This collection represents 309 books, collected by Walter J. Petry from 1983-1992. They have been written or edited by historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians, journalists and travelers on various aspects of the Revolution.
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The patient impatience : from boyhood to guerilla : a personal narrative of Nicaragua's struggle for liberation
Tomás Borge
This book intertwines the author's personal life with the history of Nicaragua to present a portrait of the Nicaraguan Revolution.
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La Utopía de Belén : sistematización de una experiencia de educación popular realizada en el Municipio de Belén, Nicaragua
Centro de Educación y Comunicación Popular (Nicaragua)
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Everybody had his own gringo : the CIA & the Contras
Glenn Garvin and P.J. O'Rourke
The Reagan administration spent eight years and a vast amount of money backing the Contras in their bid to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Although the Sandinistas eventually were ousted, it was by the ballot box and not the M-16, for by that time the Contras had ceased to be a viable force. What caused their untimely demise? Some of the fault lies with the Contras themselves, but in this account of villainy, courage, incompetence and violent death in a country at war with itself, the author sets out to show that there is blame in Washington, too. Garvin covered the war for six years, often travelling with Contra combat units, and his work was nominated for Pulitzer Prizes in 1988 and 1989. He won the Mencken Award for Investigative Reporting.
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Politics and the Catholic church in Nicaragua
John M. Kirk
Guerrilla-priests and liberation theology are not new phenomena in Nicaragua. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, Catholic Church leaders have played a major role in that country's politics. The result, John Kirk writes, is a polarized church, one with a progressive minority at loggerheads with the conservative hierarchy. Kirk sets each stage of the church-state debate in a historical continuum, then examines the forty-year period of Somocismo and the Sandinista period (1979-90) that followed. This social revolution - blending nationalism, Marxism, and Catholicism - dared to be different, he claims, and accordingly it paid the price. Kirk wrote this book following three trips to Nicaragua during the 1980s, when he witnessed firsthand the social polarization occurring at the time. But the involvement of the Catholic Church in Nicaraguan politics is not exceptional, he says: "Most - if not all - religions are also encumbered with socio-political concerns that go beyond the essentially 'religious.'"
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Life is hard : machismo, danger, and the intimacy of power in Nicaragua
Roger N. Lancaster
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.
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Nicaragua, una década de retos. English; Sandinista economics in practice : an insider's critical reflections
Alejandro Martínez Cuenca, Sergio Ramírez, and María Rosa Renzi
In light of the Sandinistas' 1990 electoral defeat, Sandinista economist Martinez Cuenca offers this frank and engaging assessment of the Nicaraguan revolution and its prospects for the future.
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Ráfaga : the life story of a Nicaraguan Miskito Comandante
Reynaldo Reyes, J.K. Wilson, and Tod Sloan
Rafaga is the nom de guerre of Reynaldo Reyes Davis, a Nicaraguan Miskito Indian. This work chronicles his life and his role in the war for the rights of Miskitos in Nicaragua. He recounts his childhood and the struggle for basic education that led him, still a teen, to a Church of God seminary. He served briefly as a minister in a Miskito community. By the time he was in his early twenties, however, Rafaga had become part of the Sandinista revolution. Then, angered by the Sandinista atrocities against the Miskitos and other Nicaraguan indigenous groups, he joined the Contras as a field commander. Eventually disillusioned by the Contra leadership, he began to work for peace and Miskito autonomy. His book presents a very personal and certainly controversial view of the complexities of Nicaragua's recent history.
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A Faustian bargain : U.S. intervention in the Nicaraguan elections and American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era
William I. Robinson, Alejandro Bendana, and Robert A. Pastor
As an analysis of the controversial US role in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, this book exposes the duplicitous and possibly illegal intervention of the US in the electoral process of a sovereign nation. Drawing on secret documents and interviews, the author brings to light the clandestine activities of US officials and examines the implications of the "electoral intervention project" for US foreign policy and for social change in the Third World in the post-Cold War era.
