num_pages: 277
description: A gripping darkly comic first-hand account of a young underground revolutionary during the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980s Chile.On September 11 1973 a violent coup removed Salvador Allende the democratically elected socialist president of Chile from office. Thousands were arrested tortured and killed under General Augusto Pinochet's repressive new regime. Soon after the coup six-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her younger sister fled the country with their parents for Canada and a life in exile.In 1978 the Chilean resistance issued a call for exiled activists to return to Latin America. Most women sent their children to live with relatives or with supporters in Cuba but Carmen's mother kept her precious girls with her. As their mother and stepfather set up a safe house for resistance members in La Paz Bolivia the girls' own double lives began. At eighteen Carmen herself joined the resistance. With conventional day jobs as a cover she and her new husband moved to Argentina to begin a dangerous new life of their own.This dramatic darkly funny narrative which covers the eventful decade from 1979 to 1989 takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru dictatorship-run Bolivia post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's Chile. Writing with passion and deep personal insight Carmen captures her constant struggle to reconcile her commitment to the movement with the desires of her youth and her budding sexuality. 'Something Fierce' is a gripping story of love war and resistance and a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life.
language: English
title: Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
publisher: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd