Mark Harmon (1) (1951–)

I started reading "Ghost of Panama" at around the same time as the US attack on Iran. I hadn’t chosen it on purpose, and yet, as often happens with chance readings, it felt as though I’d stumbled upon a glimpse of what was unfolding. Because the United States has a nasty habit of instigating coups to depose democratically elected governments it does not approve of, replacing them with the strongman of the moment who, in Panama’s case, turned out over time to be a raving madman as well show more as a dangerous criminal. Who, after a while, bites the hand that put him in power and becomes a bigger problem than the one they set out to solve. And so what does the United States do? It invades with the army, using the most absurd pretexts and telling the craziest lies, without caring about the lives of either its own soldiers or the civilians caught in the middle; it calls the resulting graveyard “peace” and prepares for a new invasion when things get out of hand again.
In addition to the ghosts of Panama, one would therefore have to reckon with those of Iraq, Afghanistan, Argentina and who knows how many others.
As for the book, it is not a novel and does not aspire to be one, and its narrative is rather dry, being essentially constructed from the memoirs of those who experienced the events first-hand. show less

A little disjointed.
Also, authors need to understand that just because someone may be have been born in Hawai'i it does not make them Hawaiian.