
  #1 "New York Times" bestselling author Nora Roberts presents the first novel in a compelling trilogy about three brothers bound by fate, blood, and a timeless enemy.

  

"In the town of Hawkins Hollow, it's called The Seven. Every seven years, on the seventh day of the seventh month, strange things happen. It began when three young boys--Caleb, Fox, and Gage--went on a camping trip to The Pagan Stone..."

It is only February, but Caleb Hawkins--descendant of the town founders--has already seen and felt the stirrings of evil. Though he can never forget the beginning of the terror in the woods twenty-one years ago, the signs have never been this strong before. Cal will need the help of his best friends Fox and Gage, but surprisingly he must rely on a stranger as well.

Reporter Quinn Black came to Hawkins Hollow hoping to make its eerie happenings the subject of her new book. She too can see the evil the locals cannot, somehow connecting her to the town--and to Cal. As winter turns to spring, they will shed their inhibitions, surrendering to a desire that will grow and form the cornerstone of a group of men and women bound by the fight against what is to come from out of the darkness...

Blood Brothers (Sign of Seven, #1)

Salman Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986, harboring no preconceptions of what he might find. What he discovered was overwhelming: a culture of heroes who had turned into inanimate objects and of politicians and warriors who were poets; a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions. His perceptions always heightened by his special sensitivity to “the views from underneath,” Rushdie reveals a land resounding with the clashes between history and morality, government and individuals.

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

"A passionate, lyrical, tough-minded account of an extraordinary life in art, revolution, and love. It's a book to relish, to read and re-read. Unforgettable." --Salmon Rushdie

An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer ("A wonderfully free and original talent"--Harold Pinter) and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution.

Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.

Her memoir is both a revelatory insider's account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.

The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War

Robert J. Sierakowski's "Sandinistas: A Moral History" offers a bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua in 1979, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, offer a new vantage point beyond geopolitics and ideologies to understand the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country's rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power. Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime's complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal.

Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas' army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. As the military responded to growing opposition with heightened state terror and human rights violations, repression culminated in widespread civilian massacres, stories that are unearthed for the first time in this work. These atrocities further exposed the regime's moral breakdown in the eyes of the public, pushing thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s. Sierakowski's innovative reinterpretation of the Sandinista Revolution will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists concerned with Latin American social movements, the Cold War, and human rights.

Sandinistas: A Moral History

“A must-read for anyone interested in Nicaragua—or in the overall issue of social change.”—Margaret Randall, author of "SANDINO'S DAUGHTERS" and "SANDINO'S DAUGHTERS REVISITED" ""Sandinista is the first English-language biography of Carlos Fonseca Amador, the legendary leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua (the FSLN) and the most important and influential figure of the post–1959 revolutionary generation in Latin America. Fonseca, killed in battle in 1976, was the undisputed intellectual and strategic leader of the FSLN. In a groundbreaking and fast-paced narrative that draws on a rich archive of previously unpublished Fonseca writings, Matilde Zimmermann sheds new light on central themes in his ideology as well as on internal disputes, ideological shifts, and personalities of the FSLN.
	The first researcher ever to be allowed access to Fonseca’s unpublished writings (collected by the Institute for the Study of Sandinism in the early 1980s and now in the hands of the Nicaraguan Army), Zimmermann also obtained personal interviews with Fonseca’s friends, family members, fellow combatants, and political enemies. Unlike previous scholars, Zimmermann sees the Cuban revolution as "the" crucial turning point in Fonseca’s political evolution. Furthermore, while others have argued that he rejected Marxism in favor of a more pragmatic nationalism, Zimmermann shows how Fonseca’s political writings remained committed to both socialist revolution and national liberation from U.S. imperialism and followed the ideas of both Che Guevara and the earlier Nicaraguan leader Augusto César Sandino. She further argues that his philosophy embracing the experiences of the nation’s workers and peasants was central to the FSLN’s initial platform and charismatic appeal.

Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution

"Rambo took the barrios by storm: Spanish videotapes of the movie were widely available, and nearly all the boys and young men had seen it, usually on the VCRs of their family's more affluent friends. . . . As one young Sandinista commented, 'Rambo is like the Nicaraguan soldier. He's a superman. And if the United States invades, we'll cut the marines down like Rambo did.' And then he mimicked Rambo's famous war howl and mimed his arc of machine gun fire. We both laughed."—from the book

There is a Nicaragua that Americans have rarely seen or heard about, a nation of jarring political paradoxes and staggering social and cultural flux. In this Nicaragua, the culture of machismo still governs most relationships, insidious racism belies official declarations of ethnic harmony, sexual relationships between men differ starkly from American conceptions of homosexuality, and fascination with all things American is rampant. Roger Lancaster reveals the enduring character of Nicaraguan society as he records the experiences of three families and their community through times of war, hyperinflation, dire shortages, and political turmoil.

