Shattering examination of Guatemala's bloody civil war, combining oral history, investigative journalism, personal narrative, and ethnography. If we are to believe only half of what the Guatemalan-born Perera (Rites, 1985, etc.) claims, Guatemala's violent history makes its sister-republics' human-rights violations look almost like nothing. This terrible chronicle is divided into three ``chapters of conquest,'' beginning with the Conquistadors. Commissioned by Cortes to bring the people of what was to become Guatemala to peace without war, Captain Pedro de Alvarado instead took actions that made his name ``synonymous with the bloodiest chapter in the Conquest of the Americas.'' But despite encomienda (royal grants giving landowners full title to Indian serfs living on their estates), hundreds of Mayan communities retained ownership of ancestral lands. In the second chapter, set in the late 19th century, self-styled ``Liberal Reformer'' Justo Rufina Barrios, needing to create a labor pool for the country's huge coffee plantations, passed debt-peonage statutes and abolished Maya land titles by the hundreds. Marked by massive counterinsurgency campaigns, the third and perhaps final chapter commenced in the late 1970's. In Ixil, a brutal plantation owner was killed. Retaliating, hundreds of Indians were tortured and murdered. Perera tells us that Guatemala has death squads who specialize in killing and torturing children and that most massacres of Mayas in the highlands are committed by other Mayas whose communal and blood bonds have been warped by army officers who consider contemporary Mayas subhuman. Further polluting the waters, Guatemala is racked by a religious war in which proselytizing evangelical Protestant sects have complicated even more the age-old antagonism between Catholicism and scotumbre (Maya religious practice) by converting about one-third of the highland Mayas as well as two recent presidents. But whoever is president, Perera says, the military seems to have its way. A harrowing study of our hemisphere's own killing fields- -admirably written, painstakingly researched. (Twenty-eight photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-520-07965-5
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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