From AudioFile
From the fall of Burma to the Japanese in 1942 until the end of the war, the Allies strove to keep China supplied with matériel from India-by air over "the Hump," and overland via the Burma Road, which stretched 700 miles to the Chinese city of Kunming. Donovan Webster's account of American derring-do in this theater is fast-paced and engaging, the work of a first-rate storyteller. His throaty reading, however, is too rushed, as though he were trying to pack as many words as possible into this drastically condensed recording. It's still dramatic and entertaining, but it feels like only a half a story, one that might have been called ABRIDGED ON THE RIVER KWAI. D.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Mountainous and malarial, northern Burma is terrible terrain for war, but the Allies resolved to fight there to keep China in World War II. The effort's executant, American general Joseph Stilwell, occupies center stage of Webster's chronicle, which benefits from the author's visits to battle sites and remnants of a supply road. Applying concrete visualization of the mud, leeches, and heat of tropical combat, Webster renders the misery experienced by soldiers on both Japanese and Allied sides, blending them with the tactical details of the war's ebb and flood in Burma. These flow into Webster's accounts of Merrill's Marauders, Wingate's Chindits, Chennault's Flying Tigers, and other such colorful objects of Eric Sevareid's and Theodore White's reportage, all under Stilwell's nominal control, as was, on paper but infrequently in fact, the military of Chiang Kai-shek. Stilwell's headaches running such a sprawling theater, while previously researched by Barbara Tuchman (Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, 1970), are ably integrated by Webster into the infantryman's viewpoint: the result is a high-quality overview. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Burma Road tells the story of the China-Burma-India theater of operations during World War II. As the Imperial Japanese Army swept across China and South Asia at the war's outset - closing all of China's seaports - more than 200,000 Chinese laborers embarked on a seemingly impossible task: to cut a seven-hundred-mile overland route - which would be called the Burma Road - from the southwest Chinese city of Kunming to Lashio, Burma. But with the fall of Burma in early 1942, the Burma Road was severed, and it became the task of the newly arrived American General Stilwell to re-open it, while, at the same time, keeping China supplied by air-lift from India and simultaneously driving the Japanese out of Burma as the first step of the Allied offensive toward Japan.

Donovan Webster follows the breathtaking adventures of the American "Hump" pilots who flew hair-raising missions over the Himalayas to make food-drops in China; tells the true story of the mission that inspired the famous film The Bridge on the River Kwai; and recounts the grueling jungle operations of Merrill's Marauders and the British Chindit Brigades. Interspersed with vivid portraits of the American General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, the exceedingly eccentric British General Orde Wingate, and the mercurial Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, The Burma Road vividly re-creates the sprawling, sometimes hilarious, often harrowing, and still largely unknown stories of one of the greatest chapters of World War II.

SYNOPSIS

The Burma Road was constructed to supply Chinese forces in the fight against Japan during World War II. Severed by the Japanese, the task of retaking it was charged to the American General Joseph Stillwell. This work recounts the military events surrounding Stillwell's retaking of the road and other actions in the China-India-Burma Theater. Written in a popular style, the work follows the war from the first efforts to cut the road through jungle and across the Himalayan plateau to Stillwell's successful efforts to retake the road some seven months before the close of hostilities. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

The story of the 700-mile supply route running from Burma to China, which took only a year to build-and was promptly overwhelmed by the Japanese. From a former senior editor for Outside. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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