Salvador.

DIDION, Joan.

Item Number: 132721

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.

First edition of this classic work by the award-winning author. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “For Jim Davidson April 7 1983 Joan Didion.” Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin.

"Terror is the given of the place." The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror–its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy.As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics. "No one has interpreted the place better.... Salvador shines with enlightening observation, and its language is lean and precise, in short what we have come to expect from Ms. Didion" (The New York Times Book Review).