In places where life is reasonably ordered, the violence that rages in the Third World is masked by a propensity to integrate it in some favorite sequence of meaning…. It is rarely, if ever, depicted as a terrifying impasse, as horror, a catastrophe of meaning. The politician's speech, the journalist's story, the social scientist's account do not reach the "heart of darkness." Only a writer in full command of her craft can recreate it on the page. Joan Didion's Salvador, a lean and splendid book, pierces ideological fictions and takes us to the outer and almost unbearable limits of what we call "politics," "society," and "culture"—to the point where those rational notions turn into terror, obscenity, and hallucination….

From the immense distance of definitions, terror appears as the arbitrary use, by organs of political authority, of severe coercion against individuals or groups, the credible threat of such...