The Shining Path, Miguel La Serna
The Shining Path, Miguel La Serna
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The Shining Path
Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes

Author: Miguel La Serna, Orin Starn

Narrator: Robert Fass

Unabridged: 12 hr 35 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/04/2019


Synopsis

On May 17, 1980, on the eve of Peru's presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night, but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a group called Shining Path.

Described by a U.S. State Department cable as "cold-blooded and bestial," Shining Path orchestrated bombings, assassinations, and massacres across the cities, countryside, and jungles of Peru in a murderous campaign to seize power and impose a Communist government. At its helm was the professor-turned-revolutionary Abimael Guzmán, who launched his single-minded insurrection alongside two women: his charismatic young wife, Augusta La Torre, and the formidable Elena Iparraguirre, who married Guzmán soon after Augusta's mysterious death. Their fanatical devotion to an outmoded and dogmatic ideology, and the military's bloody response, led to the death of nearly 70,000 Peruvians.

Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna's narrative history of Shining Path is both panoramic and intimate, set against the socioeconomic upheavals of Peru's rocky transition from military dictatorship to elected democracy.

About Miguel La Serna

Miguel La Serna is a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leading specialist in the Peruvian armed conflict.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will

From the outside, Shining Path could appear to be an invulnerable force. A War Machine, some called it. Lurgio and his fellow fighters had no such illusions in their stone shelters. They came mostly from peasant families, a ragged band of children and teens, who had just a few rifles and not man......more

Goodreads review by Roque

I could give it more stars but the constant errors in the text when it came to spelling or proper names of Peruvian figures or words was quite annoying and distracting. It is a shame that such an interesting book and written with love end up making all these distracting errors. The publisher should......more