“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Thus begins Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the twentieth century’s most lauded works of fiction. In Gabriel García Márquez, literary scholar Stephen M. Hart provides a succinct yet thorough look into García Márquez’s life and the political struggles of Latin America that have influenced his work, from Love in the Time of Cholera to Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

            By interviewing García Márquez’s family in Cuba, Hart was able to gain a unique perspective on his use of “creative false memory,” providing new insight into the magical realism that dominates García Márquez’s oeuvre. Using these interviews and his original research, Hart defines five ingredients that are critical to García Márquez’s work: magical realism, a shortened and broken portrayal of time, punchy one-liners, dark and absurd humor, and political allegory. These elements, as described by Hart, illuminate the extraordinary allure of García Márquez’s work and provide fascinating insight into his approach to writing. Hart also explores the divisions between García Márquez’s everyday life and his life as a writer, and the connection in his work between family history and national history.

Gabriel García Márquez presents an original portrait of this well-renowned writer and is a must-read for fans of his work as well as those interested in magical realism, Latin American fiction, and modern literature.

Researchers in the rapidly growing field of intelligence studies face unique and difficult challenges ranging from finding and accessing data on secret activities, to sorting through the politics of intelligence successes and failures, to making sense of complex socio-organizational or psychological phenomena. The contributing authors to Researching National Security Intelligence survey the state of the field and demonstrate how incorporating multiple disciplines helps to generate high-quality, policy-relevant research. Following this approach, the volume provides a conceptual, empirical, and methodological toolkit for scholars and students informed by many disciplines: history, political science, public administration, psychology, communications, and journalism. This collection of essays written by an international group of scholars and practitioners propels intelligence studies forward by demonstrating its growing depth, by suggesting new pathways to the creation of knowledge, and by identifying how scholarship can enhance practice and accountability.