Bolivar (Arana) - Book Reviews

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