Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, With New Afterword (Series on Latin American Studies) - Softcover

Kinzer, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674025938 ISBN 13: 9780674025936

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2007

Synopsis

In 1976, at age twenty-five, Stephen Kinzer arrived in Nicaragua as a freelance journalist―and became a witness to history. He returned many times during the years that followed, becoming Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe in 1981 and joining the foreign staff of the New York Times in 1983. That year he opened the New York Times Managua bureau, making that newspaper the first daily in America to maintain a full-time office in Nicaragua.

Widely considered the best-connected journalist in Central America, Kinzer personally met and interviewed people at every level of the Somoza, Sandinistas and contra hierarchies, as well as dissidents, heads of state, and countless ordinary citizens throughout the region.

Blood of Brothers is Kinzer’s dramatic story of the centuries-old power struggle that burst into the headlines in 1979 with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. It is a vibrant portrait of the Nicaraguan people and their volcanic land, a cultural history rich in poetry and bloodshed, baseball and insurrection.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Kinzer is a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Merilee S. Grindle is Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development, Emerita, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the former Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

From Publishers Weekly:

By the former New York Times Managua bureau chief, this is a well-written, information-rich survey of modern Nicaragua. Kinzer describes how Cesar Sandino's 1927-33 anti-U.S. campaign shaped the country's political development and inspired the overthrow of the Somoza regime in 1979. He analyzes the Reagan administration's "secret war" against the Sandinistas, and the deception that the contras existed only to interdict arms shipments to El Salvador. Kinzer relates many personal stories of his interaction with Nicaraguans, and he includes the exciting tale of his on-the-spot discovery of a U.S.-supplied contra camp in Honduras--a front-page scoop. He traces the confrontation between the Catholic church and the junta, the peace initiative by Costa Rica's Oscar Arias, the negotiated settlement that more or less ended the conflict and the surprising electoral victory of Violeta Chamorro over Daniel Ortega in 1990. Kinzer concludes that the Sandinistas grossly underestimated the moral power of the Catholic bishops, that they lost significant support by mistreating the Miskito Indians, and that they mistakenly believed they could build a prosperous Nicaragua "without deferring to the principle of free enterprise." Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0674025938
• ISBN 13: 9780674025936
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 450