cover image Augusto ""Cesar"" Sandino: Messiah of Light and Truth

Augusto ""Cesar"" Sandino: Messiah of Light and Truth

Marco Aurelio Navarro-Genie. Syracuse University Press, $34.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-8156-2949-8

Mesoamerican Religion Marco Aurelio Navarro-Genie offers a spiritual biography of a Nicaraguan revolutionary in Augusto Cesar Sandino: Messiah of Light and Truth. Sandino, an early 20th-century firebrand from whom the Sandinista government later took its name, has been studied before, but not with this kind of attention to his unique theology and millenarian worldview. At the end of his life, he believed himself to be the Messiah, and his determination to free his people from oppression deeply influenced liberation theologians later in the 20th century. This is an accessible biography with a fresh, long-overdue perspective. (Aug.)