$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
192 pages with 100 photographs by the author (57 color; 43 black-and-white), 3 historic photographs (1 color; 2 black-and-white), 5 color montages, 3 documents (2 color; 1 black-and-white), and 1 color map = 112 illustrations
11.0″ x 9.5″ landscape/horizontal
ISBN 978–1–960521–01–9
Published November 2024
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized. Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
March 29, 2025
Pratt Munson Gallery, Munson Museum of Art, Utica, NY
March 11, 2025
Dodd Center for Human Rights, UCONN
February 24, 2025 at 6pm
The Explorer’s Club, NYC
More events in 2025 coming soon! CUNY-NY, the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale
Read an article and view photographs by Wallace in Blind magazine.
“UConn professor’s retrospective reporting is still topical today”, Daily Campus 2025
“Award-winning photojournalist shares work at Munson in Utica”, Daily Sentinel
“New Hartford native, Award-Photojournalist to Present at Munson”, Greater Utica Chamber Commerce
“War-Torn Central America in the 1980s Comes to Life in New Historical Memoir” UConn Today
by Scott Wallace
with a foreword by the Honorable Christopher J. Dodd
Winner of Foreword’s INDIES Best Photography Book 2025
2025 Next Generation Indy Book Award Finalist for best book in the Military category
Winner of the 2025 International Latino Book Awards, Best Political/Current Affairs Book and Best History Book
During the 1980s, the United States financed and directed wars against popular movements in Central America. Vowing to block “Soviet expansion,” the U.S. waged a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency in El Salvador while orchestrating a covert and illegal war to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some 75,000 died in El Salvador, and more than 30,000 were killed in Nicaragua, most of them civilians. Countless more were displaced. Meanwhile, with tacit U.S. support, the Guatemalan military razed hundreds of Indigenous communities and killed more than 200,000 people during a civil war that claimed the lives of 100,000 Mayan villagers.
Scott Wallace arrived in Central America in 1983 to cover these conflicts as a freelance “stringer” for CBS News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as Newsweek, The Independent, and The Guardian. Traveling along the frontlines of war, Wallace evolved a distinctive reporting style that included photojournalistic portraits of startling intimacy, page-turning tales of high adventure, and incisive analysis of the events he witnessed. The result is this unforgettable account of a reporter coming of age on the battlefield as he seeks the truth amid a landscape rife with death and deception.
Introduced by the Honorable Christopher J. Dodd, readers will find within these pages a compelling and eye-opening narrative and visual record of the conflicts that continue to reverberate in the crisis on America’s southern border with Mexico and in policy decisions made in Washington that impact families at home and throughout the world. Situating the exercise of U.S. power on a continuum running from Vietnam through Central America to Iraq, where he later reported, Wallace provides a rare look into the real-life consequences of morally dubious policies while offering a gripping primer for aspiring foreign correspondents and field reporters.
In Central America in the Crosshairs of War, Scott Wallace presents a highly compelling memoir that not only reboots America’s history of misadventures overseas since Vietnam, but also restores faith in the importance and power of journalism at a time when “disinformation” and “alternate realities” abound in America and abroad. As Pulitzer-Pres winning journalist Debrorah Nelson observers: “Scott Wallace takes us along his harrowing journey into the Central American jungles for an important historical accounting that draws a sharp line from the U.S. proxy wars of the 1980s to today’s crises in those countries and at our own southern border.”
About
About the Author
Scott Wallace is the author of the best-selling book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes (Crown, 2011), and a longtime contributor to National Geographic. From 1983 to 1989 he covered the armed conflicts in Central America for CBS News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Guardian, The Independent, and Newsweek. His articles have also appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, Harper’s,Interview, The Nation, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and The Washington Post, his photographs in Details, The Economist, National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and The Wall Street Journal, via Getty Images and the World Bank Photo Collection. His broadcast credits include CBS, CNN, FOX News, and the National Geographic Channel. He has been honored with the Explorers Club’s Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in reporting from the field, and received awards from the Associated Press, Gannett Newspapers, Inter-American Press Association, Renewable Natural Resources Foundation, Society of American Travel Writers, and Society of Professional Journalists. Wallace is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut.
