Nicaragua

The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War, by Gioconda Bella (2002). This is the moving, tragic, yet inspiring autobiography of Gioconda Belli, award-winning Nicaraguan poet, wife, Sandinista, mother, and acclaimed author of The Inhabited Woman.Belli recounts how she parlayed her bourgeois background into the perfect alibi for transgression as a part of the underground Sandinista movement in the 1970s against dictator Somoza. Belli describes Nicaragua as a country of wide lakes and "abundant foliage like a wild woman's mane." Her memories and thoughts lovingly evoke her home country from which she was once exiled. Those interested in Nicaragua's troubled recent past will be intrigued by Belli's very personal, very impassioned, rooted telling.