Life is hard for the inhabitants of working class barrios like Doña Flora, who expects little from men and who has reared her four children with the help of a constant female companion; and life is hard for Miguel, undersized and vulnerable, stigmatized as a "cochón"—a "faggot"—until he learned to fight back against his brutalizers.

Through candid discussions with young and old Nicaraguans, men and women, Lancaster constructs an account of the successes and failures of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, documenting the effects of war and embargo on the cultural and economic fabric of Nicaraguan society. He tracks the break up of families, surveys informal networks that allow female-headed households to survive, explores the gradual transformation of the culture of machismo, and reveals a world where heroic efforts have been stymied and the best hopes deferred. This vast chronicle is sustained by a rich theoretical interpretation of the meanings of ideology, power, and the family in a revolutionary setting.

Played out against a backdrop of political travail and social dislocation, this work is a story of survival and resistance but also of humor and happiness. Roger Lancaster shows us that life is hard, but then too, life goes on.

Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua

When he died in 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the Vanderbilt dynasty, was wealthier than the U.S. Treasury. But he had nearly lost his fortune in 1856, when William Walker, a young Nashville genius, set out to conquer Central America and, in the process, take away Vanderbilt's most profitable shipping business. To win back his empire, Vanderbilt had to win a bloody war involving seven countries."Tycoon's War" tells the story of an epic imperialist duel--a violent battle of capitalist versus idealist, money versus ambition--and a monumental clash of egos that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans.

Written by a master storyteller, this incredible true story, impeccably researched and never before told in full, is packed with greed, intrigue, and some of the most hair-raising battle scenes ever written.

Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer

In 1980, with the Sandinistas newly in power, tailor and pig farmer Bernardo Martinez witnesses an extraordinary thing: an otherworldly glow about the statue of the Virgin Mary in the church where he works as sacristán. Soon the Holy Virgin appears. She tells Bernardo to forget his money problems and fear of ridicule and spread her message of peace and faith to his neighbors. Though a work of fiction, Bernardo and the Virgin is based on actual events in Bernardo Martinez's life. The visitation of the Virgin Mary at Cuapa, Nicaragua, remains one of the few such events accepted by the Roman Catholic Church in the last sixty years.

Silvio Sirias' sweeping novel tells many stories: that of a humble man touched by the transcendent; that same man as a devout boy denied the priesthood because of poverty; and those in his orbit, past and present. It is also the stormy epic of Nicaragua through the long Somoza years to the Sandinista revolution. Sirias' beautiful language mixes English with Spanish and details of dusty village life with wondrous images of Catholic mysticism. His portrayal of the rich recent past of Central America resonates with the experiences of both the natives and the thriving communities of Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and others putting down roots in the United States.


Bernardo and the Virgin: A Novel

An educational and dramatic tour through the controversial country, containing interviews with both Daniel Ortega and Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the leading voice of the opposition.

Where is Nicaragua?

In 1987, the death of Ben Linder, the first American killed by President Reagan's "freedom fighters" -- the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras -- ignited a firestorm of protest and debate. In this landmark first biography of Linder, investigative journalist Joan Kruckewitt tells his story. 
In the summer of 1983, a 23-year-old American named Ben Linder arrived in Managua with a unicycle and a newly earned degree in engineering. In 1986, Linder moved from Managua to El Cuá, a village in the Nicaraguan war zone, where he helped form a team to build a hydroplant to bring electricity to the town. He was ambushed and killed by the Contras the following year while surveying a stream for a possible hydroplant. 
In 1993, Kruckewitt traveled to the Nicaraguan mountains to investigate Linder's death. In July 1995. she finally located and interviewed one of the men who killed Ben Linder, a story that became the basis for a New Yorker feature on Linder's death. Linder's story is a portrait of one idealist who died for his beliefs, as well as a picture of a failed foreign policy, vividly exposing the true dimensions of a war that forever marked the lives of both Nicaraguans and Americans.

