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Summary
Summary
A sweeping narrative worthy of a Hollywood epic, this is the authoritative biography of the warrior-statesman who was the greatest figure in Latin American history.
It is astonishing that Simón Bolívar, 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, Bolívar 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, Bolívar 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.
Author Notes
Marie Arana is editor of "The Washington Post Book World" as well as a feature writer for "The Post". She has served on the board of directors of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists as well as the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in Washington, D.C.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. 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 Bolivar 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 Bolivar an apt embodiment of the ambitions and disappointments of the revolutionary age. 8 pages of color photos, 2 b&w maps. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Apr. 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*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. A household name in the southern half of the Americas, Bolivar nevertheless is generally unknown to North Americans, beyond the simple, Oh, yeah, I've heard the name. The good of this meticulous new account of Bolivar's exciting, to say nothing of consequential, life and times is that such a robust, dynamic, and, more importantly, easily accessible narrative goes to great lengths to rectify the North American unfamiliarity with Bolivar. The liberation of the South American colonies from the rule of the mother country was an even more complex, fits-and-starts program than the severing of ties between Great Britain and its Atlantic-seaboard colonies, but Arana follows the war in all its steps forward and back, at the end of which one man would be credited for single-handedly conceiving, organizing, and leading the liberation of six nations. 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. For more about the preparation of this book, see the adjacent Story behind the Story.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SIMÓN BOLÍVAR, the Liberator, was the George Washington of South America, or so he was regarded by sundry eminences in the United States during a large part of his extraordinary career. Grandeur was his nature. He aroused adulation. He dealt a few preliminary military defeats to the Spanish imperial army, and in 1813, he entered victoriously, for the moment, into Caracas on a chariot drawn by white-gowned daughters of the leading families, as if he were a god or a Caesar. And he assumed the magnificent title of "Liberator and Dictator." The chariot and the daughters deviated, it is true, from the austere Washington style, and the dictatorial honorific has hovered a little ominously over his reputation ever since, as you can see by reading Marie Arana's admiring and rueful biography, "Bolívar." But like Washington, Bolívar was a man of the Enlightenment. Reason and republicanism drove him forward. Arana tells us that he tended his white horse first thing in the morning, read Montesquieu and Voltaire before breakfast and issued edicts after the meal. He knew how to wield political and military power in a single gesture, as Washington used to do, but he also knew how to weather the ghastliest of conditions, one Valley Forge after another, in versions that were tropical, Andean, wildly remote and beyond anything that Washington had to endure. Only in the mid-1820s, after 14 years of war, did he manage to achieve international recognition for various new independent republics of South America; and even then, post-victory, warfare never seemed to stop. Arana judges that carnage and destruction in the course of South America's struggles for independence added up to a calamity so great as to be demographic: in some regions population dropped 50 percent. Bolívar coped with impossibly complicated racial and ethnic circumstances. The man himself was fabulously wealthy, the owner of slaves and estates, capable of raising his own armies for a while, though his struggles ultimately impoverished him. And yet, because a strain of non-European blood was thought to run through his otherwise European veins, even he, the Caracas aristocrat, was obliged to fend off the skin-tone prejudices of the age. "Sambo," he was called in Peru, not by his admirers. Indian warriors with bows and arrows made up a portion of his armies, and Indian women a large portion of his camp followers. Slaves and the descendants of slaves from Africa played a central role in the war, sometimes fighting on the Spanish royalist side, ultimately on Bolivar's republican side; and the spirit of conspiracy being what it was, he executed the finest of his black republican generals. Unfortunate executions apart, Bolívar's positions on slavery and race were in every respect superior to Washington's. At a moment when the anti-Spanish struggle seemed hopeless, the president of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, came to Bolivar's aid (as no president of the United States ever managed to do, which is pitiful to see), and Bolívar responded in 1816 by ordering the abolition of slavery, not merely for strategic reasons. Arana quotes a speech from 1819: "Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe." He continued, "It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong." And more: "We all differ visibly in the color of our skin" - which is the kind of straightforward acknowledgment that no leading figure in the United States would have uttered in those benighted days, or for many generations to come, even if, in the United States, epidermal monochronicity has never been the norm. On the other hand, Bolívar figured that South America's racial mishmash ruled out any experiments in libertarian or democratic self-rule. "We will require an infinitely firm hand," he said, "and an infinitely fine tact to manage all the racial divisions in this heterogeneous society, where even the slightest alteration can throw off, divide or undo its delicate balance." He ended up in command of the countries that are nowadays known as Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia (whose name derives from his own) and Peru, all of which he hoped to unite, together with still more regions, into a grand Latin American federation. And the constitutional system that he proposed made provision for a presidencyfor-life, like a Supreme Court appointment in the United States, except with a further, faintly monarchist clause allowing the president