Monkey's Paw [Paperback]

Robin Kirk (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558491090
• ISBN-13: 978-1558491090
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #384,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #56 in Books > History > Americas > South America > Peru

More About the Author

Kirk is the author of three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America's War in Colombia (PublicAffairs) and The Monkey's Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She is the coeditor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and helps edit Duke University Press's World Readers series. Her essay on Colombia and human rights appears in Human Rights and Conflict Resolution in Context: Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Northern Ireland (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution, May 2009), edited by Eileen F. Babbitt and Ellen Lutz. An award-winning poet, Kirk also won the 2005 Glamour magazine non-fiction contest with her essay on the death penalty, available in the November 2005 issue. In the Fall of 2006, she was a Fulbright lecturer at the Human Rights Center at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. In 2005-2006, she was a consultant to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first-ever truth commission within the United States. Kirk authored, co-authored and edited over twelve reports for Human Rights Watch, all available on-line. In the 1980s, Kirk reported for U.S. media from Peru, where she covered the war between the government and the Shining Path. During that time, she also prepared reports for the U.S. Committee on Refugees, including the first report ever on the plight of Peru's internally displaced people. Kirk is a former Radcliffe Bunting Fellow and is a past winner of the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award for Freelance Writing. Kirk directs DukeEngage's Duke in Belfast program. She is the associate director of Duke's International Comparative Studies program.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book brings Peru to life for the reader., November 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Monkey's Paw (Paperback)

In the first few pages of her book, Kirk writes: "It takes stubbornness, perhaps arrogance, and a certain faith in the face of long odds to write about someone else's country." The country Kirk has chosen, moreover, is a vastly complex and changing place. Nonetheless, she has succeeded remarkably well in detailing Peru's many facets, in capturing the grand schemes and the day-to-day struggles, in recounting the varied and fascinating Peruvians who cross her path with all their strengths and all their weaknesses, in avoiding simplistic conclusions, and in making me feel as if I myself lived in "someone else's country." The book is a must for anyone interested in the people who live in Peru and its complicated web of social struggle. Her clear, evocative writing recreates Peru on the page for readers who can't go there themselves, and adds to the experience of those who can. I loved it.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating anecdotal study, May 8, 2002

By 

Andrew C. Thompson (Memphis, Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Monkey's Paw (Paperback)

This is not a comprehensive, academic account of the Shining Path or of Peru's recent social & political history, so readers who are looking for something along those lines will be disappointed. What it is, however, is a fascinating story of the author's experiences investigating the impact of Peru's social and political upheavals on poor Peruvians from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. The role of the Shining Path naturally takes a prominent central place in that story. Robin Kirk has produced a highly readable and engaging book that paints portraits of individual Peruvians' lives, as they deal with their country's troubled recent history. From her account of the Tunnel Six 'ronda campesina,' to the search for justice in their son's murder by Cromwell Castillo & Carmen Rosa, to the stories of women in the Shining Path, Kirk's anecdotal approach makes reading this book as enjoyable as a good novel.

As a past and future visitor to Peru, I found this book helpful in relating something of the substance of Peruvian society to me, as it has been experienced by a fellow American in her work as an investigative journalist and past resident of the country.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Needs polish, but at its best a fair-minded effort, December 12, 2004

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Monkey's Paw (Paperback)

Flor de retama, the broom flower with its yellow shoots flourishes from soil nourished by blood. Peru's Shining Path fanatical cult, devolved from earnest Maoism into indoctrinated millenarian warriors determined to bring down their corrupt nation and destroy it in order to rebuild it into a utopia, chose this weed as their logo.

Robin Kirk, in her collection of rather disparate chapters, charts her Peruvian encounters with the senderistas, their pursuers, and the victims left by both sides--'internal refugees' forced off their land by those who claimed to fight for and protect them, whether government or guerrillas. Beginning with her 1983 first visit to Orin Starn as he was writing his dissertation about a Piura hamlet, Tunnel Six, that grew around the spew from an irrigation works near the Ecuadorian border, she records various stints spent in the country over the next decade and more, as the war with Abimael Guzmán's disciples intensified and spread to the cities.

