American warlord

Before Charles Taylor became the infamous warlord president of Liberia, he lived as a student in Boston, where he fathered a son. When Taylor returned to Liberia, he left the boy behind with his mother, who sought to distance the child from his birth-father. Chucky was an unremarkable suburban American kid living outside Orlando with his mother and a stepfather whose name he had taken. Like so many teenage boys, he trod a fine line when it came to staying out 'of trouble. But then one day in 1991 he picked up the phone to find his father Charles, calling from the middle of a bloody civil war. Charles Taylor claimed victory in that war and would soon be elected president. When Chucky traveled to Liberia in 1992 to reunite with his father, he quickly found himself caught up in a world of violence and intimidation. Alter assassins nearly killed Charles, he appointed Chucky head of the new Anti-Terrorist Unit, an elite group intended to protect the president, but one that would instead become infamous for carrying out his vendettas. Young and drunk on power, and with no real training beyond action films, Chucky spiraled into a binge of drugs, violence, and women, committing crimes that stunned even his brutal father. Eventually, when the regime fell, he fled the country only to be apprehended when he tried to return home to the United States in 2006. Journalist Johnny Dwyer has spent more than five years working to uncover the truth of Chucky's dark years in Liberia. Based on interviews with Chucky, his family, and his victims; extensive reporting in Liberia; as well as hundreds of newly declassified documents, this is a story that few have heard until now. American Warlord cuts right to the bone of humanity's terrifying and unknowable capacity for cruelty, and shows just how easily a soul can be lost amid the chaos of war.--Adapted from book jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.