cover image Thanks to God and the Revolution

Thanks to God and the Revolution

Dianne W. Hart. University of Wisconsin Press, $21.95 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-299-12610-0

Members of a pseudonymous Nicaraguan family here talk about their lives, beginning with accounts of the late Somoza years through the triumph of the 1979 revolution, and ending in 1987. The family consists of elderly Dona Maria Lopez, essentially apolitical but sympathetic to her children's political passions; her daughter Leticia, a Sandinista collaborator and the most articulate, least ingenuous subject; and Leticia's half-sister and half-brother, Marta and Omar, active in the revolution, now employed in Sandinista agencies. Amid occasional squabbling and political grandstanding, a compelling human panorama emerges, and one of tragic dimensions, as family members come to realize the fragility of the revolutionary culture that matters so deeply to them. Hart, a language instructor at Oregon State University who spent 1983 to 1987 meeting with her subjects, makes no claim to objectivity, yet her portrayal conveys great force and her subjects' eloquence. (Nov.)