Books, Arts & Manners: Semper Fidel

Grenada: The Untold Story, by Gregory Sandford and Richard Vigilante (Scribner’s Madison, 181 pp., $13.95)

The body count of books about Grenada since the American intervention stands to date at nine—more, probably, than the entire number written about the island before 1983. These studies vary from the colorless documentation of William Gilmore to the fantasies of the London Observer’s Hugh O’Shaughnessy, who depicted the New Jewel era of Maurice Bishop as the island’s Kingdom Come. The spectrum darkens if you include reports such as that of the Islington team, which made outlandish charges about torture of Grenadian prisoners by American soldiers and suggested that Britain’s Plessey Airports Ltd. clandestinely imported all the (Russian!) arms photographed by the 82nd Airborne. The Islington Report, a genuinely scurrilous document, was composed not by wild-eyed Shiites but by three British MPs. Nor was the report of the American Bar Association much better. Now into these muddied Carib waters step Gregory Sandford, a U.S. State Department careerist, and Richard Vigilante, a journalist and television producer (and now an NR editor), who have written quite the best account of these times and troubles available.

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Geoffrey Wagner

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Grenada: The Untold Story, by Gregory Sandford and Richard Vigilante (Scribner’s Madison, 181 pp., $13.95)

The body count of books about Grenada since the American intervention stands to date at nine—more, probably, than the entire number written about the island before 1983. These studies vary from the colorless documentation of William Gilmore to the fantasies of the London Observer’s Hugh O’Shaughnessy, who depicted the New Jewel era of Maurice Bishop as the island’s Kingdom Come. The spectrum darkens if you include reports such as that of the Islington team, which made outlandish charges about torture of Grenadian prisoners by American soldiers and suggested that Britain’s Plessey Airports Ltd. clandestinely imported all the (Russian!) arms photographed by the 82nd Airborne. The Islington Report, a genuinely scurrilous document, was composed not by wild-eyed Shiites but by three British MPs. Nor was the report of the American Bar Association much better. Now into these muddied Carib waters step Gregory Sandford, a U.S. State Department careerist, and Richard Vigilante, a journalist and television producer (and now an NR editor), who have written quite the best account of these times and troubles available.