WMD Machete

by Mark Plimsoll

Mark Plimsoll, LLC (2006)

ISBN 0976779544

Reviewed by Richard R. Blake for Reader Views (9/06)

Mark Plimsoll demonstrates an amazing ability to craft words which leave the reader with haunting imagery and deep feelings. In this memoir he has skillfully developed both plot and characters. His powerful word pictures, and strong descriptive phrases are poignant with insight.

Plimsoll has chosen to meld a creative nonfiction memoir, of a young man's coming of age, into a graphic romantic adventure novel. The novel's range of topics is compelling. Plimsoll expertly combines history, philosophy, religion and social injustice to provide the reader with a smorgasbord of ideals and ideas to whet the appetite for additional food for thought.

By providing a detailed historical backdrop of the Mayan culture, Plimsoll uses the story as a vehicle to open the eyes of the reader to the importance of being willing to explore the possibilities of another ethnicity's viewpoint, to question the motives of governments, to analyze foreign relations driven by economic reward and personal gratification.

The book is more than a sensitive coming of age story. Brandon (young Plimsoll) chronicles his yearning for transcendence. Two Spanish courses and an introduction to Guatemala through his mother's encyclopedia plant an obsessive seed in Brandon's mind. At age twenty-two he leaves his conservative Midwestern community to visit Guatemala to establish personal answers to his spiritual, intellectual, and moral values.

After traveling through Mexico, he visits the cities and villages in Guatemala and begins to journal his observations. Brandon travels in crowded buses, overloaded canoes, and on foot in his search for adventure and answers to life's purpose. He soon begins to recognize inconsistencies. There is an absence of respect for personhood. He records his experiences and impressions as he observes suspicion, mistrust and intolerance. Social status, skin color, religion, and culture become accepted as the norm by the Maya as determining factors in their personal fatalistic destiny.

Based on his own personal experiences as a young man, Plimsoll used the voice of Brandon to share his struggle to exchange his strong patriotism for acceptance of innuendos and accusations that the foreign policy of the United States creates or contributes to the despairing plight of third world countries.

Word pictures of Guatemala depict jungle forests, exotic birds, and raging rivers. His writing is stimulating and thought provoking. Harsher words describe a country filled with political corruption and poverty. Guatemala is made up of a people experiencing hunger, insecurity, persecution, and injustice. He describes the culture as bereft of opportunities for personal satisfaction, deficient in knowledge, without the simplest intellectual resources.

Flashbacks in the narrative relate the details of his trip from Michigan to Texas where he crossed the border into Mexico and on through to Guatemala. Conversations within dreams provide additional opportunity for Plimsoll to introduce, social, political, ethical, and religious divergences. Answers to questions posed by Yvonne, his traveling companion, reveal Brandon's early life, the death of his father, and the influence on his life by his atheist mother and the conservative religion so prevalent in northern Michigan.

Brandon described his emerging confusions this way: "The range of uncertainty made me dizzy, as I thought about my status as a foreigner, and worse an ugly American, in a country full of people that felt the United States of America corrupted their democracy, absconded with their natural resources, and dominated their economy through the influence of a very few privileged families."

In the aftermath of an earthquake that killed 22,000 people, and with a ripple effect of over 600 aftershocks, the author discovered years later that he suffered from a mild case of Post Traumatic Stress.

Plimsoll's call to action sometimes rubs the wrong way, his attitude sometimes irreverent, or his conclusions unfounded, but his message is a clarion call to examine our lives in light of an opportunity to a life of service to humanity while finding fulfillment.

Maybe you have asked the question, "How does the other half live."

Plimsoll challenges the reader to consider sharing the responsibility of obstacles faced by the other half, "the high infant mortality, malaria, HIV infection and AIDS, ignorance, illiteracy, and in general the lack of respect or knowledge of basic Human Rights and social justice."

Mark Plimsoll is a gifted communicator with amazing story telling skills. "WMD Machete" is an exhilarating reading experience.

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