Edward Platt was born in 1968 and lives in London. His first book, Leadville, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is also the author of The Great Flood which explores the way floods have shaped the physical landscape of Britain, and The City of Abraham, a journey through Hebron, the only place in the West Bank where Palestinians and Israelis lived side by side.At the Guardian, Platt tagged ten favorite political travel books, including:
The Jaguar Smile by Salman RushdieRead about the other entries on the list.
Rushdie visited Nicaragua during July 1986, when the Sandinista government was battling to survive in the face of hostility from theUS and the US-sponsored Contra rebels. Since he was a patron of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign in London, he was not “a wholly neutral observer”. He was dismayed by the censorship in force, but “el escritor hindú”, as he was called, could not bring himself to condemn a government led by a poet, Daniel Ortega. Rushdie’s “postcards” from Nicaragua, as he calls this record of his trip, were once an insight into a venture that failed. But since Ortega won power again in 2011 and 2016, their historical significance has changed again.
--Marshal Zeringue
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