Salvador

Terror is the given of the place.

The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war.

Didion delivers an anatomy of a particular brand of political terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy.

As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, Didion interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear."

Here, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.