A book that every American should read. What I knew about US meddling in the affairs of other nations since it rose to power after WWII did not prepare me for the way Bevins put his journalistic skills to the task of connecting the dots between some of the major right-wing terror campaigns of the Cold War.

Some books fail to deliver on the promise of their subtitle. This one does not. Bevins uses personal accounts from survivors of massacre and genocide along with quotes from US leaders and previously unavailable official documents to painstakingly assemble a timeline and then illustrate the deliberate pattern of the American anti-communist obsession.

This is a devastating book, and as I listened to the stories of people who longed for a more just world that saw friends, family, and comrades slaughtered or disappeared, I was hit with feelings of incredible sadness and fear. But there are many disparate tragedies that now come together to make a kind of sense that was intentionally eschewed in my history education throughout public school and which wasn't fully developed in my study beyond that. Many history books will focus on a single conflict or event in a nation's past, or a prolonged political process where captivating stories of a few major players are unfurled. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but Bevins' approach is far more powerful, as he manages to tell several stories in a way that allows the reader (or listener, in my case) to zoom out and see that these are chapters in a much larger volume, so to speak. The lives of those that shared their accounts are not lost in the process, which is what I find particularly impressive. I think Bevins did right by his interviewees, and his interviewees' willingness to speak has the potential to change anyone who reads this book.