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
An intimate and provocative glimpse into the lives of adolescent schoolgirls at two West Coast middle schools by journalist Orenstein (formerly managing editor of Mother Jones). Orenstein was motivated by the disturbing findings of a 1990 study from the American Association of University Women. It revealed that girls' self-esteem plummets as they reach adolescence, with a concomitant drop in academic achievement- -especially in math and science. By sixth grade, both boys and girls have learned to equate masculinity with opportunity and assertiveness and femininity with reserve and restraint. In her attempt to delve more deeply into this phenomenon, Orenstein observed and interviewed dozens of young girls inside and outside their classrooms. The resulting narratives are likely to move and vex readers. The classrooms at Weston Middle School ring with the symptoms: Even girls who consider themselves feminists tend to ``recede from class proceedings'' while their male classmates vociferously respond to teachers' questions; girls who are generally outspoken remain silent in the classroom. When probed, they tell Orenstein that they are afraid of having the wrong answer and of being embarrassed. They are not willing to take the risks that boys routinely take. The girls are overly involved with their appearance, with clothes and beauty products, instead of their studies. Sexual desirability becomes the central component of their self-image, with negative feelings often translating themselves into eating disorders. At the Audubon Middle School, with its predominantly minority population, it is apparent that ``the consequences of silence and marginalization for Latinas are especially dire.'' The Latina girls we meet often become gang members and mothers, while school becomes increasingly irrelevant. A comprehensive bibliography and annotated notes enhance Orenstein's ardent and significant exploration of the adolescent roots of key women's issues. (First serial to the New York Times Magazine)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42575-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
In the latest leg of an idiosyncratic intellectual journey, Pellegrino looks at the stories of the Old Testament through the lenses of genetics, paleontology, and archaeology. Pellegrino (Unearthing Atlantis, 1990, etc.) has an autodidact's omnivorous curiosity to match his high-flying imagination. In this new hodgepodge, he expands on the speculations he put forward in his previous expedition into antiquity, in which he hypothesized that the volcano-buried Minoan city of Thera was the inspiration for the legendary Atlantis. Here he conjectures that when an eruption in the second millennium b.c. obliterated the Minoan civilization, its long-distance effects may have been responsible for the plagues of Egypt and the Aegean diaspora that brought the Philistines to Canaan. He also annexes other theories having to do with the contentious ``Mitochondrial Eve'' hypothesis (based on mitochondrial DNA research, it theorizes that genetic the mother of us all lived between 250,000 and 140,000 b.c.) and the Ark of the Covenant's wanderings. Using diverse scientific sources and historical perspectives—Sumerian clay tablets, Egyptian steles, the writings of Herodotus, and, naturally, the Bible—he ``telescopes'' anthropological and archaeological theories to fit Biblical myths like those of Noah and Nimrod, compressing patterns of history into oral tradition's legends. With a natural sense of storytelling, he blends theories of antiquity with the adventures of field work: He is best describing the modern difficulties of conducting digs in Gaza, Jericho, and Iraq (where he radically situates the Biblical Cities of the Plain destroyed by God's wrath). There is, however, a good deal of padding by this accidental archaeologist: reconstructed dialogue, digression, repetition, and flights of fancy that leave solid ground far below. For all its interdisciplinary breadth and originality, this reads like a beery breeze-shooting session with a college prof. (16 pages of b&w drawings, maps, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40006-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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