The Death of Ben Linder: The Story of a North American in Sandinista Nicaragua

"A collection of varied and amazing lives, all bent on shaping history. Together, these experienced, undeterred Nicaraguan women offer powerful clues about a truly revolutionary and democratizing feminism."––Adrienne Rich


"If it were not for writers like Margaret, how would women around the world find each other when there is such an institutional effort to keep us apart and silent? Here Margaret brings us the voice of Sandino's daughters, honoring his hat and wearing their own, wiser now, having been part of political and personal revolution."––Holly Near"
  

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"Powerful, moving, and challenging. Everyone interested in decency and justice will want to read "Sandino's Daughters Revisited"."––Blanche Wiesen Cook"
  

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"Sandino's Daughters", Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In "Sandino's Daughters Revisited", they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong––and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express their feelings and ideas. 


Randall interviewed these outspoken women from all walks of life: working-class Diana Espinoza, head bookkeeper of a employee-owned factory; Daisy Zamora, a vice minister of culture under the Sandinistas; and Vidaluz Meneses, daughter of a Somozan official, who ties her revolutionary ideals to her Catholicism. The voices of these women, along with nine others, lead us to recognize both the failed promises and continuing attraction of the Sandinista movement for women. This is a moving account of the relationship between feminism and revolution as it is expressed in the daily lives of Nicaraguan women.

Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle

"I'm not afraid of that old man," Adela once told her niece. But everyone in the small town of La Curva, Nicaragua, knew that the wealthy land owner, Don Roque Ramirez, wanted Adela Rugama dead. And on Christmas Day, Adela disappeared. It was two months before her murdered body was found. An American professor of Nicaraguan descent spending the summer in his parents' homeland learns of Adela's murder and vows to unravel the threads of the mystery. He begins the painstaking process of interviewing the townspeople, and it quickly becomes apparent that Adela--a hardworking campesina who never learned to read and write--and Don Roque had one thing in common: the beautiful Ixelia Cruz. The love of Adela's life, Ixelia was one of Don Roque's many possessions until Adela lured her away. The interviews with Adela's family, neighbors, and former lovers shed light on the circumstances of her death and reveal the lively community left reeling by her brutal murder, including: her older sister Mariela and her four children, who spent Christmas morning with their beloved aunt, excitedly unwrapping the gifts she brought them that fateful day; her neighbor and friend, Lizbeth Hodgson, the beautiful mulata who rejected Adela's passionate advances early in their relationship; Padre Uriel, who did not welcome Adela to mass because she loved women (though he has no qualms about his lengthy affair with a married woman); her former lover Gloria, the town's midwife, who is forever destined to beg her charges to name their newborn daughters Adela. Through stories and gossip that expose jealousies, scandals, and misfortunes, Sirias lovingly portrays the community of La Curva, Nicaragua, in all its evil and goodness. The winner of the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize, this spellbinding novel captures the essence of a world rarely seen in American literature.

Meet Me Under the Ceiba

"The best of all natural history journals which have ever been published."—Charles Darwin, 1874. Beautifully illustrated and a pleasure to read, this classic book describes the geography, geology, ecology, flora, fauna, and native inhabitants of Nicaragua in the nineteenth century. Many of Belt's detailed and accurate observations were not confirmed until decades later—for example, the fact that certain plants have "standing armies" of ants that defend them. (

The Naturalist in Nicaragua


"Nicaragua: Emerging from the Shadow of the Eagle" details the country's unique history, culture, economics, politics, and foreign relations. Its historical coverage considers Nicaragua from pre-Columbian and colonial times as well as during the nationalist liberal era, the U.S. Marine occupation, the Somoza dictatorship, the Sandinista revolution and government, the conservative restoration after 1990, and consolidation of the FSLN's power since the return of Daniel Ortega to the presidency in 2006.

The thoroughly revised and updated sixth edition features new material covering political, economic, and social developments since 2011. This includes expanded discussions on economic diversification, women and gender, and social programs. Students of Latin American politics and history will learn the how the interventions by the United States—the “eagle” to the north—have shaped Nicaraguan political, economic, and cultural life, but also the extent to which Nicaragua is increasingly emerging from the eagle's shadow.

Nicaragua: Emerging From the Shadow of the Eagle

In the decade before the onset of the Civil War, groups of Americans engaged in a series of longshot—and illegal—forays into Mexico, Cuba, and other Central American countries in hopes of taking them over. These efforts became known as" filibustering", and their goal was to seize territory to create new independent fiefdoms, which would ultimately be annexed by the still-growing United States. Most failed miserably.

