Salvador

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Summary: Salvador
Review: "Salvador" completely discredits Joan Didion and all of her books. The two weeks she is believed to have "lived" in El Salvador was actually a mere four hours. Any truths in this book, and there are but a handful, have been obtained by outside sources, not by her own "research." I lived in El Salvador when she came in to gather info for her story. It is an outrage that she so flippantly used the sufferings of the Salvadorans to effect personal gain. If you want to read fiction, go ahead. She's a good storyteller. As a service to yourself, however, keep in mind that the author has almost zero first hand knowledge of what she writes. The only reason I have the book at all is that my father gave it to me. What a shame that he wasted his money on this piece of trash.

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Summary: Perhaps Joan Didion's most important non-fictional work.
Review: Didion's uncanny ability to use the words and mechanics of the English language to convey particular meanings is lustfully breathtaking. A fine line between the writings found inside a diary and a journalist's objective reportings, Joan Didion's _Salvador_ conveys El Salvador's civil war in ways that only she could. An outsider to the region, Didion's writings do not attempt to account for the chronological history of the civil war. Instead, she uses this diaretic format to help the reader enter into a world so foreign from the luxury-plagued U.S. that both Joan and her readers are left out of place, struggling to come to terms with the terror then reigning across El Salvador's tropical countryside--all along forcing her readers to confront the odious role played by our nation's then Vietnam Syndrome inflicted CIA. (May I also suggest the movie _Salvador_,...It is based on the diary of another freelance journalist/photographer who covered the civil war in El Salvador at the same time as Didion. These two works will move your mind and your heart, altering the way you look at the world as well as our country.)

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Summary: Incisive & Biting: The U.S. & El Salvador's Civil War
Review: For anyone interested in the 12-year bloody civil war in El Salvador and the U.S. complicity in that war, this is a absolute read. It is a slim volume in which Didion lays bare in a matter a pages the U.S.'s criminal involvement in El Salvador's internal political affairs in the name of the war against "communism." There are few books in its class. I couldn't put this book down and finished it in one sitting! It provides a quick study of the U.S.'s complicity in the murderous regimes in El Salvador in the 1980's.

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Summary: Salvador
Review: I met Joan Didion the day she came to El Salvador. We talk for about one hour and though I find her a most inteligent woman, his ideas about the country and the civil war shocked me as completely fantastic, I thought that at the end of her visit, her ideas would be very different.
I was very surprised when I read her book several years ago. It was our conversation, as if it was written before she came to El Salvador. She first made her conclusions, then she came to the country to pick some anecdotes that fit them. Too bad. The book is a waste of paper and ink

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Summary: A still life of death
Review: Joan Didion went to El Salvador for a couple of weeks in 1982 and wrote this great short book about her experience. Her tale is not about the details of the civil war or the politics involved, but just the mood of the country during that slice of time. Senseless and violent murder pervaded, and she captured it vividly and brilliantly.

Being in El Salvador must have felt like never knowing that at any moment someone could step up from behind you and fire a bullet into your head. Could one ever get used to that? Used to bodies left every day on the side of the road? Used to them laying unclaimed because, if they were claimed, that person would be next? It really made me realize how much I take for granted living under the rule of law. Human life seems to be of such little value almost everywhere else.

The other thing Didion made me realize was that there was hope for my writing. She writes in huge, long, never-ending run-on sentences with scads of parantheticals and comma-separated interludes and explanations, as well as semicolon appendages (many whole paragraphs are only one sentence long), yet she gets away with it; there's hope for me.

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Summary: Vivid and haunting imagery and cause for reflection
Review: Joan Didion's book is a reedy, powerful work of nonfiction that explores El Salvador's horrific civil war and the American government's dark involvement with helping certain individuals "to disappear." In this work, Didion travels from "battlefields to body dumps" to uncover what many in the political regime do not want covered. With gun shots echoing in the night, frightened citizens keeping quiet and the fear of imminent bloodshed on the minds of many, Salvador is a classic, true tale of political intrigue, violence and secrecy that is equil to the works of Thomas Hauser's Missing and Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shah of Shahs and The Soccar War(s). Joan Didion is a journalist and author who truly gets into 'the bush' of the matter.

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Summary: a romantic view of civil war
Review: This is not the book to learn about the civil that engulfed El Salvador for over 12 years. This book gives a snapshot of widely held liberal political views of the war. Is quite arrogant to spend two weeks in a total foreign country, have dinner with a rich local family, meet with U.S embassy personnel and to assist to a few social functions ( all in English) Put all this experience together and write a book that tries to explain a conflict so violent that its roots go back decades. If this was not enough the writing is quite dramatic and one wonders how accurate are some events that Joan writes about. One such event describes walking in some upper class neighborhood reaching for her purse and hearing clicks of guns being loaded ( this I assume from private bodyguards being paranoid and alert to a possible treat coming form her ) I have visited such neighborhoods and walked those streets at around the period of time that Joan was there. I honestly do not remember any such episodes.

This book provides a one side perspective of the conflcit. The writing is so dramatic as to be laughable. Nevertheless if El Salvador is a topic of interest to you, it might be worth the reading as a way to learn more of events that occurred in that country at that particular time. No way this book can be taken whole and quoted as a single source to describe the Salvadorian Civil War