A Silent Fury, Yuri Herrera
A Silent Fury, Yuri Herrera
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A Silent Fury
The El Bordo Mine Fire

Author: Yuri Herrera, Lisa Dillman

Narrator: Armando Durán

Unabridged: 2 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/10/2020


Synopsis

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis—the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company—may have committed murder.The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than ten” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers’ tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

About Yuri Herrera

Yuri Herrera, born in Actopan, Mexico, is an acclaimed and award-winning author. His Signs Preceding the End of the World won the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 and was included in many best books of the year lists, including the London Guardian’s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books. His first novel, Kingdom Cons, won the 2004 Premio Binacional de Novela Joven and, when published in Spain won the Premio Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos, being considered the best work of fiction published in Spain by a jury of 100 people, including editors, journalists and cultural critics. He studied politics in Mexico, creative writing in El Paso, and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.

About Lisa Dillman

Lisa Dillman is a translator from Spanish and Catalan and a lecturer at Emory University.

About Armando Durán

Armando Duran has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the repertory acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Timothy

Profits over people? Shocker. Sealing the mine without checking for survivors? Disturbing. Corruption involved? Always.......more

Goodreads review by César

Este libro me hizo pensar en todas las historias que existen y no se cuentan, todo el tiempo está pasando algo de lo que nadie más que los involucrados directamente se enterarán. Y no estoy seguro si todas deberían saberse, pero lo que si, es que hay algunas que si, como la que narra Yuri en este li......more

Goodreads review by Sylvia

Me leí este libro en tres sentadas, en un solo día. Me parecía que no podía, yo también, cerrar y dejar a los mineros atrapados en el fuego, en la historia, en el silencio. Yuri Herrera Herrera reconstruye en esta crónica la tragedia de un incendio que es también la tragedia de un pueblo y de sus fa......more

When I got this I didn't know it was a non-fiction about a real mine fire (yes that's how I roll) and must say this is not something I would've picked up for content, but it was so good. The presentation of the events and also the commentary he made had me captivated.......more


Quotes

“A searing, painful, poetic, simple, extraordinary book about a 1920 mine disaster.” 
Philippe Sands, British Book Award–winning author