I read her account after having studied her translation of Gustavo Gorriti's history of the SP. I wondered, from an English-language vantage point, why so few reporters from outside Perú had produced book-length works for a popular audience on the movement. Why? In large part, the hostility towards 'Western' gringo observers, not only by the army and police suspicious of collaborators, but from the SP itself.

Kirk, like previous chroniclers to a land of harsh weapons and forbidding walls, finds herself trapped. Her white skin, San Franciscan provenance, and education distance her from her subjects. They mistrust her, and she finds herself caught between pity and contempt more than once as she listens to guerrilla prisoners. Powerful moments emerge here, but overall, the book feels like a cobbling of previous notes and journalistic material upon which she presumably sent back while in Peru. The section on one family's search for the fate of their son bogs down the pace considerably. The accounts of her quest to find female SPers to talk to reappear throughout, but in a rather scattershot pattern, as does her Lima scenario. I was never sure where I'd find her or when, as about fifteen years appear to have been spanned and compressed here, somewhat confusingly.

However, Kirk's honesty, her own realisation that she can only approach but never enter the interior of those she interviews, makes for a bracing if disheartening recounting of her Peruvian journeys.

A sample quote: "{W}hen the column came, people hid. But the column could drag them from their homes and administer a 'popular trial.' The column could shoot them or hack them to death with machetes or stone them as they begged for mercy. Or the column could force a daughter to kill a father; a husband his wife. La columna could force an entire village to march before them, forming the people's vanguard of an attack. It burnt the houses of those it deemed traitors. It took those, especially the young, it found useful. The column called itself 'the people's wrath.' Its appearances could be as sudden as a thunderhead cresting a ridge. Its departures were scored by the slow, measured sound of grief." (104)

Its name taken from a poem (by José Carlos Maríategui, founder of Perú's CP in the 1920s), its nightmarish rhetoric, its idealised portraits transforming its portly Ayacucho doctor into a cherubic, trimmer messiah of redemption through decimation: all underscore the actual distance between the SP and those from the lowly for whom it mediated in fevered litany its 'pensimiento Gonzalo'. As an aid worker asks Kirk: 'if they are fighting for the people, why kill them? Why did they drive them away?' (170) This discussion leads into an excellent analysis of what differentiates senderistas from other militants.

Kirk, by the end, finds that she cannot keep returning to the flame that threatens to devour her. As a journalist, she finds that her employers less eagerly solicit stories on community reform than terrorist assaults. As the SP reels from the backlash by not only the government forces but vigilante peasant groups, these same gatherings find that they may have learned a bit from the mystical nihilism of the senderos after all. Not in content so much as in form. For what were once dreams begin to assume reality. In the wake of first Velasco's land reform and then the SP, despite the near-collapse of the economy and its mismanagement by whoever manipulates himself into the presidency, the common people begin to embrace local control of their justice system, their farm production, and their faith, which increasingly finds its dynamism fueled by evangelical Protestantism and its insistence upon self-worth and hard work to achieve security. As Kirk wings her way from Perú for the final flight home, she admits her bravery and its lack. In the awe-inspiring but also awful--in its sheer reach beyond human power--array of climates and terrains, Perú represents a microcosm of our planet's diversity--and our inability to grasp our place in the macrocosm. She learns the lesson: 'Never underestimate fear.' This land, fabled as our El Dorado for so long in our Western legends, resists those of us who dare to delve into its hidden veins.

(See also the compilation edited by Kirk, her partner Orin Starn, and former colleague of Guzmán and expert on the SP Carlos Iván Degregori, The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.)For an extended version of this: Belfast's on-line journal The Blanket, "The Broom Flower."