Bolivar: American Liberator
Marie Arana, 2013
Simon & Schuster
603 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439110195
Summary
It is astonishing that Simon Bolivar, the great Liberator of South America, is not better known in the United States. He freed six countries from Spanish rule, traveled more than 75,000 miles on horseback to do so, and became the greatest figure in Latin American history.
His life is epic, heroic, straight out of Hollywood: he fought battle after battle in punishing terrain, forged uncertain coalitions of competing forces and races, lost his beautiful wife soon after they married and never remarried (although he did have a succession of mistresses, including one who held up the revolution and another who saved his life), and he died relatively young, uncertain whether his achievements would endure.
Drawing on a wealth of primary documents, novelist and journalist Marie Arana brilliantly captures early nineteenth-century South America and the explosive tensions that helped revolutionize Bolívar. In 1813 he launched a campaign for the independence of Colombia and Venezuela, commencing a dazzling career that would take him across the rugged terrain of South America, from Amazon jungles to the Andes mountains. From his battlefield victories to his ill-fated marriage and legendary love affairs, Bolivar emerges as a man of many facets: fearless general, brilliant strategist, consummate diplomat, passionate abolitionist, gifted writer, and flawed politician.
A major work of history, Bolivar colorfully portrays a dramatic life even as it explains the rivalries and complications that bedeviled Bolívar’s tragic last days. It is also a stirring declaration of what it means to be a South American. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—Peru
• Raised—United States
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University; M.A., Hong
Kong University: certificate of scholarship, Yale
University
• Currently—lives in Washington D.C.
Marie Arana is an author, editor, journalist, and member of the Scholars Council at the Library of Congress.
Arana was born in Peru, the daughter of Jorge Arana, a Peruvian born civil engineer, and Marie Campbell Arana, she moved with her family to the United States at the age of 9, achieved her B.A. in Russian at Northwestern University, her M.A. in linguistics at Hong Kong University, a certificate of scholarship at Yale University in China, and began her career in book publishing, where she was vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster.
For more than a decade she was the editor in chief of "Book World", the book review section of The Washington Post, during which time she instituted the partnership of The Washington Post with the White House (First Lady Laura Bush) and the Library of Congress (Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress) in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. She currently sits on the board of the National Book Festival. Arana is a Writer at Large for The Washington Post. She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Post's chief book critic, and has two children from a previous marriage, Lalo Walsh and Adam Ward.
Marie Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well as the Martha PEN/Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir); editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life (2002); and the author of Cellophane (a satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon, published in 2006, and a finalist for the John Sargent Prize). Her most recent novel, published in January 2009, is Lima Nights. She has written the introductions for many books, among them a National Geographic book of aerial photographs of South America, Through the Eyes of the Condor. Her biography of Venezuelan military and political leader, Simon Bolivar—Bolivar: American Liberator—was published in 2013.
Arana has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For many years, she has directed literary events for the Americartes Festivals at the Kennedy Center. She has been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award as well as for the National Book Critics Circle. Her commentary has been published in USA Today, Smithsonian magazine, National Geographic, and numerous other literary publications throughout the Americas.
Arana was an Invited Research Scholar at Brown University in 2008-2009. In October 2009, Arana received the Alumnae Award of the Year at Northwestern University.
In April 2009, Arana was named John W. Kluge Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress through 2010. In September 2009, she was elected to the Scholars' Council of the Library of Congress as well as the Board of Directors of the National Book Festival. She is currently Senior Consultant to the Librarian of Congress. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Most North American historians, including me, have mentioned [Bolivar] only in passing, usually making "the George Washington of Latin America" reference, as though his life merits attention only when viewed through a North American prism. The hemispheric condescension inherent in that conception obviously needed correction in the form of a comprehensive biography that makes Bolivar's life accessible to a large readership in the United States. Bolivar is unquestionably that book…As befits its subject, Bolivar is magisterial in scope, written with flair and an almost cinematic sense of history happening…We might call Arana's style Bolivarian—colorful, passionate, daring, verging on novelistic.
Joseph J. Ellis - Washington Post
Wonderful.... In Arana's energetic and highly readable telling, Bolivar comes alive as having willed himself an epic life.... She brings great verve and literary flair to her biography of Bolivar.
Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times
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. Simon Bolivar’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. .. Arana’s dramatic narrative is appropriately grand and enthralling, if a tad breathless, and it makes Bolivar an apt embodiment of the ambitions and disappointments of the revolutionary age.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A] human story of a wealthy Creole who, inspired by Enlightenment ideas, sought to bring South Americans of all colors responsible and representative government. As Arana aptly points out, his vision of equality went much further than the ideals of George Washington. Today, Bolivar is viewed either as the archetype of the Latin American strongman or an impossibly faultless crusader of equality. In her work, Arana adeptly finds the statesman behind the images. —Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Arana is an indefatigable researcher, a perceptive historian, and a luminous writer, as shown in her defining, exhilarating biography of the great South American liberator Simon Bolivar.... Her understanding of the man behind the fame—and behind the hostility that enveloped him in his later years—brings this biography to the heights of the art and craft of life-writing.
Booklist
Inspired biography of the great Latin American revolutionary, with great depth given to his fulsome ideas.... Arana's work is bold and positively starry-eyed about her subject. She....reconstructs the wildly erratic, early character development that led to...a career forged by his own will.... Bolivar 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.
Kirkus Reviews
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