In the Presence of My Enemies
Author: Gracia Burnham
Can faith, hope, and love survive a year of terror?
For American missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham, what started out as a relaxing, once-in-a-lifetime anniversary getaway at an exotic island resort turned into one of the most horrific nightmares imaginable.
Kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group with ties to Osama bin Laden, the Burnhams were snatched away from friends and family and thrust into a life on the run in the Philippine jungle. During a perilous year in captivity, they faced near starvation, constant exhaustion, frequent gun battles, coldhearted murder—and intense soul-searching about a God who sometimes seemed to have forgotten them.
In this gripping firsthand account of faith, love, and struggle in the face of unnervingly casual brutality, you'll go behind the scenes of a real-life drama, told in gritty detail by the least likely survivor. You'll learn about the methods and motives of a radical terrorist group whose members are determined to meet their objectives, no matter what the cost. You'll be inspired by the ultimately triumphant faith and enduring love of an ordinary couple thrown into extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Whatever the struggles of your life, you'll find encouragement and hope in this refreshingly honest story of a yearlong struggle with the darkness that inhabits the human heart.
Publishers Weekly
In this remarkably honest and unaffected memoir, Burnham tells the story of her captivity at the hands of Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim extremist group in the Philippines. For just over a year, she and her husband Martin, a missionary pilot, lived with their captors and a variety of other hostages in the Philippine jungle. In a botched rescue attempt, the Philippine army shot and killed Martin Burnham and Ediborah Yap, a nurse who was the other remaining hostage. Gracia Burnham was also shot, but rescued and treated for a leg wound. Burnham hauntingly depicts the alchemical reaction of deep Christian faith, Stockholm Syndrome and the unremitting terror of hostage life. The odd intimacy among the hostages and captors comes across in surprisingly frank conversations. At one point, Martin boldly refers to all the bad things the captors have done to the hostages, only to have one of them look at him quizzically and claim he has never done any harm to the hostages. The captors, in fact, do unspeakable things, such as beheading hostages or taking them as unwilling "wives." Impressively, Burnham makes no attempt to dramatize these events for shock value, nor does she use this book as an occasion for Christian triumphalism. Instead, she chronicles both her high and low moments as a Christian during that year, and shows tremendous respect and love for members of other faiths with whom she lived. While some of the book is written for a Christian audience, a much wider audience will appreciate Burnham's brave, artless account of these horrific events. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Interesting book: Your Pregnancy Quick Guide to Feeding Your Newborn or Between Stress and Hope
Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America
Author: Gregory Rodriguez
Wide-ranging and provocative, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds offers an unprecedented account of the long-term cultural and political influences that Mexican Americans will have on the collective character of our nation.
In considering the largest immigrant group in American history, Gregory Rodriguez examines the complexities of its heritage and of the racial and cultural synthesis--mestizaje--that has defined the Mexican people since the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. Rodriguez deftly delineates the effects of mestizaje throughout the centuries, traces the northern movement of this "mongrelization," explores the emergence of a new Mexican American identity in the 1930s, and analyzes the birth and death of the Chicano movement. Vis-a-vis the present era of Mexican American confidence, he persuasively argues that the rapidly expanding Mexican American integration in to the mainstream is changing not only how Americans think about race but how we envision our nation.
Deeply informative--as historically sound as it is anecdotally rich, brilliantly reasoned, and highly though provoking--Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds is a major contribution to the discussion of the cultural and political future of the United States.
The Washington Post - Pamela Constable
Despite its unappealing title, Gregory Rodriguez's Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds provides a fascinating excursion through the history of Mexican immigrants in the United States. Full of instructive revelations and forgotten facts, the book shows how the treatment and status of immigrants have always been hostage to the vicissitudes of history—from the Gold Rush to the invasion of Iraq. The best sections of this book by a Mexican American columnist for the Los Angeles Times cover events that occurred long ago. But by putting the current tensions in a solid historical context, Rodriguez offers hope that they too will eventually subside and be followed by a cooler spell in which a lasting, more rational solution can prevail over the politics of fear and bigotry.
Publishers Weekly
Despite its title, this volume from L.A. Timescolumnist Rodriguez is a thorough and accessible history of Mexico that emphasizes the legacy of mestizaje, mixed races, among Mexico's inhabitants. Beginning with Cortes's arrival in 1519, an elaborate system of racial classification was put into place to keep separate Spanish and native peoples. The failure of this system, Rodriguez argues, allowed for a more progressive and open-minded approach to race in Mexico compared with, for example, the U.S.: "In colonial New Mexico, mestizajewas the rule rather than the exception." Black/white racial lines were nonexistent, as African natives merged effortlessly into Mexican society (which abolished slavery nearly 40 years before the States). Other developments include the Mexican American War and subsequent insurgencies in the huge swath of Mexican land ceded to the U.S.; the Mexican Revolution and the immigration wave it inspired; the backlash against Mexican-Americans during the depression years; and the Chicano movement of the 1960s and '70s. There's more at stake in Rodriguez's text than the latest immigration hullabaloo (he doesn't get around to addressing the past 30 years until the last chapter); aside from illuminating a complicated history and deeply contextualizing the present debate, the author takes on the concept of racial classification itself, calling for a change in attitude that more closely reflects the Mexican unifying idea of mestizaje, that we are all, to some extent, racially mixed "mongrels." (Oct.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationKirkus Reviews
Montezuma's revenge is not what you think. Instead, suggests essayist-journalist Rodriguez, the emperor's true revenge may be in the dismantling of the idea of racial differences among white, brown and every other hue. "After the conquest of Mexico," writes the author, "some conquistadors married Indian princesses and daughters of chiefs." So they did, and the Spaniards who came after that first generation of conquistadors married other Indian women, while some Indian men married white women. The result was the mestizo, the Mexican: the race that melded all other races, with "a great variety of phenotypic traits." The upper crust kept itself as white as possible and used skin color as a measure of race and social position. This way of reckoning among whites, creoles, mestizos, indios and other phenotypic types was carried over to the frontier. Once gringo census takers arrived, Californios gave themselves promotions so that, as Rodriguez quotes a historian as remarking, "everyone acquired some fictitious Caucasian ancestry and shed Negro backgrounds-becoming, in effect, lighter as they moved up the social scale." Today, Mexican Americans-who, as Rodriguez points out, constitute two-thirds of the Latino population in the United States-self-identify on the census differently depending on their perceived social status. The upper class considers itself white, but the vast majority of Mexican Americans check "other race," even as most identify ethnically as Hispanic or Latino. As Rodriguez's lucid book demonstrates, now that whites are no longer the majority in California, there is not much talk there of majorities or minorities, even as census officials worry that this confounding of race andethnicity will "undermine the validity of all the other racial categories." In other words, given the growth of the Latino population and high rate of intermarriage, the "other" will do what its forerunner did, namely subvert and redefine the notion of a melting-pot nation. Of great interest to the demographically inclined, and those who wonder what America will look like at the tricentennial.
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