Bolivar
American Liberator
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4.5 • 26 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant biography that “reads like a wonderful novel but is researched like a masterwork of history” (Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs), this is the epic story of the famous South American general and statesman Simón Bolívar.
Simón Bolívar—El Libertador—freed six countries from Spanish rule and is still the most revered figure in South America today. He traveled from Amazon jungles to the Andes mountains, engaged in endless battles and forged fragile coalitions of competing forces and races. He lived an epic life filled with heroism, tragedy (his only wife died young), and legend (he was saved from an assassination attempt by one of his mistresses). In Bolívar, Marie Arana has written a sweeping biography that is as bold and as passionate as its subject.
Drawing on a wealth of primary documents, Arana vividly captures the early 19th-century South America that made Bolívar the man he became: fearless general, brilliant strategist, consummate diplomat, dedicated abolitionist, gifted writer, and flawed politician. A major work of history, Bolívar not only portrays a dramatic life in all its glory, but is also a stirring declaration of what it means to be South American.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The George Washington of South America cuts a dashing though dark-edged and ultimately tragic figure in this rousing biography. Peruvian journalist Arana (American Chica) chronicles Gen. Sim n Bol var's struggle against the Spanish Empire in the 1810s and '20s through several dizzying cycles of battlefield victory, triumphal procession, demoralizing reversal, and squalid exile, before he finally drove imperial forces out of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Her vivid portrait shows us a charismatic man of high ideals, fiery oratory, unflagging energy and resolve, bold strategies, and a romantic aura "he rode, ragged and shirtless... his wild long hair riding the wind" that women found irresistible. (His preeminent mistress was no slouch herself: she once took up a sword to protect him from assassins.) Behind the epic marches, picturesque battles, and swirling ballroom scenes, the author smartly fills in the troubled background of the revolution, which descended from Enlightenment principles into bloody civil and racial conflict and grisly massacres that Bol var sometimes fomented; his tense rule over politically fractious republics also declined from a vision of freedom and unity to an unpopular authoritarianism. Arana's dramatic narrative is appropriately grand and enthralling, if a tad breathless, and it makes Bol var an apt embodiment of the ambitions and disappointments of the revolutionary age. 8 pages of color photos, 2 b&w maps.
Customer Reviews
Excelente
Astonishing book. Impressive narrative of the epic battles fought under extremely severe weather end environment. Got clinched from the very first day. I burst into tears as a baby at the end of the book
A mistaken and distorted view of Bolivar's life
This book irreaponsably shows many errors about Bolivar's life. A wrong vision of venezuelan history.
Great book!
I couldn't stop reading. My admiration for Simon Bolivar grew!