 William Walker was the outlier. Short, slender, and soft-spoken with no military background—he trained as a doctor before becoming a lawyer and then a newspaper editor—Walker was an unlikely leader of rough-hewn men and adventurers. But in 1856 he managed to install himself as president of Nicaragua. Neighboring governments saw Walker as a risk to the region and worked together to drive him out—efforts aided, incongruously, by the United States’ original tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

"William Walker’s Wars" is a story of greedy dreams and ambitions, the fate of nations and personal fortunes, and the dark side of Manifest Destiny, for among Walker’s many goals was to build his own empire based on slavery. This little-remembered story from US history is a cautionary tale for all who dream of empire.

William Walker's Wars: How One Man's Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras

With The Contras: A Reporter In The Wilds Of Nicaragua

An account of U.S. policy from the Sandinista revolution through the Iran-contra scandal and beyond. Sklar shows how the White House sabotaged peace negoatiations and sustained the deadly contra war despite public opposition, with secret U.S. special forces and an auxiliary arm of dictators, drug smugglers and death squad godfathers, and illuminates an alternative policy rooted in law and democracy.

Washington's War on Nicaragua

Challenging the widely held belief that Nicaragua has been ethnically homogeneous since the nineteenth century, "To Die in This Way "reveals the continued existence and importance of an officially “forgotten” indigenous culture. Jeffrey L. Gould argues that mestizaje—a cultural homogeneity that has been hailed as a cornerstone of Nicaraguan national identity—involved a decades-long process of myth building.Through interviews with indigenous peoples and records of the elite discourse that suppressed the expression of cultural differences and rationalized the destruction of Indian communities, Gould tells a story of cultural loss. Land expropriation and coerced labor led to cultural alienation that shamed the indigenous population into shedding their language, religion, and dress. Beginning with the 1870s, Gould historicizes the forces that prompted a collective movement away from a strong identification with indigenous cultural heritage to an “acceptance” of a national mixed-race identity.

By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from the national memory, "To Die in This Way" critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and thus marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history that will also interest anthropologists and students of social and cultural historians.

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965

Lavinia is "The Inhabited Woman": accomplished, independent, and fiercely modern. She is sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being, then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and—through the power of love—finds the courage to act.


The Inhabited Woman

The Patient Impatience: From Boyhood to Guerrilla: A Personal Narrative of Nicaragua's Struggle for Liberation

In the wake of the US invasion of Nicaragua in 1912, the country came under the rule of the Somoza family, which imposed a brutal and corrupt military dictatorship. A low-scale insurgency of students, supported by peasants and other anti-Somoza elements of the society developed already in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the country became embroiled in a brutal insurgency. Supported by Cuba, a coalition of students, farmers, businessmen, clergy and a small group of Marxists launched a major war in 1978, which resulted in the downfall of the Somozas, a year later. The Sandinista government established in Managua of 1979 found the country ruined by the long war and natural disasters, and nearly half of the population either homeless or living in exile. Attempting to restructure and recover the underdeveloped economy, Sandinisas introduced a wide range of reforms and a cultural revolution. Considering the Sandinistas for 'Cuban-supported Marxists' and therefore a major threat for the US domination of Latin America, in 1980-1981 the USA began supporting the creation of the Contrarevolutionary forces (better known as 'Contras'), and thus helped provoke a new war that was to rage through Nicaragua for most of that decade, and is going to be covered in Volume 2 of this mini-series. Leaning upon extensive studies of involved armed groups, and their insurgencies in the 1960s and 1970s, 'Nicaragua, 1961-1990, Volume 1' is providing an in-depth coverage of military history during the first phase of one of major armed conflicts of Latin America in modern times. Guiding the reader meticulously through the details of involved forces, their ideologies, organization and equipment, this book is offering a uniquely accurate, blow-by-blow account of the Nicaraguan War and profusely illustrated with more than 120 photos, maps, and color artworks

Nicaragua, 1961-1990. Volume 1: The Downfall of the Somosa Dictatorship

Set in Nicaragua in 1984, "The Stars at Noon" is a story of passion, fear, and betrayal told in the voice of an American woman whose mission in Central America is as shadowy as her surroundings. Is she a reporter for an American magazine as she sometimes claims, or a contact person for Eyes of Peace? And who is the rough English businessman with whom she becomes involved? As the two foreigners become entangled in increasingly sinister plots, Denis Johnson masterfully dramatizes a powerful vision of spiritual bereavement and corruption.

