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Tino Fernández, one of Panama's outstanding bus painters
Come Blow Your Horn by the Theatre Guild
New jazz club at Habibi's
Sparky the Wonder Dog
Books: The Recluctant Colonel
Chiricanos come together to defend their museum
Hermanos Alfaro

La Bella y la Bestia
Jorge Dunn and his generation of Panamanian street painters
Bent at the Teatro La Quadra
Cool Internet sites
Ibarra Exhibition in Beverly Hills
Grupo Llama




A worthy coup novel,
set in a place like here
a book review by Eric Jackson
The Reluctant Colonel
by Michael J. Merry
BookSurge, Charlston SC (2008)
618 pp, $23.99 in paper from Amazon.com
ISBN  1419687026

Michael J. Merry is a Brit who has spent decades doing business and economic reporting in Latin America, and who found himself in Panama that October in 1968 when a military cabal ousted Arnulfo Arias and in Caracas that February in 1992 when Hugo Chávez's bid for power fell short. There are many things one knows or suspects but can't write as a journalist, and like many before, Merry has turned to fiction to impart some of the true flavor of what he has seen and heard in his travels.

Here we have the story of a low-level expatriate British telecommunications manager who has some friends in the army of the fictional Latin American republic where he works, and quite by accident finds himself in the middle of a bloody coup d'etat and then press-ganged into a military junta. With the ribald tales of one of the coup plotters interspersed, it's a story of heroism, corruption, genius, betrayal, generosity, venality, international intrigue, sex and violence.

So will this book tell you everything you need to know about Omar Torrijos, Augusto Pinochet, Hugo Chávez or Juan Perón? Of course not. It's a work of fiction. But the characters and acts do have a certain ring of truth to them that only one who knows the history can impart, and this is one of those novels you'll find hard to put down.

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