"More than an expose or refutation, Stoll's account presents an increasingly complex — and I think ultimately sympathetic — portrait of an exceptional, eloquent individual caught up in personal and historical tragedies doing her best to maintain her integrity. The strength of this book lies not in its refutation of Rigoberta Menchúu's story but in its inquiry into what the instant worldwide appeal of her autobiography tells us about how we choose to understand recent Guatemalan history, Guatemalan society, and more generally, revolutionary struggle and authenticity in the voice of others." John Watanabe, Darmouth College
"The rule of all sociological studies should be a simple one: no icons. Not Karl Marx; not Max Weber (sigh); not Michel Foucault; not anyone. Rigoberta Menchú should not be an exception. This book is going to explode over Guatemalan and Latin American Studies." Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Georgetown University
In the autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú, Mrs. Menchu, now 39, tells a wrenching tale of violence, destruction, misery and exploitation as moving as a Victor Hugo novel. Key details of that story, though, are untrue, according to [Stoll].
Mench<'u>'s tale of her odyssey from being orphaned by death squads to political exile propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Since the end of the civil war, her story has been questioned. Stoll (anthropology, Middlebury College) assembles the evidence and finds the story important in the fight for human rights and multiculturalism, but not the eyewitness account she claimed. He warns that focusing on images of victims can lead to more victims. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
If not a phony, [Stoll] contends, [Menchu] is the author of an elaborate personal myth, one in which she embroidered liberally on some experiences, fabricated others and hid still others from public view....Stoll asserts that the fictions of Menchu's memoir are in fact threads of a bigger lie: that the rebel uprising of the late 1970s and early 1980s enjoyed wide support among the Mayan peasantry.
— The New York Times Book Review
In the autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú, Mrs. Menchu, now 39, tells a wrenching tale of violence, destruction, misery and exploitation as moving as a Victor Hugo novel. Key details of that story, though, are untrue, according to [Stoll].
I, Rigoberta Menchu is not, alas, a true story....[as] David Stoll shows in his riveting and masterfully researched book....After Stoll's book, we have a pretty good idea of why [she] lied....much of the book is true -- and much more of it was at least plausible...
— The New Republic
Stoll's campaign against myth, benevolent though he would wish it to be, is also a force for political demobilization and stasis.....Anthropologists and guerillas notwithstanding, life goes on.
— London Review of Books
Stoll's important and painstaking work goes well beyond the particular's of Guatemala's monstrous history and Mench?'s honest suffering to address broader issues - the role of created moral authority, the value of armed revolt the validity of cross-cultural inquiry, the mysterious power of what he calls poetic truth.
— Washington Post
An anthropologist's (Middlebury College) critical re-examination of the phenomenon of Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan peasant awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. I, Rigoberta Mench&uactue;, her 1983 memoir, achieved international acclaim; it helped focus worldwide attention on the oppressive actions of the right-wing Guatemalan government and on the plight of the peasants, who were forced to join guerrilla movements to protect their lives and property. Both the book and Rigoberta became powerful symbols of the struggle of indigenous peoples against repressive anti-leftist regimes. While remaining sympathetic to Rigoberta's general message and to the plight of the Guatemalan peasants, Stoll's book attempts to unveil the manner in which the elevation of Menchú's book to the status of myth does violence to the complexities of historical reality. Using tesitmony of local residents and archival sources, in seeking to discover what has been filtered out of Rigoberta's heavily ideological account of recent Guatemalan history, Stoll focuses on what he reads as a discrepancy between the revolutionary fervor of the guerrillas and the voices of ordinary Guatemalan peasants. He characterizes the average peasant response to events as feeling "caught between two armies"—a far cry from the awakening into revolutionary consciousness described by Rigoberta in her book. Stoll employs possible inaccuracies within Rigoberta's text to destabilize the unity of her version of events. In particular, he questions her account on two historical points: "Was the guerrilla movement defeated in the early 1980s a popular struggle expressing the deepest aspirations of Rigoberta'speople? Was it an inevitable reaction to grinding oppression by people who felt they had no other choice?" Stoll's book is not an attempt to debunk Rigoberta's story, but to serve as a warning that elevating one version of history to cult status inevitably silences a multitude of others.
