""From February 4 to 20, 1985, I listened to testimony of some sixty persons, civilians in the north of Nicaragua, who had been the victims of kidnappings, bloody ambushes, rapes, and other kinds of assault by the contras, or who had survived the slaughter of their families or civilian friends. ""All of the accounts of the men and women I listened to, most of them poor, went straight into my note pad or my tape recorder and from there to these pages...