About the Contributor
Christopher J. Dodd was born in 1944 in Willimantic, Connecticut. He earned a B.A. in English literature from Providence College and received his J.D. from the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. From 1966 to 1968 he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, and from 1969 to 1975 he served in the U.S. Army Reserve. Dodd is Connecticut’s longest-serving member of Congress, having been a member of the House of Representatives from 1975 to 1981 and then the U.S. Senate from 1981 to 2011. Upon retirement from the U.S. Senate in 2011, Senator Dodd became Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America and, in 2018, he joined the law firm of Arnold & Porter as a Senior Counsel. Senator Dodd also served as Special Advisor on the Americas to President Joseph R. Biden. He and his wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd, have two daughters and reside in East Haddam, Connecticut.
Slide Show
Praise
“The latter experience is at the core of Central America in the Crosshairs of War, a stunning, oversized hardcover that blends memoir, photography, and historical analysis. …it is a kind of memoir-documentary report from a field reporter. This unique perspective is one of the book’s major strengths. Drawing from his detailed notes and scripts from the field (the subject of one of the book’s three galleries), military briefings, media coverage, and some scholarly work, Wallace offers readers a felt sense of what it was like on the ground. Especially intriguing are the insights he offers into the idealism of journalists.”
—Robert Shaffer, Ph.D., Professor of History Emeritus, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, and book review editor, Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research
“Scott Wallace’s Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq is really several books at once that cohere into a magnificent whole. It is the evocative, at times nostalgic, at others harrowing, personal account of a young journalist’s coming of age during his first foreign journalism assignment, always keenly observant and thoughtful. But it also offers a carefully developed analysis of the nature of U.S. foreign policy, at least in those poorer parts of the world where it has intervened militarily or more clandestinely, or heavily supported the wars waged by its clients. Wallace has witnessed these wars both earlier and later in his life, as a citizen and journalist.”
—Francisco Goldman, ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America (read full review here, pdf)
“Scott Wallace takes us along on his harrowing journey into the Central American jungles for an important historical accounting that draws a sharp line from the U.S. proxy wars of the 1980s to today’s crises in those countries and at our own southern border.”
—Deborah Nelson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Professor of Investigative Reporting at the University of Maryland
“Scott Wallace intensively documented the U.S.-supported wars that wracked Central America during the 1980s, and he deftly links them to the American “war on terror” after 9/11. Writing with great lucidity and grace, Wallace also illustrates Central America in the Crosshairs of War with his stunning photographs. A very compelling read.”
—Peter Bergen, Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, National Security Analysist for CNN, and author of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden and The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda
“For anyone seeking to comprehend how the United States lurched heedlessly from its disastrous war in Vietnam on to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, Central America in the Crosshairs of War is a must-read. One of the most intrepid and clear-eyed reporters to have covered the wars in Central America of the 1980s, Scott Wallace has produced an essential book, in words and pictures, offering an invaluable historical perspective.”
—Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Fall of Baghdad and Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year
“Scott Wallace’s book is fantastic. Vivid, immediate, gripping, and frequently hair-raising, his grounds-eye account of the cruel wars that the U.S has inflicted and enabled on hapless victims far and near evokes history as it happened. Wallace’s reporting, intensely detailed and personal, memorializes people and the world in which they lived and died in a way no reader can ever forget.”
—Andrew Cockburn, Washington Editor of Harper’s Magazine and author of The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine and Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins
“Scott Wallace’s reporting from Central America’s armed conflicts during the 1980s is inspirational stuff: compelling, informed and informative, moving, and with photographs that bring both an immediacy and an intimacy to complex and violent times. And there is so much more in Central America in the Crosshairs of War: On the Road from Vietnam to Iraq.”
—Bob Ahern, Archives Editor, Getty Images