"Now, in his vivid memoir, Wait for Me, True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll, Bill Gentile turns back the clock to the 1980s and thrusts us into the mountains of Nicaragua and the slums of El Salvador to offer what he calls "a firsthand, frontline account of the human cost of war." He succeeds for two simple reasons: he was willing to take serious risks and, more pertinently, he survived to tell his story when so many around him-soldiers, rebels and photojournalists like himself-were killed. It was, to put it bluntly, a murderous time." - Alan Riding, former New York Times Mexico and Central America bureau chief.
Bill Gentile did more than just "cover" Nicaragua's Sandinista Revolution and the Con-tra War. He lived them. First as corre-spondent for United Press International (UPI) and later as photojournalist for Newsweek magazine, Gentile experi-enced those historic events from the inside, as the partner of a Nicaraguan woman whose prominent family "adopted" him as one of their own. His memoir takes readers not only to the 1979 revolution, the Contra War in the merciless mountains of Nicaragua and to the deadly streets of El Salvador, but also to the steel mills and backyards of southwestern Pennsylva-nia where the Italian immigrant com-munity prepared him for those conflicts, and then waited for his return. This book introduces the American public to the victims of U.S. intervention abroad. It is a firsthand, frontline account of the human cost of war.
Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll, explores family, self, love, loss and love again - told against a backdrop of adversity and warfare.
For more information and photos relative to Wait for Me, see waitformebook.com
Gentile, Bill: - Bill Gentile is an independent, national Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker teaching at American University (AU) in Washington, DC. His career spans four decades, five continents and nearly every facet of journalism and mass communication. Gentile covered the 1979 Sandinista Revolution and the U.S.-backed Contra War in Nicaragua, as well as the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the 1994 invasion of Haiti, the ongoing conflict with Cuba, the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's worked across Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Tajikistan, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Chad, Angola, Rwanda and Burundi. His book of photographs, Nicaragua, won the Overseas Press Club Award for Excellence, Honorable Mention. He is a pioneer of "backpack video journalism" and author of the highly acclaimed Essential Video Journalism Field Manual and its Spanish-language version, Manual Esencial de Produccion Video Periodismo. He is the director, executive producer and host of the documentary series, FREELANCERS with Bill Gentile, the Mexico pilot of which is currently being distributed by the Walt Disney Company's affiliate, National Geographic Television, across Latin America and the Caribbean. Gentile teaches the first-ever Spanish-language class at AU's School of Communication (SOC), "Backpack Documentary en Español." He engineered the SOC's 2014 partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and is the driving force behind that initiative. Gentile helped found, and is the faculty advisor of, the AU student chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), the organization's first student chapter in the nation's capital. He is a member of the Pulitzer Center's Campus Consortium Advisory Board. He is a member of the Overseas Press Club (OPC) Foundation Board of Directors. He is advisor to the Association of Foreign Correspondents in the United States. Gentile collaborates on filmmaking with the university's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS). His recent work includes Fire and Ice on the Mountain, about the diminishing glacier at Huaytapallana, Peru, and its impact on the local population's spiritual relationship with the environment. He also produced When the Forest Weeps, a short film that examines how Ecuador's Kichwa Indians struggle as their deep spiritual relationship with the Amazonian rain forest diminishes in a clash with the forces of so-called modernity. In 2013, he shot, produced, wrote and narrated a three-part film series on religion and gangs in Guatemala. They are, I. The Gangs, II. The Researcher, and III. The Pastor. Bill Gentile began in 1977 as reporter for the Mexico City News and correspondent for United Press International (UPI) based in Mexico City. After covering the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, he spent two years as editor on UPI's Foreign Desk in New York, then moved to Nicaragua and became Newsweek Magazine's Contract Photographer for Latin America and the Caribbean.