The Stars at Noon

Young Black Americans have been trying to realize the promise of the American Dream for centuries and coping with the reality of its limitations for just as long. Now, a new generation is pursuing success, happiness, and freedom -- on their own terms. 

 In "It Was All a Dream", Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point.

 Interweaving her own experience with those of young Black Americans in cities and towns from New York to Los Angeles and Bluefield, West Virginia to Chicago, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity. Instead of accepting downward mobility, Black millennials are flipping the script and rejecting White America's standards. Whether it means moving away from cities and heading South, hustling in the entertainment industry, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality, or building activist networks, they are determined to forge their own path. 

 Compassionate and deeply reported, "It Was All a Dream" is a celebration of a generation's doggedness against all odds, as they fight for a country in which their dreams can become a reality.

It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America

The political upheaval in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala had a devastating human toll at the end of the twentieth century. A quarter of a million people died during the period 1974-1996. Many of those who survived the wars chose temporary refuge in neighboring countries such as Honduras and Costa Rica. Others traveled far north, to Mexico, the United States, and Canada in search of safety. Over two million of those who fled Central America during this period settled in these three countries. 

 In this incisive book, María Cristina García tells the story of that migration and how domestic and foreign policy interests shaped the asylum policies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. She describes the experiences of the individuals and non-governmental organizations—primarily church groups and human rights organizations—that responded to the refugee crisis, and worked within and across borders to shape refugee policy. These transnational advocacy networks collected testimonies, documented the abuses of states, re-framed national debates about immigration, pressed for changes in policy, and ultimately provided a voice for the displaced.

 García concludes by addressing the legacies of the Central American refugee crisis, especially recent attempts to coordinate a regional response to the unique problems presented by immigrants and refugees—and the challenges of coordinating such a regional response in the post-9/11 era.

Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada

A new translation of the influential teachings of the great Stoic philosopher

DESPITE BEING BORN into slavery, Greco-Roman philosopher Epictetus became one of the most influential thinkers of his time. "Discourses and Selected Writings" is a transcribed collection of informal lectures given by the philosopher around AD 108. A gateway into the life and mind of a great intellectual, it is also an important example of the usage of Koine or ?common? Greek, an ancestor to Standard Modern Greek.

Discourses and Selected Writings

In many Latin American countries, guerrilla struggle and feminism have been linked in surprising ways. Women were mobilized by the thousands to promote revolutionary agendas that had little to do with increasing gender equality. They ended up creating a uniquely Latin American version of feminism that combined revolutionary goals of economic equality and social justice with typically feminist aims of equality, nonviolence, and reproductive rights.Drawing on more than two hundred interviews with women in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Mexican state of Chiapas, Karen Kampwirth tells the story of how the guerrilla wars led to the rise of feminism, why certain women became feminists, and what sorts of feminist movements they built. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas explores how the violent politics of guerrilla struggle could be related to the peaceful politics of feminism. It considers the gains, losses, and internal conflicts within revolutionary women’s organizations. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution challenges old assumptions regarding revolutionary movements and the legacy of those movements for the politics of daily life. It will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in political science, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and Latin American studies as well as to general readers with an interest in international feminism.

Feminism  and the Legacy Of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas

"Wonderfully evokes Nicaragua's enchanting beauty and the enormity of its loss."--Kirkus Reviews "Descriptive and compelling, Shattered Paradise brings the reader to this magical land, its folkloric culture and its diminishing wildlife." --Maria Beltran, Readers' Favorite SHATTERED PARADISE is a lyrical, stunning and poignant memoir of survival and quick adaptation--as Ileana, alongside with her rooted Roman Catholic mother, manage to break free from a war infected life in Nicaragua, bullying school masters, and a womanizing father whose obsession with women and inner strength manage to carve an unexpected destiny for the two. Araguti brings to light the world of childhood in all of its innocence, curiosity and strength. Araguti, child number eight and sister to perhaps over twenty other unknown siblings, grew up happy and a dreamer amid the cloud rain forest of her isolated farmhouse and the mystical life of a small town, City of Mist. Until, the revolutionary war that came soon after the defeat of the forty year Somoza Dynasty, came to her door and the abrupt loss of the veil from innocent childhood revealed to her a hopeless and disappointing world, where her parents also lacked immunity: a relentless praying and weeping mother, a diminishing family and the endangering of the cloud forest and wildlife that saw her grow. Araguti came to the United States at the age of 12 and never had intentions of returning to her native land. However, after twenty-one years, she returned and discovered a country different from the one she left behind. Thus, the birth of her memoir blossomed into stories of inspiration, healing and self-discovery. Araguti's recount is passionate and of the pure kind. It offers a unique perspective of the war, its effects on the civilians and the richness of the culture. Araguti resides in California. She's an educator, a wife and a mother of a son and a daughter.

