BEAR WITNESS

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. 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.