On the seventeenth of July, 1979, the dictator Anastasio Somoza left Nicaragua after forty-five years. Finally, the family that had ruled and owned the country was gone. It took its money, which was much of the money the country had. The dictator left. The generals left. The colonels. They fled by helicopter and airplane, by car and on foot. By the nineteenth they were, almost all of them, gone. But the soldiers remained. And in San Juan del Sur, on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, the rebel Commander Zero, Eden Pastora, was facing the best of the dictator's remaining soldiers: Bravo, Montenegro, "the Rattlesnakes," "the Wild Geese," "the Black and White." Eventually the guardias fled too - some of them, including a tough, murderous sergeant from "the Rattlesnakes" (called Suicida by his men), making their way to El Salvador, from where, as the Contras, they waged sporadic war against the Nicaraguan leftist forces. Christopher Dickey was the first American newspaperman to go into the mountains of Nicaragua with the Contras and come out alive, and his account of the "secret" war that is being waged against the Sandinista government reads like the best fiction. Yet it is as factual as tomorrow's headlines.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
What ties all of Christopher Dickey's books together?
His most recent is "Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force -- The NYPD," chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 2009. But before that came "a first-rate thriller," "The Sleeper," which followed his critically acclaimed memoir, "Summer of Deliverance," about his father, the poet and novelist James Dickey. "Innocent Blood," Chris's first novel, predicted in 1997 the waves of terror that would come at the United States, and got inside the heads of those who would bring them. "Expats," is a book of essays about traveling among the people of the Middle East -- particularly the displaced and misplaced Westerners who lived there in times of war. And Chris's first book, "With The Contras," in 1986, was not only an up-close account of combat in Nicaragua but a first-hand history of Central America at a time of ferocious revolutions and repression.
So, you'll say that what's common about Chris's books is combat, terror and emotional trauma. And that's partly true. But there is also another deeply felt theme: that of family as the ultimate source of human drama and also the social force that far too often is misunderstood, or ignored, in our efforts to grasp what's going on in the world around us. For more on this theme see pages 228-229 in the paperback edition of "Summer of Deliverance" or Location 3949 on the Kindle edition.
Chris's career as an editor, reporter and foreign correspondent spans 35 years. He is currently the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek Magazine and The Daily Beast. Previously he worked for The Washington Post as Cairo Bureau Chief and Central America Bureau Chief. Chris's columns about counter-terrorism, espionage and the Middle East appear regularly now on TheDailyBeast.com. For links to recent columns and articles, visit www.ChristopherDickey.com.
Chris has written for Foreign Affairs, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Wired, Rolling Stone, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic, among other publications. He is a frequent commentator on the BBC World Service, BBC television, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio and France24 as well as other television and radio networks.
Among his many honors are awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association and Georgetown University. Chris is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he was formerly an Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow, and of the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris. In the fall of 2009 he was a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.
And Chris's next book? He's deep into a true, untold story of espionage and international intrigue -- and, yes, combat, terror, trauma and families -- on the eve of the War Between the States.
