Underwriting injustice Book

If I were just judging Joan Didion's prose, it would be 5 stars every time. But a few things about "Salvador" kept me from giving this book a 5 star rating.

But first, a disclaimer. I'm half Salvadoran. My American father and Salvadoran mother met in El Salvador and married in '77 and I was born in '79 in the States, just a few months after my parents decided to come back here. That said, I've never really spoken to them about the war. I've only actually only visited the country once, as a child, while the war was still going on. But my entire extended family continued to live there through the war and still do today.

So I come to the book with some ideas in my head about pre-Civil War El Salvador, as well as some knowledge of what happened both after Didion wrote this book and, even later, after the war ended.

As a snapshot, this is probably a somewhat accurate depiction of the country from an American who stayed there for TWO weeks. And that's my biggest problem with it. How can you really get a sense of this incredibly complicated war and truly get to know and understand the people and culture you're writing about from a scant two weeks on the ground? I think it's truly misleading to use this as a definitive examination of the country during the war.

This is a look at a very bloody war, but as graphic as the descriptions can be at times, it's actually a very sterile. You just see body counts, not people. There's no look at the culture (other than some off-base generalizations like "Salvadorans don't do numbers accurately") to really examine HOW the country got to be where it was in '82 when Didion wrote this snapshot. Lots of interviews with the US ambassador and high-ranking Salvadoran military officials but very little perspective of everyday people living day-to-day during this time.

Part of this could be because of when this book was written (1982, right in the midst of the awful war, not to mention smack dab in the middle of the Cold War) and a political point Didion may have been trying to prove, but whatever the reason, "Salvador" left me wanting.

Also, the insistence at calling the country Salvador drove me up a wall. I've never in my life heard the country referred to like that.