Review
In
Eclipse Richard North Patterson cranks up the
heat, as it were, on an already hot-button issue: the world's shameful and quite
literally fatal attraction to fossil fuels. Thanks to Al Gore and his ilk we are
all aware of the damaging toll petroleum use takes on our planet's natural
environment. However, Patterson points out a fatal attraction in which the
bunny-in-the-stewpot is much more immediate – it is the murder of tens (even
hundreds) of thousands of innocent men, women and children who have nothing more
to do with oil than to live where it can be harvested. They may or may not stand
in the way between world class avarice and its true love (oil). They may or may
not even pose a threat. No matter - they are expendable. Their lives, and
whether they live or die, don't mean a jot in the corporate and geopolitical
worlds where oil is more sexy...
Beyond the Book
Ken Saro-Wiwa
In his acknowledgments, Richard North Patterson confirms that
Eclipse is
loosely based on the life and death of Nigerian writer and activist
Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.
Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995) was born Kenule Benson Tsaro-Wiwa in Bori, Rivers
State (a coastal state in the south of Nigeria,
map).
He was the son of Jim Beesom Wiwa, a businessman and community chief of the
Ogoni people,
an ethnic minority whose homelands have been targeted for oil extraction since
the 1950s. The Ogoni
are one of the many indigenous people of the
Niger Delta region. Their 404-square-mile homeland, known as Ogoniland, is
located in Rivers State on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea and is home to about
half a million...
