Visceral reporting of Colombia drug gang trauma by a committed journalist.
A Colombian journalist tracks the traumatic life of a former teenage soldier in a rural guerrilla group.
In 2016, the Colombian government negotiated a truce with the guerrilla group called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Nonetheless, the menacing activities of drug-trafficking gangs has not ceased in that beleaguered nation. Delgado-Kling, a journalist who grew up in a privileged household in Bogotá, recounts the odd intersection of her own life and that of Leonor, a poor farmer’s daughter who was caught up in the drug wars in the mid-1990s. As a child of prominent officials, the author was sent to Canada to be educated due to the threats of violence and kidnapping. “Between 1970 and 2013,” she writes, “39,058 people were kidnapped. Many cases were not reported for fear of retribution from the captors.” Delgado-Kling never traveled in Colombia without a bodyguard—even as a journalist, when she first met Leonor after she’d been freed from FARC captivity at age 17. Slowly, the two became friends. During numerous exchanges over the course of nearly two decades, Leonor shared her story: the family’s forced move to Mocoa from their farm due to FARC threats; numerous incidents of sexual assault; her brother’s work as a drug mule; her sister’s brutal murder, after which her body was tossed into the street; the lure into FARC, which served first as a haven but soon became a nightmare, with Leonor enduring sexual slavery under a man 34 years her senior; and her eventual capture by government troops and rehabilitation over many years. In the end, Leonor’s story has no neat resolution, but Delgado-Kling never wavers in her devastating portrait of unspeakable suffering. The author offers a helpful bibliography for further reading about the fraught situation in Colombia.
Visceral reporting of Colombia drug gang trauma by a committed journalist.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781682194478
Page Count: 250
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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