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The great white gets all the press, but the shark most feared by people around the world is the
bullshark, a fish of warm seas that even penetrates fresh water, swimming up rivers and into lakes.
InNicaragua, fishermen still pursue these unusual predators by dangerous, traditional means.
Acclaimed travel writer Edward Marriott takes us into the brackish realm of the bull shark and the
men who tackle it with their dugouts and handlines.
The coastal and river people hunted the shark for its fins and for its oil, feared and
revered it; every village had had family taken in its jaws. It was shark where shark
should not be--in fresh water, on human territory.
Along the way we learn about Nicaragua's spicy cultural stew of indigenous Miskitos, Spanish
conquerors, and Africans; about a country torn between Sandinistas and Contras; and about a
creature that is quickly disappearing despite its fierce disposition. Readers with a scent for blood will
not be disappointed--but the mythology of shark attacks on humans is perhaps even richer than the
true-crime variety; indeed, Marriott infuses the country with a Marquez-like quality of magic that
seems appropriate to a lake shark.
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Salman Rushdie's extraordinary book ... is a masterpiece of sympathetic yet critical reporting graced with his marvelous wit, quietly assertive style, odd and yet always revealing experience.... To say of The Jaguar Smile that it is a work of art is to take full note of its literary allusions, its
uncompromising sensitivity to death and destruction, its ready political eye for the funny and
grotesque, and above all it its understated and gripping eloquence.
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No mere rehash of an unsavory experience, this is a solid military and political history of a now-forgotten insurgency in Nicaragua that for six years involved the Marine Corps in frustrating jungle and guerrilla warfare. It points up our failure to learn to understand native peoples in our
efforts to win them to allegiance to the lawful government, and that our conduct of this affair still
rankles among peoples of the American Republics.
The best and most complete work ever written on this subject, April 22, 2000
Reviewer: zorroeast (see more about me) from United States
I understand this book was Maculay's doctoral thesis, and I think exceeds the purpose. Written with
such a fine style, the reader is situated in the jungles of Nicaragua experiencing guerilla warfare at its
best. It is a well documented work. In addition to reviewing previous titles on the subject, Macaulay
did extensive research on Marine Corps archives to produce an unbiased and scientific study of the
struggle. Also, the portrait of the character is highly accurate of this little man ( only 5'-4") born as
illegitimate son in a Nicaraguan village, yet his nationalism and valor had monumental influence throughout generations of
latin-americans. As of today his presence is still vivid and controversial.
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Times Literary Supplement
Life is Hard brings together two areas of enquiry which are seldom linked: intimacy and revolution.
This is a study of a popular revolution based on the daily lives of the urban poor. . . . At the same
time, it is a modern work of ethnography, incorporating the insights of Foucault and Derrida in
posing some searching questions about sexuality, racism and gender identity in modern Latin
American society.
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This Miskito Indian legend set in seventeenth-century Nicaragua illustrates the impact of the first European traders on traditional life.
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Book Description
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
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Some deaths in war are unmistakably heroic, sacrifices for the greater good. Some are merely sacrifices, and whatever good comes from them happens years later, when the events surrounding them have been all but forgotten. Such was the case with the death of Ben Linder, a young
American engineer who, fired by ideals of social justice, volunteered to aid the Sandinista revolution
that overthrew the corrupt dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua in 1979.
Ben Linder arrived in Nicaragua four years later, where he worked to build a hydroelectric dam that
would bring electrical power to the remote northern highlands. As journalist Joan Kruckewitt
observes in The Death of Ben Linder, "Nicaragua was to leftists throughout the world in the 1980s
what Spain was to progressive Americans in the 1930s," a place where a popular revolution might
for once bring peace and even happiness to the downtrodden. Officials in the administration of
President Ronald Reagan viewed the matter quite differently, however; Reagan once remarked,
seriously, that Nicaraguan tanks were only three days' drive from the American border--yet another
Communist threat that lay too close to be countenanced.
Linder was murdered by counterrevolutionaries--the Contras--in 1987, almost certainly with the
foreknowledge and perhaps even tacit approval of American intelligence officials. Kruckewitt draws
on recently declassified CIA documents and her own field reporting to discover why Linder--and
why Sandinista Nicaragua--should have been perceived as being such a threat. She paints a
sympathetic portrait of young Linder, too, who, even though idealistic, seems not to have been
naive; he recognized that he was in danger, but he pressed on, anyway, to do his part for the
revolution, helping build a dam that now provides electricity to former Sandinistas and Contras alike.
--Gregory McNamee
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Times Literary Supplement
The questions Gould's admirable work raises should spur in-depth scholarship in Nicaragua and
elsewhere. The book has appeal, too, for a broad audience. . . . Gould illustrates how discourses of
homogeneity and equal rights can be used as weapons, and thus touches on issues of assimilation
such as bilingual education, religious freedom and nationalism, and on the thorny issues concerning
reparations for intergroup oppression, such as affirmative action and rectification of borders.
Gould's outstanding analysis explores the conscious political construction of the national myth of
ethnic homogeneity in Nicaragua. . . . It is indispensable reading for anyone wishing to understand
Nicaragua and its Sandino revolution, as well as the wider history of Central America. Apart from
providing an extremely enlightening background for the long history of armed conflict in the region,
Gould demonstrates that in the process of conflict the definition of both Indian and community. . .
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One of the few texts on the role of the indigenous Miskito peoples in the war. Definitely worth a read.
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BEST BOOK ON THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTION!, January 31, 2000
Reviewer: Johan Nilsson (see more about me) from Stockholm, Sweden
The July 1979 triumph of the Nicaraguan revolution showed the way forward for fighting workers
and farmers throughout the Americas and the world. It transformed the possibilities for revolutionary
struggles in Central America and the Carribean...attracted a new generation of fighters in the United
States to communism...interwined with the rising freedom fight in South Africa...and gave impetus to
new advances by the socialist revolution in Cuba.
-Only the workers will go all the way -that battle cry of Augusto César Sandino, leader of the war
against the U.S. marines' occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s and '30s, once again became a line
of march for millions.
This special issue of New International, based on ten years of working-class journalism from inside
Nicaragua, traces the lessons fighters everywhere can learn from the rise and fall of the workers and
farmers government in Nicaragua.
Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba are three giants rising up to defend their independence, sovereignty,
and justice, on the very threshold of imperialism...One must have a sense of history to know what
these revolutions mean. -- Cuban president Fidel Castro March 1980.
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