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Bezig met laden... Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala (2004)door Daniel Wilkinson
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Silence on the Mountain by Daniel Wilkinson is an important work on the recent history of Guatemala that needs to be heard and remembered. Unfortunately, this jumpy narrative is unnecessarily hard to follow and the length is unnecessarily too long by about 100 pages. When the author first interviews the townsfolk and plantation workers, he is met with a determined silence which intrigued me. The secrets they guard are horrific, and equally disturbing is the culture that creates the incentive for them to remain silent. The locals frequently answered questions using vernacular such as "Sí pues" and "Saber" which is the language equivalent of passively shrugging one's shoulders. Over time, Wilkinson does start to earn their trust.
Onderdeel van de reeks(en)Erelijsten
Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were ?disappeared?) at the hands of the U.S.-backed military government. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, the story begins in 1993, when the author decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation's manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country's recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala's Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)972.81052History and Geography North America Mexico, Central America, West Indies, Bermuda Central America GuatemalaLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Although the book jumps around quite a bit, the book does have a useful summary of Guatemala's political history as viewed through the lens of US involvement. There are a few details about people who lived in a rural community, but Wilkinson is not able to get much out of them, hence the title of the book. Amid these little snippets of interviews, the author discusses his motorcycle, the difficulty he has driving in the rain, and how unsettled he is because he believes the military could make him a target for asking questions. In the end, I felt the book was somewhat self-aggrandizing. ( )