Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1951
• Raised—Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston University
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Stephen Kinzer is a United States author and newspaper reporter. He is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has reported from more than fifty countries on five continents.
During the 1980s he covered revolution and social upheaval in Central America. In 1990, he was promoted to bureau chief of the Berlin bureau and covered the growth of Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from Soviet rule. He was also New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul (Turkey) from 1996 to 2000. He currently teaches journalism and United States foreign policy at Boston University.
Kinzer has written several non-fiction books about Turkey, Central America, Iran, the US overthrow of foreign governments from the late 19th century to the present, and about Rwanda's recovery from genocide.
Views
Kinzer has spoken out widely against a potential U.S. attack on Iran, warning that it would destroy the pro-US sentiment that has become widespread among the Iranian populace under the repressive Islamic regime. He is also a fierce opponent of US foreign policy toward Latin America. In a 2010 interview with Imagineer Magazine, he stated:
The effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelming negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call “American values.” In many cases, if you take Chile, Guatemala, or Honduras for examples, we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those democratic, quasi-democratic, or nationalist leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for.
In Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, published in 2006, Kinzer critiques US foreign policy as overly interventionist.
In his 2008 book A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man who Dreamed It, Kinzer credits President Paul Kagame for the peace, development, and stability that Rwanda has enjoyed in the years after the Rwandan genocide, and criticizes the leaders of Rwanda before the genocide such as Juvenal Habyarimana.
His 2013 biography The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret War examines the Dulles brothers—Secretary of State and Director of the CIA, respectively—and their prosecution of the Cold War, including US government-sanctioned murders of foreign officials. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/16/2014 .)