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Reading • Nicaragua

Book Digest There is an open question on what character flaw or personality disorder causes me to lord over people who don’t know anything about Nicaragua or at least where it is located. No doubt it will be given ample consideration in my memoir (current working title: Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words). To be fair, I had only the faintest idea myself until sometime in the late ‘80s, when I read a William Greider piece in Rolling Stone set in Managua, in which photojournalist Susan Meiselas informed him there were only two working elevators in the whole country. (By the way, Chester Bowles, a Kennedy-era diplomat reportedly quipped that Managua, Nicaragua, looked/sounded like a typographical error.)

Now comes a republication of Meiselas’s classic monograph, Nicaragua, shot in the waning days of the cruel, corrupt—and U.S.-sponsored—Somoza regime and in the glory days of the Sandanista revolution. This new edition includes Pictures From a Revolution, a DVD in which Meiselas returns to the scenes she originally photographed and searches out and talks with the subjects of the photographs. Additionally, there is a lucid interview with Meiselas about this project. And last but certainly not least, the International Center of Photography in Manhattan honors the MacArthur fellow, Magnum photographer Meiselas with an exhibition. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 8, 2008
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