Description
From the Dust Jacket
On May 31, 1970, halfway through a quiet Sunday afternoon, the earth began to tremble in a high mountain valley of north-central Peru. Before it stopped, a mighty earthquake registering 7.7 on the Richter scale had shaken the Andes, shattering town after town in a long, narrow valley known as the Callejon de Huaylas. Some 75,000 people perished in the quake and the avalanche it spawned, making it by far the worst natural disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere. No Bells to Toll brings that extraordinary event in the Peruvian Andes to life. Months after the earthquake, a young American anthropologist, Barbara Bode, set out to spend a year in the valley. Living in the destroyed town of Huaraz and sharing hardship and privation with the survivors of the catastrophe, she undertook to discover and record their thoughts and feelings. Every aspect of the earthquake was probed, from its geologic dimensions to the personal traumas of the survivors. By giving voice to survivors’ search for some rationale for the tragedy, she has done in fact what Thornton Wilder did in fiction in his Bridge of San Luis Rey. This account of the survivors’ search for reasons for the disaster has produced a finegrained description of life in the Callejon de Huaylas. Rooted in this portrait, No Bells to Toll nevertheless transcends the valley of Huaylas. Survivors, stripped of their past and of the healing comfort of everything commonplace, were given no time to mourn, as modernizing religion and technology were pressed upon them in the hollow left by the disaster. We see them grappling with revolution, religious reform, and evangelical proselytizing, all portrayed against the backdrop of the earthquake, and seen more vividly through the lens of its aftermath. The book unfolds in unforgettable scenes, image upon image, as the valley’s long indigenous past — its myth, lore, and history — is churned up by the catastrophe itself. Spread throughout this portrayal of the political, social, and religious landscape of this piece of Peru are haunting descriptions of the physical landscape itself. The Cordillera Blanca comprises the greatest tropical mountains on earth, studded with glacial peaks towering 20,000 feet or more. No Bells to Toll is therefore also the story of light touching and retouching the peaks in a procession of colors, of windswept tundra, ice, dust, and deep silences — the majestic solitude of the Andes. But it is foremost the story of survival, of the landscape of the mind that empowers people to endure the unendurable. Barbara Bode is that rare combination — an anthropologist who combines the rigor and thoroughness of her professional training with the empathy and sensitivity of a woman who had herself experienced personal tragedy before leaving for the field. She writes clear and gripping prose that approaches the heights of literature. She juxtaposes the affairs of daily existence with the momentous phenomena of the cataclysm in such a way that we experience a magical, almost surreal world. As her sure, quiet strokes paint the grandeur of the Andean vastness, the epic human tragedy of the earthquake, and its tumultuous aftermath, we are left with a sweeping and transcendent picture of life among the ruins of this glacial valley. In the end, No Bells to Toll is a moving testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.
Publishing Info
No Bells To Toll: Destruction and Creation in the Andes by Barbara Bode. From the First Printing by Charles Scribner’s Sons with 1989 copyright. The ISBN is 0-684-19065-6. This measures 9-1/2″ x 6-1/2″ and has 559 pages.
Condition
See the photo above. The dust jacket shows some storage but no tears. The boards are in near new condition and the pages are in very good condition with some light storage on the outside page edges of the closed book. No names, but tiny ink mark on front free end-paper. From clean, pet and smoke-free home.
Shipping
Generally sent the same day payment arrives. Unless you request otherwise, I will wrap the book in plastic wrap to help protect it from the elements, create a custom-made cardboard box to ship it in, and send via Media Mail with Delivery Confirmation tracking. See the shipping page for the cost to send a three-pound Media Mail package. Insurance is an additional cost as described. I am delighted to combine postage and insurance costs if you purchase more than one item. The second item may travel for free or just a few cents more — so it’s worth taking a look at my other items before you complete your order.
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