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"What an impressive book! I was deeply
touched to read it and to be carried back to that time and those cruel
events of the war in Nicaragua. They would have disappeared into
the amnesia hole of history except for efforts like yours. You have
done the people who suffered and died a profound service."
—Bill
Moyers, journalist and commentator
• • •
"This
is
a deeply moving book. [...] in it we see the human spirit
surmount obstacles and
pain, observe how these protagonists of the horror of the war get on
with their
lives, fall in love, bear children, work.
[...] The photographs contained in this book are more eloquent than any
word one might venture to pronounce. [...]
The
world needs books such as this in order to see itself mirrored in a
setting in which wars are not described as heroic campaigns, but for
what they really are:
the failure of understanding, the relinquishment of the highest
human powers to solve differences by peaceful means.[...]"
—Gioconda
Belli, Nicaraguan author and poet (from the Prologue of the book)
• • •
"Here we have the
tracks left by the 'Freedom Fighters.' President Reagan sent them to Nicaragua
to save Nicaragua from the danger of becoming Nicaragua: so Nicaragua would not be Nicaragua; so
it would continue being just a fourth-class colony.
The greatest power
in the world against a very small, impoverished country: ten years of ruthless war not only left
thousands dead and mutilated, it also left poisoned souls and murdered hopes. In a magical way, this book shows the
visible as well as the invisible wounds. And the persistent, inexplicable joy of living:
in spite of everything."
—Eduardo
Galeano, writer
• • •
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"About
2500 years ago Aeschylus, the Greek playwright,
wrote, 'He who
learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls
drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.'
These
remarkable photos and the stories that accompany them should be
on billboards from sea to shining sea, so the pain and suffering they
represent might fall drop by drop upon the American psyche and against
our will, by the awful grace of God, wisdom might come to these United
States and her foreign policy."
—Charlie
Clements,
Executive Director,
Carr Center for Human
Rights at Harvard University
• • •
"Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S.
Policy is an extraordinarily powerful and moving book. A single
genre cannot begin to convey what the people of Nicaragua or any
dependent nation live with day to day: the consequences of criminal
U.S. foreign policy. Only a multi-genre offering—in which the
photographic image, human testimony, children's drawings and more
combine to open a door on that life—can come close to reflecting its
reality. Pam Fitzpatrick and Paul Dix give us such a door. It is up to
us to look, listen and walk through."
—Margaret
Randall author of Sandino's Daughters and Sandino's Daughters
Revisited, among other books
• • •
"To see the true
price of war, you must
look in the face of the innocents who endure it and hear their voices.
That is the gift that Dix and Fitzpatrick present in this stirring book—the sobering gift of letting us see and
hear what our 'leaders' so routinely do in our names."
—Jim
Hightower, national radio commentator and author
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