The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, a Life Against Cruelty Book

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. DelaneyRead More