to appoint a vice president who would be his successor. Among Bolívar's fellow freedomfighters and republicans, not everyone looked with admiring eyes on this dictatorial tendency. In 1828, a group of his associates, who styled themselves "liberals," hatched a tyrannicidal assassination plot. The plot was foiled by Bolívar's mistress, a married lady named Manuela Sáenz, who, Arana tells us, was notorious for her libertine panache - her probable lesbian affair with one of her slaves, her delight in costuming not only herself but her female slaves in masculine clothes and her tolerance for Bolívar's many affairs. But Sáenz's most salient trait, historically speaking, was an ability to think quickly. She heard the assassins breaking into the house. She instructed Bolívar to leap out the window to safety, which he did, wearing her shoes. And with the conspirators about to burst into the room, she greeted them at the door for the purpose of giving Bolívar extra time to make his escape - "a strikingly beautiful woman, sword in hand," according to the description of one of the plotters, whom Arana wisely quotes. The conspirators were not alone in regarding Bolívar as a tyrant in the making. In the United States, his greatest admirers - Henry Clay chief among them - lost faith in the man after a while. The Marquis de Lafayette, who was the world's greatest expert on the question of George Washington comparisons, sent Bolívar a letter objecting to the idea of a president-for-life. Arana rejects the notion that in our own day, Hugo Chavez, the late president of Venezuela, was justified in assuming Bolívar's mantle - though in dismissing Chavez's presumption, she appears mostly to have in mind Bolívar's Uberai ideals, and not his anti-liberal penchants. She does concede that in the centuries after Bolívar one Latin American dictator after another has taken inspiration from his example. Her purpose in "Bolívar," however, is not to come up with weighty observations about Latin America's political tradition. Mainly she chronicles Bolívar's military and political exploits, which makes for a mighty river, coursing through more than 600 pages, of too many names and battles. But she brings an agreeable affection to this task. She is a writer with Peruvian origins, the author of "American Chica," and her background appears to have endowed her with a pleasing and romantic nostalgia for the southern continent. Horse hooves drum like a heartbeat on a sundappled forest floor and a black cape flutters from Bolívar's shoulders on the very first page, and by the middle of the book, "snow-capped peaks glisten against azure skies." All of which may be corny but, like a Technicolor swashbuckler, is dreamily entertaining. In the centuries after Bolívar, one Latin American dictator after another has taken inspiration from him. Paul Berman, the author of "The Flight of the Intellectuals" and a senior editor of The New Republic, is teaching this year at Princeton.
Choice Review
As Simon Bolivar's life, writings, and legacy deserve greater attention in the English-speaking world, any effort to provide an accessible biography is welcome. This is true whether one is concerned with the legacy of Bolivar's political vision in the post-Chavez era, or curious as to how Bolivar compares to the US founding fathers, who all seem to merit annual reappraisals that run several hundred pages. Here, Washington Post columnist Arana has produced a story that will sate the curiosity of all but the most avid Bolivarianist. Hers is a lengthy, thoroughly researched, and lovingly detailed telling of Bolivar's life that casts "The Liberator" as an Olympian figure, a font of history, and a visionary. Arana gives every element of his life equal weight--his early years in Caracas, his time in Europe as a young man, his early political experiences, and his many military adventures. The work is readable, but its length and lack of a critical perspective make it an unlikely choice for academia, especially as John Lynch's Simon Bolivar: A Life (CH, May'07, 44-5216) was published less than ten years ago. Summing Up: Recommended. General collection, public libraries. J. M. Rosenthal Western Connecticut State University
Kirkus Review
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 Bogot, 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 Bolvar'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, Bolvar 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. Bolvar would effectively build on important insurrections before him: by Indian leader Tpac Amaru II in Peru in 1781; by the famously egotistical Venezuelan rebel-in-exile Francisco de Miranda, from whom Bolvar learned the fatal consequences of indecision; and by Jos 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, Bolvar 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The cliche goes that history is written by the winners; in the case of Simon Bolivar, a remarkable military leader who liberated six South American countries from Spanish rule, this is not the case. Bolivar's legacy has been tarnished by many right up to the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Arana (former editor in chief, Washington Post Book World; Lima Nights) presents 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. Drawing on Bolivar's voluminous correspondence and political writings, she assembles a chronological narrative that does justice to both Bolivar's august achievements and his human imperfections. This well-rounded work reveals not just an accomplished military tactician but also an able statesman. VERDICT This vivid biography flows smoothly and makes an important contribution to Bolivarian studies. It should appeal to readers both lay and academic, the more so as this is the bicentennial year of Bolivar's first independence campaign. [See Prepub Alert, 10/28/12.]-Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| 1 The Road to Bogotá | p. 1 |
| 2 Rites of Passage | p. 32 |
| 3 The Innocent Abroad | p. 50 |
| 4 Building a Revolution | p. 76 |
| 5 The Rise and Fall of Miranda | p. 99 |
| 6 Glimpses of Glory | p. 127 |
| 7 The Legions of Hell | p. 149 |
| 8 A Revolution Struggles to Life | p. 181 |
| 9 The Hard Way West | p. 204 |
| 10 The Way to Glory | p. 236 |
| 11 The Chosen Son | p. 267 |
| 12 Under the Volcanoes | p. 284 |
| 13 In the Empire of the Sun | p. 310 |
| 14 The Equilibrium of the Universe | p. 337 |
| 15 Era of Blunders | p. 356 |
| 16 Man of Difficulties | p. 376 |
| 17 Plowing the Sea | p. 406 |
| 18 The General in His Labyrinth | p. 428 |
| Epilogue | p. 455 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 465 |
| Notes | p. 469 |
| Bibliography | p. 569 |
| Index | p. 581 |