Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an agreement between Guatemala and God;' Guatemala's Evangelical Protestant military dictator General RÃos Montt incited a Mayan holocaust: over just 17 months; some 86;000 mostly Mayan civilians were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying; bewildering murk of this episode; the Western hemisphere's worst twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most lucid historical account and analysis we yet possess of what happened and how; of the cultural complexities; personalities; and local and international politics that made this tragedy. Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the least comforting answers. Beautifully; movingly; and clearly written and argued; this is a necessary and indispensable book.-- Francisco Goldman; author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?"Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued; providing the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period of extreme political repression that overwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad ways Christian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one of the finest contributions to our understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period; not just in Guatemala but throughout Latin America."--Greg Grandin; Professor of History; New York UniversityDrawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents; evangelical pamphlets; speech transcripts; and declassified US government records; Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup EfraÃn RÃos Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically; but also horizontally; across class; cultures; communities; religions; and even families. The book examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence; but it also explores the long durée of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly; she contends that self-interest; willful ignorance; and distraction permitted the human rights tragedies within Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world.
#1167940 in Books Fish M Steven 2011-02-09Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 6.10 x 1.20 x 9.20l; 1.14 #File Name: 0199769214408 pagesAre Muslims Distinctive A Look at the Evidence
Review
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful. Vast amount of informationBy religioprofA long and highly fraught battle has waged for decades over the alleged propensity of Muslims toward violence; misogyny; tyranny; and fatalism. Given the fact that Islam is the second largest world religion; with 1.6 billion Muslims in more than 200 countries; any attempts to characterize its influence are not only vitally important but also a daunting task. That is why this book is important to read. Fish sets out a practical if wildly ambitious scheme for measuring the global Muslim population's opinions about matters of social and economic inequality; political violence; democracy; and so forth; relying on data provided by the World Values Survey. Well worth a read; and a very good pedagogical tool because it raises many provocative questions about methods and data validity; as well as challenging the usual presumptions many secular Westerners have about Islam. Also helpful is the preface to the book which explains how to read social scientific data. My only misgiving about this tome is that it might encourage the reader to move from the larger concepts of aggregate data analysis provided by the author (e.g.; what large pluralities of Muslims think) to more precise observation about who Muslims are at the individual level. In other words; the reader should not be led to believe that a single cause (Islam) can account for the effect (e.g.; what Muslims say and do); which is something this author tries to avoid by providing multivariate analyses. Let's hope that the reader appreciates the nuances and caveats4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. ExcellentBy Daniel HummelCuts to it and lets the data do the talking not the politics. So much better than the demagoguery of typical books on this subject.1 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Five StarsBy CustomerExcellent book with a very deep and scientist analysis.
