Arana ably captures the brash brilliance of this revered and vilified leader.
Inspired biography of the great Latin American revolutionary, with great depth given to his fulsome ideas.
Like the recent biography by Englishman Robert Harvey, novelist and memoirist Arana’s (Lima Nights, 2008, etc.) work is bold and positively starry-eyed about her subject. She plunges into the tumultuous life of the Great Liberator, from the moment he thundered into the capital of the Spanish viceroyalty, Santa Fe de Bogotá, on August 10, 1819, at age 36 and at the height of his power, sure at last that his revolution “stood to inherit all the abandoned riches of a waning empire.” Arana reconstructs the wildly erratic, early character development that led to Bolívar’s apotheosis, a career forged by his own will and wrought by experience, from his aristocratic roots in Caracas through wide-ranging travels to Europe and America. From his mother’s thwarted efforts to secure a title of nobility for her sons, Bolívar learned early on about the racial inflexibility of the Spanish overseers, cognizant that Latin America, with its rich ethnic layers, was unlike the makeup of European and American society and therefore was incompatible with their models of government. Bolívar would effectively build on important insurrections before him: by Indian leader Túpac Amaru II in Peru in 1781; by the famously egotistical Venezuelan rebel-in-exile Francisco de Miranda, from whom Bolívar learned the fatal consequences of indecision; and by José de San Martin in Argentina and Chile. Disgusted by the corruption and venality of the Spanish crown and feeling betrayed by North America’s refusal to aid the Latin American revolutionaries, Bolívar embraced revolution wholeheartedly, declaring freedom for Spanish-American slaves, proclaiming war to the death and ruling by an authoritative style that won many detractors.
Arana ably captures the brash brilliance of this revered and vilified leader.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1439110195
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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