Shattered Paradise: Memoirs of a Nicaraguan War Child

Nicaragua: Those Passed by

The Contra War and the Iran-Contra affair that shook the Reagan presidency were center stage on the U.S. political scene for nearly a decade. According to most observers, the main Contra army, or the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (FDN), was a mercenary force hired by the CIA to oppose the Sandinista socialist revolution.


The Real Contra War demonstrates that in reality the vast majority of the FDN’s combatants were peasants who had the full support of a mass popular movement consisting of the tough, independent inhabitants of Nicaragua’s central highlands. The movement was merely the most recent instance of this peasantry’s one-thousand-year history of resistance to those they saw as would-be conquerors.


The real Contra War struck root in 1979, even before the Sandinistas took power and, during the next two years, grew swiftly as a reaction both to revolutionary expropriations of small farms and to the physical abuse of all who resisted. Only in 1982 did an offer of American arms persuade these highlanders to forge an alliance with former Guardia anti-Sandinista exiles--those the outside world called Contras.


Relying on original documents, interviews with veterans, and other primary sources, Brown contradicts conventional wisdom about the Contras, debunking most of what has been written about the movement’s leaders, origins, aims, and foreign support.


 

The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua

For two years the author had been investigating the secret funding of the Contras by the White House. Here, she identifies the network of National Security Council staff (led by Colonel Oliver North), CIA operatives &amp; ex-agents who set up this illegal support system, after the passage of the Boland Amendment in 10/1984 which made it illegal for the US government to give direct or indirect aid to the Contras. There is a detailed account of how mercenaries were recruited from all over the world &amp; sent to CIA-run training bases in Costa Rica; how money was obtained thru various means, ranging from the Iran arms deal to an arrangement with cocaine smugglers bringing drugs into Florida in return for quarterly payments into Contra bank accounts; how guns were procured, flown to US-controlled military bases in Central America &amp; then delivered into the hands of the Contras. The author, a British journalist, worked for CBS News beginning in 1978.

Nicaragua

Blood Brothers (Sign of Seven, #1)

Nora Roberts

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

Salman Rushdie

The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War

Gioconda Belli

Sandinistas: A Moral History

Robert J Sierakowski

Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution

Matilde Zimmermann

Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua

Roger N. Lancaster

Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer

Stephen Dando-Collins

Bernardo and the Virgin: A Novel

Silvio Sirias

Where is Nicaragua?

Peter Davis

The Death of Ben Linder: The Story of a North American in Sandinista Nicaragua

Joan Kruckewitt

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

Salman Rushdie

Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle

Margaret Randall

Meet Me Under the Ceiba

Silvio Sirias

The Naturalist in Nicaragua

Thomas Belt

Nicaragua: Emerging From the Shadow of the Eagle

Thomas W. Walker

William Walker's Wars: How One Man's Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras

Scott Martelle

With The Contras: A Reporter In The Wilds Of Nicaragua

Christopher Dickey

Washington's War on Nicaragua

Holly Sklar

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965

Jeffrey L. Gould

The Inhabited Woman

Gioconda Belli

The Patient Impatience: From Boyhood to Guerrilla: A Personal Narrative of Nicaragua's Struggle for Liberation

Tomás Borge

Nicaragua, 1961-1990. Volume 1: The Downfall of the Somosa Dictatorship

David François

The Stars at Noon

Denis Johnson

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965

Jeffrey L. Gould

It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America

Reniqua Allen

Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada

María Cristina García

Discourses and Selected Writings

Epictetus

Feminism and the Legacy Of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas

Karen Kampwirth

Shattered Paradise: Memoirs of a Nicaraguan War Child

Ileana Araguti

Nicaragua: Those Passed by

Vern Asleson

The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua

Timothy C. Brown

Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline & the Contra Drug Connection

Leslie Cockburn

Nicaragua, Back from the Dead? an Anthropological View of the Sandinista Movement in the Early 21st Century

Johannes Wilm

The Burden of Knowing: A journey, a friendship, and the power of truth in Nicaragua

Sharon Rezac Andersen