A moving account of a remarkable woman and activist.
The story of a courageous nun who was murdered in 2005 while working for environmental protection and agrarian land reform in Brazil’s Amazon jungle.
Sister Dorothy Stang was “greatly loved and fiercely hated.” In this succinct biography, Le Breton (Trapped: Modern-Day Slavery in the Brazilian Amazon, 2003, etc.), a British journalist who lives in Brazil, investigates the life and death of this modern-day martyr. To understand the nun, she avers, it is first necessary to understand the young woman who entered a convent at age 17 in 1948. Dorothy Mae Stang was one of nine children in a strict Catholic family; her father, an officer at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, was devoted to organic farming. In 1966, after working with families in Arizona migrant camps, Sister Dorothy was sent to do missionary work in Brazil. She later asked to serve with the “poorest of the poor” and in 1982 settled in the Nazaré region, site of the controversial Transamazon Highway. She became increasingly committed to agrarian reform, sustainability and environmental activism. She worked as a community organizer with the peasants (“her people”) to claim land even while illegal slash-and-burn campaigns devastated the forest around them. Her enemies were high-powered loggers and landowners, some of whom were ultimately charged with her death. Interweaving Brazilian history and political context throughout, the author makes good use of interviews with priests, nuns, activists, peasants and family members to paint a full portrait of a spirited, blessedly stubborn and highly committed individual. Recounting the grim details of Sister Dorothy’s murder, Le Breton stresses her calmness and resolve when confronted by the hired assassins. Fans of religious biography will be especially inspired by accounts of Sister Dorothy’s devotion to Catholicism; in the moment before her death, she read aloud a passage from the Bible.
A moving account of a remarkable woman and activist.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52218-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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