Any travel journalism by Joan Didion can sway you from visiting the place. I bought this book in Los Angeles before driving to Panama, keen to read up on each country before visiting. We had plans to cross El Salvador quickly after my reading of the book however stayed for a few weeks. This book in particular reveals the horror of the political situation in El Salvador in 1982. Joan and her husband sip a coca cola, crouched around a single tea light, they keep still while a man watches them and pretends to point a gun at them , a few days later a journalist is found dead, a warning.