 |   Author : Neil Belton Edition : First American Edition Number of Pages : 384 Publisher : Pantheon List Price: Our Price: $4.47 You Save: $22.53 (84%) Used Price : $0.24 |
Product Description
A magisterial achievement: part biography, part history, part moral meditation on the resurrection of torture as an instrument of political power in the twentieth century, The Good Listener tells the story of Helen Bamber, a good but complex woman now in her seventies, who has spent her life battling to bring the dark side of history into the light.In almost every situation in our century where mankind has demonstrated its capacity to intensify evil--during the Nazi Holocaust, in Algeria, Chile, Africa, the USSR, and Israel, as well as in postwar Britain and Germany--Bamber has served as a witness, an expert, or a reproach, as well as a repository of our collective memory of debasement. Her father, a Polish Jew, had been so obsessed by the Fascist threat that he would read to Helen from Goebbels' speeches, teaching her how corrupting and manipulative language can be. She went to Bergen-Belsen after World War II had ended, and upon her return to London she dedicated herself to caring for the young survivors of the camp.
So began Bamber's brave devotion to the grim and dangerous task of undoing the work of the torturer--culminating, after her participation as a central force in Amnesty International, in her establishment in England of the Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Because Bamber's uncanny openness to others has been one of her great skills, The Good Listener is rendered even more powerful by the stories of the people she has helped, stories that become unforgettable records of meaningless human suffering. Written with preternatural sensitivity, The Good Listener is a remarkable and important book.
Amazon.com Review
When Helen Bamber was a little girl growing up in 1930s England, her father read her sections of Mein Kampf to inure her to the evil in the world. In 1945, at the age of 19, she traveled to the former concentration camp at Belsen to help with the physical and psychological recovery of Holocaust survivors. "Above all else," she said, "there was the need to tell you everything, over and over and over again. And this was the most significant thing for me, realizing that you had to take it all." Later in life, she became active in Amnesty International, and in 1985, she founded the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture--an organization whose name, in the words of her biographer Neil Belton, "says more than most of us wish to hear." Her remarkable life and her noble cause is now the subject of The Good Listener.Blending history, biography, and moral indignation, Belton presents a view of the late 20th century darkened by cruelty. Bamber's lifetime of work--protecting children in hospitals, exposing unscrupulous doctors, and international human rights activism--is interwoven with capsule biographies of people who have influenced her, including Maurice Pappworth, whose book Human Guinea Pigs enraged the medical profession and resulted in the gifted physician's blacklisting. Belton also delivers searing indictments of governments still inflicting torture--indictments strengthened by the wrenching stories of some of the people Bamber has helped, including Adriana Borquez, tortured under Pinochet's regime in Chile, and people who have disappeared, such as Bill Beausire, with whom Borquez was imprisoned in 1975. Any book on the subject of torture and human rights is bound to be difficult and disturbing; The Good Listener, however, remains powerfully inspirational. Bamber maintains that the work she and her colleagues do is not heroic. She is clearly wrong. --C.B. Delaney
Customer reviews
I'm bewildered by Amazon's rating system. 
by .. ()
Why does this book have only 2.5 stars? One German reader doesn't like it, the other reviewer doesn't think it's political enough, and every reviewing publication gives it a very high recommendation. It seems that the stars are very simplistic and robotic.
rjhkrkjokhkñkgb'lgn 
by .. ()
ehglkgnlgkhnmbdzg,b-cz,nfz,gnçñlarjahra
Plastic Saints 
by .. ()
This book like Schindlers List creates heroes which can be used to characterize the offical enemy as evil, much like a t.v. melodrama, while ignoring the complicity & collaboration of Britain & the U.S. in the very crimes they chronicle, when it suits their colonial ambitions. While Six Million Died. by, Arthur D. Morse a more substantive history, describes Britain in a far less innocent manner, but apparently the publisher could not afford Amazon's asking price for a prominent spot on their home page.