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A strange silence : the emergence of democracy in Nicaragua
Stephen Schwartz
The author, a fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development whose expertise is in environmental and resource economics, presents a thorough examination of how the policies of various governments fail simultaneously to encourage natural resource preservation and economic growth. Case studies describing success, as in Dumoga-bone National Park in Indonesia and the tropical forest in Peru, along with failures, as in Ghana, where deforestation has taken its toll, help support his viewpoint.
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Disposable patriot : revelations of a soldier in America's secret wars
Jack Terrell and Ron Martz
A former intelligence agent who survived two assassination attempts describes how the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are literally pursuing their own reprehensible agenda.
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Dando razón de nuestra esperanza : los cristianos latinoamericanos frente a la crisis del socialismo y la derrota sandinista.
Centro Ecuménico Antonio Valdivieso
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Nicaragua, a decade of revolution
Lou Dematteis, Chris Vail, and Eduardo Galeano
This work, covering the period of Nicaragua's violent history since 1979 in a collection of black and white photographic images by photographers from Nicaragua, the United States and around the world, ranges from the Sandanista triumph to the brutal Contra war and the election of Vileta Chamorro.
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Comandos : the CIA and Nicaragua's Contra Rebels
Sam Dillon
Dillon, a reporter for the Miami Herald , offers the first comprehensive examination of the civil war in Nicaragua from the Contra side. He focuses largely on the work of Luis Fley, the Contras' chief legal investigator who, uncovering tortures, rapes and murders committed by the Contra commanders against their own peasant troops, brought the criminals before a tribunal. Dillon analyzes the rivalry among U.S. agencies for control of the Contras--the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Agency for International Development and the National Security Council all had a crack at it--and shows how Lt. Col. Oliver North secretly aided and advised the Contra army during the U.S. military-aid cutoff from 1984 to 1986.
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Harvesting change : labor and agrarian reform in Nicaragua, 1979-1990
Laura J. Enriquez
One of the principal aims of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua was to end the exploitation of the rural poor. But its attempts to promote balanced economic development and redistribute agricultural resources created labor shortages that threatened the country's economic lifeline. New employment opportunities created through agrarian reform upset the delicate balance developed in pre-revolution years to meet the labor requirements of Nicaragua's two key crops, cotton and coffee. Laura Enriquez studied this problem extensively while working in Nicaragua between 1982 and 1989, and in Harvesting Change she provides a unique analysis of the dilemmas of reform in an agrarian society.
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Witness for Peace : a story of resistance
Ed Griffin-Nolan
In this graphic, thought-provoking book, Ed Griffin-Nolan depicts the experiences of Witness for Peace (WFP), a group of Americans who bore witness to the war in Nicaragua--an event that resulted in the killing and wounding of many innocent Central American civilians. Griffin-Nolan explains how WFP participants spent weeks in the war zones in order to understand the impact of U.S. policy on simple people living, as one member of the group phrased it, "at the end of a gun barrel." He describes how WFP participants labored to bring stories of war back to the United States, and how many of them lost their jobs and even their marriages in the process. He concludes by showing that the efforts of WFP saved lives and possibly prevented "another Vietnam" from developing in Central America.
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Blood of brothers : life and war in Nicaragua
Stephen Kinzer
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 openedthe New York Times Managua bureau, making that newspaper the first daily in America to maintain a full-time office in Nicaragua.
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In search of the assassin
Susie Morgan
In 1984 Susie Morgan, an English journalist, was critically injured in a bomb attack at a press conference in Nicaragua, just across the Costa Rican border. The conference had been urgently convened by Eden Pastora, charismatic leader of the anti-Sandinista contra rebel force at his jungle headquarters. 17 journalists were injured and three killed in the blast. Pastora, the target, miraculously survived. It took Susie two years and dozens of operations to recover, and, as she did, she became obsessed by a desire to track down the assassin - a man who had passed himself off as a Danish photographer, had travelled with journalists to the press conference and had planted the bomb, concealed in his camera case, only inches from where Susie had stood. A story which chronicles Susie's own emotional odyssey, it is also a dramatic narrative of one woman's tenacious and courageous struggle against the labyrinthine machinations of corrupt governments on every side and of the enormous difficulty she faced as a journalist, with no legal powers, to get to the truth: a truth almost everyone wanted hidden.
