Rating: 
Summary: If only I'd read it before going to Guate
Review: Before travelling through Guatemala in 2002 I'd read a couple books, including Benz's Guatemalan Journey. Unfortunately, it wasn't until a year later that I found Silence on the Mountain. It's the kind of book that makes a place come alive. Well written, thrilling and engrossing, it's the book I wish I'd read before travelling through Guatemala.
Rating:
Summary: If only I'd read it before going to Guate
Review: Before travelling through Guatemala in 2002 I'd read a couple books, including Benz's Guatemalan Journey. Unfortunately, it wasn't until a year later that I found Silence on the Mountain. It's the kind of book that makes a place come alive. Well written, thrilling and engrossing, it's the book I wish I'd read before travelling through Guatemala.
Rating:
Summary: A balanced & well-written chronicle of state terror
Review: Daniel Wilkinson's "Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala" is a balanced and well-written chronicle of State terror. The author dedicates many years, abandons law school and runs up credit card debt to research and write a glaring historical account of the struggle between large landowners and the poor in Guatemala. Wilkinson's early focus is on the 1950 presidential victory of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. He then explains the daring 1952 implementation of a far-reaching Agrarian Reform law called Degree 900. The author reaches out to Guatemalan students who favored the reforms and declared that peace, "required greater equality and greater equality required a redistribution of land in the countryside." Wilkinson then flashes back to 1892 when twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Endler leaves Germany for Central America. Endler eventually becomes a large coffee plantation owner and it is through him the author explains the historical struggle with poor illiterate workers who provide the labor that builds a coffee nation. From there Wilkinson flash forwards to 1954 and the carefully choreographed CIA overthrow of democratically elected President Guzmán. Shortly thereafter agricultural students protested, "We who receive an education paid for by the people have a debt to the people! We who have the power to analyze have the responsibility to criticize! An agronomist should carry, in one hand, a machete...and, in the other, a machine gun." The remainder of the book is a painstaking tale of documenting the State terror of the 1980's when 200,000 Guatemalans perished. Quite frankly, parts of this book are brutal. Nevertheless, the author must be commended for risking his life and traveling to the interior and urging the poor to testify before the Guatemalan Truth Commission that officially investigated the atrocities of the armed forces. In conclusion, Daniel Wilkinson courageously points a finger at Washington for being so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that they rationalize away qualms and uneasiness. He even quotes an American embassy official who was uneasy with early military abuses and wrote in 1968, "the record must be made clearer that the Untied States Government opposes the concept and questions the wisdom of counter-terror; the record must be made clearer that we have made this known unambiguously to the Guatemalans; otherwise we will stand before history unable to answer the accusations that we encouraged the Guatemalan Army to do these things." Unfortunately, no one in Washington was listening. This is a tier-one book...buy it. Bert Ruiz
Rating:
Summary: A balanced & well-written chronicle of state terror
Review: Daniel Wilkinson's "Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala" is a balanced and well-written chronicle of State terror. The author dedicates many years, abandons law school and runs up credit card debt to research and write a glaring historical account of the struggle between large landowners and the poor in Guatemala. Wilkinson's early focus is on the 1950 presidential victory of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. He then explains the daring 1952 implementation of a far-reaching Agrarian Reform law called Degree 900. The author reaches out to Guatemalan students who favored the reforms and declared that peace, "required greater equality and greater equality required a redistribution of land in the countryside." Wilkinson then flashes back to 1892 when twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Endler leaves Germany for Central America. Endler eventually becomes a large coffee plantation owner and it is through him the author explains the historical struggle with poor illiterate workers who provide the labor that builds a coffee nation. From there Wilkinson flash forwards to 1954 and the carefully choreographed CIA overthrow of democratically elected President Guzmán. Shortly thereafter agricultural students protested, "We who receive an education paid for by the people have a debt to the people! We who have the power to analyze have the responsibility to criticize! An agronomist should carry, in one hand, a machete...and, in the other, a machine gun." The remainder of the book is a painstaking tale of documenting the State terror of the 1980's when 200,000 Guatemalans perished. Quite frankly, parts of this book are brutal. Nevertheless, the author must be commended for risking his life and traveling to the interior and urging the poor to testify before the Guatemalan Truth Commission that officially investigated the atrocities of the armed forces. In conclusion, Daniel Wilkinson courageously points a finger at Washington for being so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that they rationalize away qualms and uneasiness. He even quotes an American embassy official who was uneasy with early military abuses and wrote in 1968, "the record must be made clearer that the Untied States Government opposes the concept and questions the wisdom of counter-terror; the record must be made clearer that we have made this known unambiguously to the Guatemalans; otherwise we will stand before history unable to answer the accusations that we encouraged the Guatemalan Army to do these things." Unfortunately, no one in Washington was listening. This is a tier-one book...buy it. Bert Ruiz
Rating:
Summary: One of the best nonfiction titles I've read
Review: Daniel Wilkinson's Silence on the Mountain is easily one of the best nonfiction titles I've ever read. I am a big fan of first person journalism -- books like God of the Rodeo (Angola prison rodeo) and We Regret to Inform You We are About to Be Killed with our families (Rwanda) -- and this book is among the best of the genre. Wilkinson's account reads like a novel -- he effectively reveals a history that I'm a little ashamed to have known nothing about. It's interesting both as history, but also as memoir -- he does a good job of relating his own story (why he went to Guatemala, how he got interested in the project) but doesn't let his own story overwhelm the history he wants to recount. I highly recommend this good, quick, informative, read. It's made me want to learn more about Guatemalan history.
Rating: 
Summary: Understanding Guatemala
Review: I could not put this book down.
It was well written and well researched and after all of that, it was interesting. Spell binding.
If you are interested in understanding what happen(ed) in Guatemala, you will want to read this book.
Good visual descriptions.
Who has the movie rights?
Read it!
Rating:
Summary: to Brady L. Buchanan
Review: I have to wonder how America's role in Guatemala's civil war and in the oppressive history of most Latin American countries has managed to escape your attention.
Rating:
Summary: I was surprised this book was such a pleasure...
Review: I was surprised this book was such a pleasure to read. It has the pacing and suspense of a good whodunnit. The crime being disinterred is vast and horrible, and its causes reach back across the 20th century. As a result, Wilkinson's personal quest for truth -- trying to tease out the buried memories of one traumatized community -- quickly opens into a broad history of Guatemala (and of other things too, like U.S. foreign policy and the history of globalization). But he weaves the broader themes into a series of beautifully detailed individual stories -- stories of peasants, guerrillas, soldiers, landowners, all struggling against enormous social dislocations and upheavals that would leave most of them brutalized, embittered or dead. The end result is exciting, informative, and heartbreaking all at once.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing story
Review: SILENCE ON THE MOUNTAIN is one of the best books I've ever read about the effects of war and government terrorism on the people and culture of a country, as well as a first rate look at the history and reasons behind the conflict in Guatemala. What is most amazing is how Wilkinson was able to get so many people from both sides of the war to open up and tell him their stories. They are not always fun to hear but in the end you'll be glad you did. Get this book NOW if you are at all interested in Latin America, globalization, or human rights.
Rating: 
Summary: difficult to follow
Review: The book was not organizeed chronologically based upon events as they occured, but rather organized according to the author's travels. This makes the book difficult to follow with glimpses of various time periods revealed here and there. I finished the book feeling as though I hadn't really gotten the full story.
| 
