Justin Wintle is a British author, reviewer and journalist who's written a book that is as much a portrait of Burma as it is of its human subject. Now freedom always needs its heroes, but sometimes the flesh-and-blood person can get lost behind the icon.

As the imprisoned figurehead of the Burmese democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi is often spoken of with a kind of reverence. (Apr.Aung San Suu Kyi is more than one Burmese woman's name – it's a name that has come to represent a particular kind of resistance to dictatorship. In making the reader care about the smallest things, Wintle makes the reader really care about the big thing-that “the world's best-known prisoner of conscience” is not free. He is a biographer smitten with his subject, who cares enough to note the smallest detail, such as that Suu Kyi prefers Simenon's Maigret to Christie's Poirot. Suu Kyi's developing political activism, her house arrests, her honors are delineated in draftsman's detail that Wintle manages to keep vibrant. ) can skewer in a sentence (“About Sanjay there was something palpably uncouth, while the vainglorious Rajiv was lacking in intelligence”). Obscure political in-fighting is made comprehensible unfamiliar colonial history is made accessible. Entertaining and instructive, charming and persuasive, Wintle mingles sober history and gossipy chat.

In rendering his subject, he weaves in Burmese history and folklore, Buddhism, Indian politics and portraits of Suu Kyi's intimates and enemies that he delivers all this in an absorbing fashion is a marvel. Wintle's research has been prodigious he brings encyclopedic knowledge of just about anything that can be linked to Suu Kyi. Behind her reserve and English veneer, however, was a resolutely stubborn streak and a family life steeped in politics. Her education at Oxford and self-effacing demeanor did not prime her for the life of a dissident. Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi seems both the least likely and the most natural person to become “the world's best-known prisoner of conscience,” and Wintle's thoroughly engrossing book magnificently illustrates both sides of this elusive yet very public figure.

The Perfect Hostage by Justin Wintle