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Book Summary and Reviews of Bear Witness by Ross Halperin

Bear Witness by Ross Halperin

Bear Witness

A Crusade for Justice in a Violent Land

by Ross Halperin

  • Publishes:
  • May 13, 2025, 352 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A high-octane true-crime story, Bear Witness follows two Christians who refuse to let fear or conventional wisdom stand in the way of their altruistic mission.

As young men, Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, devoted their lives to helping the poor. But it wasn't until they moved to an extraordinarily dangerous neighborhood in Honduras that they came to a radical conclusion: The charity world was combating poverty incorrectly.

In gripping prose, journalist Ross Halperin chronicles how these two best friends became quasi vigilantes and charged into a series of life-and-death battles: first with the gang that terrorized their community, then with a notorious tycoon who commanded about a thousand-armed men, and finally with a police force whose corruption and brutality defied credulity. Their efforts made some of the most violent neighborhoods on earth safer and arguably improved the functioning of a national government, but in the process of pulling that off, they compromised their principles, precipitated collateral damage, and acquired their share of outraged critics.

A remarkable and dangerous feat of reportage, Bear Witness is a thrilling account of an unorthodox mission to establish justice in a place thought to be beyond the reach of the law.

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This information about Bear Witness was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Ross Halperin

Ross Halperin attended Harvard University and worked under Mark A. R. Kleiman, one of the world's leading criminal-justice scholars. He started reporting this story in 2018 and has since spent much of his time in Honduras.

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