Salon.com > Central America

Joan Didion’s “Salvador” delves into the heart of darkness

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Over the last few years, I’ve been sent 400 to 500 review copies of books and audiobooks. I haven’t read them all, although I have tried to read at least a handful of pages of all of them, or listen to at least the first couple of minutes. Most of them have offered at least some pleasures to reward the time, and I’m happy in general that we live in a world where there is a place even for books and audiobooks that appeal to the narrowest of audiences.

The most striking thing about all this reading and listening is how few of these books and audiobooks have taken up any kind of long-term residence in my mind and in my life – how few have troubled me so that I think about them months and years after I thought I had finished my time with them, and how few have brought pleasure or solace of the sort that cause me to want to reread them.

If I tried to categorize what it is that gives these books their special staying power, the first thing I might do is make a list of the qualities that — surprisingly — aren’t sources of this power. It’s not the subject or the content, although subject and content that is inherently interesting or dramatic can go a long way toward helping a book be interesting or dramatic. It’s not timeliness, although I’m always happy to spend time with a book that has something to say to the present moment. And it’s not the events the book offers, although I’m drawn to a book that offers a series of interesting events.

“House Hunter,” locked up in Nicaragua

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 19:57:00 +0000

GRANADA, Nicaragua — A US family that has spent the past 23 months on an odyssey through the treacherous terrain of Nicaragua’s legal system hopes the adventure will end soon, with Jason Puracal’s safe return home to Tacoma, Washington.

Puracal, 35, a former US Peace Corps volunteer and beachfront realtor in Nicaragua, could be acquitted by an appeals court by the end of this week. That would conclude nearly two years in jail on what his family, friends and international supporters claim are false charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and organized crime.

But if appellate judges uphold the original ruling, the cocktail of crime convictions will keep the American behind bars in Nicaragua for 22 years.

Puracal, who has a Nicaraguan wife and a 5-year-old son, was arrested inside his home in the beach town of San Juan del Sur in November 2010. On Aug. 29, 2011, he was sentenced along with 10 Nicaraguan co-defendants all accused of conspiring to traffic drugs and launder money.

New in town: Nepalis join the Latin trek to America

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 18:38:00 +0000

NEW YORK — Tashi vividly remembers the two black Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that hovered over Arizona desert’s blue sky two years ago, marring the first moments of his American dream. It had been nine days since he left Nepal, a journey that took him by plane to Guatemala, then overland by van and finally on foot to Mexico across the US border.

Now it seemed the long journey was about to end. His jeans were covered in desert sand. His shirt reeked of dust and sweat. There, in the desert outside of Tucson, Ariz., as the border patrol closed in, Tashi saw his childhood dreams of making his fortune in the West disappear.

“I was numb, didn’t know what to do,” he recalled. “ I have never seen anything like this except in movies.”

And then, they got him.

Tashi, 28, asked to withhold his real name because he fears being investigated by immigration authorities. He grew up in a small, remote Himalayan village in the Sagarmatha Zone of northeastern Nepal.