Silence on the Mountain
€26.90
Product Information
| ISBN | 9780822333685 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Wilkinson |
| Publisher | Duke University Press |
| Format | Paperback |
| Number of pages | 392 |
| Weight (kg) | 0.556 |
| Publishing Date | 20/08/2004 |
| Price (excl. tax) | €25.38 |
| Tax | €1.52 |
| Price (incl. tax) | €26.90 |
| Availability | 2 units in external warehouse |
Product Description
new in paperbackSilence 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. Decades of terror-inspired fear have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete that it verges on collective amnesia. The author’s great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories, and it is through these stories-dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking-that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that has relevance not only to Guatemala but also to countless places around the world where terror has been used as a political tool.