Wait For Me: An Afternoon with Bill Gentile and Alan Riding

Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

Wait For Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll

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"Now, in his vivid memoir, Wait for Me, True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll, Bill Gentile turns back the clock to the 1980s and thrusts us into the mountains of Nicaragua and the slums of El Salvador to offer what he calls "a firsthand, frontline account of the human cost of war." He succeeds for two simple reasons: he was willing to take serious risks and, more pertinently, he survived to tell his story when so many around him-soldiers, rebels and photojournalists like himself-were killed. It was, to put it bluntly, a murderous time." - Alan Riding, former New York Times Mexico and Central America bureau chief.

Bill Gentile did more than just "cover" Nicaragua's Sandinista Revolution and the Con-tra War. He lived them. First as corre-spondent for United Press International (UPI) and later as photojournalist for Newsweek magazine, Gentile experi-enced those historic events from the inside, as the partner of a Nicaraguan woman whose prominent family "adopted" him as one of their own. His memoir takes readers not only to the 1979 revolution, the Contra War in the merciless mountains of Nicaragua and to the deadly streets of El Salvador, but also to the steel mills and backyards of southwestern Pennsylva-nia where the Italian immigrant com-munity prepared him for those conflicts, and then waited for his return. This book introduces the American public to the victims of U.S. intervention abroad. It is a firsthand, frontline account of the human cost of war.

Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll, explores family, self, love, loss and love again - told against a backdrop of adversity and warfare.

BILL GENTILE is an independent, national Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker teaching at American University (AU) in Washington, DC. Gentile covered the 1979 Sandinista Revolution and the U.S.-backed Contra War in Nicaragua, as well as the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s. His book of photographs, “Nicaragua,” won the Overseas Press Club Award for Excellence, Honorable Mention. He is the director, executive producer and host of the documentary series, FREELANCERS with Bill Gentile, and the author of Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll.

ALAN RIDING, a longtime New York Times correspondent, covered Central America, including the Nicaraguan Revolution, in the 1970s and early 1980s. The author of several books, including Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, he now lives in Paris and has turned to playwriting.

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