SILENCE ON THE MOUNTAIN: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala Hardcover - 2002
by Wilkinson, Daniel
- Used
- as new
- Hardcover
- Signed
- first
Description
Standard delivery: 7 to 14 days
Details
- Title SILENCE ON THE MOUNTAIN: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala
- Author Wilkinson, Daniel
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition 1st Edition 1st Printing
- Condition New
- Pages 320
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Houghton Mifflin, New York, New York, U.S.A.
- Date 2002
- Illustrated Yes
- Bookseller's Inventory # 023832
- ISBN 9780618221394 / 0618221395
- Weight 1.41 lbs (0.64 kg)
- Dimensions 9.08 x 6.34 x 1.35 in (23.06 x 16.10 x 3.43 cm)
- Library of Congress subjects State-sponsored terrorism - Guatemala, Guatemala - History - Civil War, 1960-1996
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 2002075936
- Dewey Decimal Code 972.810
About Joe Staats, Bookseller California, United States
Modern Literature, Mysteries, and More! We specialize in collectible, contemporary signed first editions. First edition means the first printing. (Later printings of the first edition are typically not printed on acid-free paper, and should be avoided by collectors.) Signatures are obtained by us in person. Inscribed books sold by us may contain a line, a phrase, or a sketch that the author has chosen to add. Our signed books are not dedicated to anybody in particular (not to your grandmother, your Aunt Gladys, your ex-lover or your former cellmate), except in the rare case of a presentation copy from an author to a noteworthy person. All our books are hardcover, unless the book is an Advance Reading Copy, Uncorrected Proof, or PBO. You can expect that the books we send you will be as described, and in a physical condition worthy of the author’s having signed them. We do not sell remainder-marked books, signed or otherwise
Summary
In 1993 Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, begins 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 that compels Wilkinson to seek out an impressive cross-section of the country's citizens, from coffee workers to former guerrillas to small-town mayors to members of the ruling elite. From these sources he is able to piece together the largely unwritten history of the long civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and, further back, to the origins of Guatemala's plantation system, which put Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets.
Silence on the Mountain reveals a buried history that has never been told before, focusing on those who were most affected by Guatemala's half-century of violence, the displaced native people and peasants who slaved on the coffee plantations. These were the people who had most to gain from the aborted land reform movement of the early 1950s, who filled the growing ranks of the guerrilla movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and who suffered most when the military government retaliated with violence.
Decades of terror-inspired fear have led Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete it verges on collective amnesia. Wilkinson'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 come to see the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that is relevant not only to Guatemala but to any country where terror has been used as a political tool.
