Jaime Salazar is the 2021 Nautilus Book Award silver medalist. He is also a practicing lawyer, engineer, soldier, and author. For two decades, he has resided in Houston, Texas. Known by his family as L’Enfant Terrible, Salazar was born and raised in Lafayette, a staunchly white middle-class central Indiana town. Salazar was the youngest of four in one of the very few Mexican immigrant families. He refers to himself as the cleaning lady’s son. Salazar began his studies at the local prestigious Purdue University and lived with his parents for the entirety of the rigorous, all-encompassing Mechanical Engineering curriculum. Thinking he was ready to mature into adulthood, Salazar returned to the United States and was immediately recruited by the German technology conglomerate Siemens in Chicago. Because of his charisma and engineering expertise, Salazar was placed in their executive technical sales program. It was not long before the trappings of “Corporate America” and the shallow jet-set lifestyle disenchanted him. All the while, he was researching one of the world’s last rites of passage, the ultimate adventure sure to cure his wanderlust—the French Foreign Legion. Though he expected to live a romantic Beau Geste life, the harsh disciplined, often cruel reality of life in a cutthroat army of mercenaries was not quite to his taste. Salazar eventually made a daring escape from the Legion, and after a month on the run from French authorities, made it back to the safety of his homeland. Penguin published his memoir Legion of the Lost in 2005, reviewed favorably in the New York Times. In 2018, Salazar published his eagerly awaited follow-up, Escaping the Amazon. He authored it for another former legionnaire who escaped the Legion’s jungle regiment in French Guiana in a small boat, reminiscent of Papillion decades prior. Mutiny of Rage: The 1917 Camp Logan Riots and Buffalo Soldiers in Houston is his third non-fiction endeavor. In 2016 Salazar completed a law degree in Texas and now practices immigration, patent, and criminal law. When not practicing law, he is dedicated to his passion for writing narrative non-fiction. He is committed to physical activity and competed in the 2020 Houston Marathon. To contact the author, visit www.LegionoftheLost.com.
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