded by decades of selective enforcement. Yet Thant Myint-U insists on another reading: a reminder that individuals from the margins have, before, bent history’s arc. U Thant did not secure a just world; no one could have. But his decade in office proves the organisation can be more than theatre when led by someone who believes in it.

For those of us working in international law’s long defeats – climate finance battles, ocean governance deadlocks – the book offers bracing perspective. Multilateralism endures not because it’s perfect, but because alternatives are worse. In an era of Trumpian unilateralism and rising protectionisms, recovering U Thant’s story feels urgent. This is not nostalgia; it’s equipment for the fights ahead.

Five stars without reservation: archival rigour, narrative verve, intellectual heft. If biography can teach history, Peacemaker proves it can also rekindle possibility.

The Correspondent,
by Virginia Evans,
Published by Penguin Random House (2025)
Rating: **** (really, 3.7)

A life written in letters

Sybil Van Antwerp has spent most of her life doing what the title promises: corresponding. Most mornings, around half past ten, she sits down to write letters to family, to friends, to a university president who will not let her audit a class, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry, and to one person who never actually receives what she drafts. In The Correspondent, Virginia Evans turns this habit into form, offering an epistolary novel about the long afterlife of the things we commit to paper and the question of whether, very late in the day, forgiveness can still be written.

One of the book’s great pleasures is how ordinary Sybil’s voice is on the page. These are not vaulted, self-consciously “literary” letters, but the kind of correspondence that would not be out of place in a family archive: clear, practical, sometimes meandering, with occasional shafts of humour and sudden, disarming honesty. At its best, reading this novel felt like dipping into someone else’s inbox – an experience familiar to anyone who has stumbled across old emails or handwritten notes and found themselves lingering over the everyday as much as the dramatic.

Character, memory, and timing

Beneath the apparent lightness of the set-up, there is a more serious project underway. Letters from someone in Sybil’s past begin to arrive, forcing her back toward one of the most painful periods of her life and toward the unsent letter she has been, in effect, composing for years. Evans handles this slow reveal with a good deal of control: details are withheld and released with care, and it is often a throwaway line in one letter that gathers weight two or three sections later.

Sybil herself is a satisfyingly knotty late-life protagonist. She is capable, funny, occasionally prickly, and far from saintly; there are blind spots in her own self-understanding that the letters only gradually expose. Relationships are largely built in the negative space between what she chooses to narrate and what she leaves out, which feels right for a book about how we curate ourselves for others on the page.

When the letters misfire

For all that, the form does not always work in the novel’s favour. There are sections where you can feel the book working a little too hard to include particular exchanges from Sybil’s past. The schooldays correspondence with Rosalie, for instance, is ushered in quite smoothly – the transition into that earlier time in Sybil’s life is believable – but the transition out is much rougher, snapping us back to the present-day timeline before the emotional dust has really settled. The effect is mildly jarring, as though we have been shown a crucial folder and then had it slammed shut mid-perusal.

That pattern recurs elsewhere. Some letter-runs are anchored clearly in Sybil’s current preoccupations, and the movement between past and present feels organic. Others read more like backstory that needed a home, with the result that the overall rhythm of the book becomes uneven. The best epistolary novels often make productive use of gaps and jagged edges; here, the joins sometimes show.

A rushed final act

A similar unevenness appears in the pacing. For much of its length, The Correspondent proceeds at a careful, reflective tempo. Conflicts accrue slowly, the question of whether certain letters will ever be sent remains genuinely open, and the book is content to sit with Sybil’s ambivalence rather than resolve it. In the final 30–40 pages, though, the story accelerates dramatically. Long-deferred conversations happen, the fate of the unsent letter is decided, and various strands are tied off at a speed that feels out of step with the earlier patience.

By that stage, the broad outline of what has to happen is fairly clear; predictability in itself is not the problem. What disappointed me was the sense that, just as the novel’s core conflicts reach their most interesting pitch, the depth and granularity of attention fall away. The early letters do the slow, difficult work of showing how a person learns to live around an old wound; the ending, by contrast, seems more interested in ensuring that everything is resolved before the final page count. The result, for me, was a slightly thinner emotional payoff than the set-up deserved.

Reading through my own correspondence

All of this is coloured, inevitably, by the way the book intersected with my own history of letters. My parents wrote to each other before and after they were married, when distance and circumstance meant their lives ran in parallel more than they overlapped. Reading those letters as an adult has felt, more than once, like having live access to their love story, and to versions of them that do not yet know me. My father remains an excellent email writer; he has sent me long, reflective messages over the years that I have not always answered, something this book made me wince about more than once.

For a period, one of my closest friendships existed almost entirely on email, by choice rather than necessity. We built a relationship inside subject lines and sign-offs, with all the latency and generosity that asynchronous conversation permits. It made me appreciate and provide space for longform conversations through my life. Spending time with Sybil’s habit of sitting down, regularly, to write – even to people who will never read the words – left me wanting to recover that practice. I finished The Correspondent with a modest, but concrete resolution: to write more letters and emails, and perhaps to try, at least once a month, to be a correspondent in more than just the literary sense.

This is ultimately why, despite reservations about structure and pacing, the book landed at a 3.7 for me rather than a flat three. It is not, in my view, an unqualified triumph of the epistolary form, and Sybil will not displace my favourite fictional letter-writers any time soon. But there is something quietly valuable about a novel that, even in its imperfections, nudges you back toward your own drafts folder and the pile of unanswered messages on the desk.

Month: January 2026

The Peacemaker’s Lost World | Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World, by Thant Myint-U