Bolivar

American Liberator

De: Marie Arana

Narrado por: David Crommett

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 19th-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.

©2013 Marie Arana (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

A Bloodbath Of Racial Hatred

He may only have been the necessary evil needed to counter the evil oppressors. The story presented devolves simply into a lifetime of one racially motivated massacre after another. Mindless violence, unconnected to any cause other than that of total annihilation. By the end, Bolivar's vision for an American Liberation becomes only a footnote to all the carnage. He may have originally had good and pure intentions as a young man, but his final legacy is finally only that of extreme violence and vanity. Not the George Washington I know.

Sympathetic Biography of a Complex Man

It is a shame (one which I share) that so few North Americans know much about the man who liberated massive parts of South America from Spanish rule and sought unsuccessfully to forge them into a single unified nation. Brilliant, vibrant, energetic, a man of enormous talents who brought Enlightenment ideas to bear, Bolivar became a winning general but a less effective statesman. Prone to quick, sometimes erroneous decisions, plagued by both infighting among his generals and divergent nationalists, his United States of South America was not to be. Even so, in his last dark days, sick and relinquishing power, used up physically and emotionally, he provided a hero for future generations and a harbinger for the next two centuries of regional power politics.

Very nice book!

I enjoyed this book, the reader did a good job with all the names, minus “Coro”

Bolivar comes to life

From the beginning I was enthralled by the narration of this great man’s life. Marie Arana documents Simón Bolivar as a prominent young aristocrat living in a Spanish colony and what shaped his anger towards the crown. Seeing the injustices of the royal empire in his native Venezuela lit the fire to wanting to liberate all of South America. He rallied all peoples to believe in his vision to kick the Spanish out of America. The narrator does a great job pronouncing all the names, places correctly. A must for your collection of Great War strategists!

Well written and well read biography

I got this after watching the Netflix series Bolivar. I wanted to know the history of this amazing and strong character. This book is definitely worth listening to if you want to know more of the story. There are not many people in history with the grit, strength, and persistence of Simon Bolivar.

Excellent historical work!

You don't hear much about Bolivar he saw the need to undo wrong and did.

Extraordinary man, extraordinary story.

very well researched and exceptionally well written. I found it hard to put down and looked forward to picking it back up.

Outstanding

All the praise for this book given in the reviews above is well-placed. This is an outstanding work of history, told by Arana with drama, passion, and a keen moral sense. Crommett's narration is superb--his Spanish is near flawless, and he blends the Latin American pronunciations into the stream of his English deftly.

The greatest man South America has ever seen

My South American blood compelled me to pick up this book, little did I know what I was getting.

The immortal hero and the fallible human being is presented in this well researched book that leaves nothing behind and presents it in a beautiful narrative.

outstanding book about a great man

A Dream Denied

We vaguely know of Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of South America. We know even more of how his name has been misused by populists and especially by Venezuela’s late dictator Hugo Chávez, who renamed his country "the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela" and even dug up his bones and wept over them. He has also been called the George Washington of South America.

Anytime one is called the “__name__ of __place__,” the description fits only depending on what you are looking at. It is easy to point out all of the differences between Bolívar and Washington but Marie Arana certainly makes a strong case that he is a man who is at least of comparable importance to the nations he was involved in. And, in some ways, he was able to go further than Washington could, partly because the environment and culture were different but also because he came along a bit later. Bolívar’s success was partly by being at the right place at the right time, but so were many others. His success came because he took advantage of the time and situation to create success through strategy, diplomacy, and persistence. The “situation” was the weakness of Spain during the Napoleonic war. He rode over 75,000 miles (earning him the nickname Iron Ass), several times crossing what were then thought to be the world’s highest mountains, over a decade (twice as long as the US war of Independence) with many setbacks to free all of Spanish Northern South America, what is now Argentina, Columbia, Panama, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru (7 times larger than the land area of the 13 US colonies). And, it was a place of jungles, tropical diseases, crocodiles, piranhas, and rugged mountains that are covered with snow year round, even there in the tropics. But, like Washington, he resisted repeated efforts to make him a king and he constantly gave to others any gifts to him and any rewards. 

Spanish colonies were a bit different than the English colonies. There was little local say in their governance and their governors were appointed by Spain. The colonies had almost no connection with each other and travel or trade between colonies were forbidden. Bolívar was born in 1783 into a wealthy family with two centuries of history in Venezuela. He lived a very privileged life with many servants. He married the girl he loved only to have her die almost immediately on arriving at his home. He never remarried, though he had many mistresses. He traveled to Europe and was quite impressed with Napoleon until Napoleon crowned himself. What bothered him about that was not that Napoleon didn’t place his rule under the authority of the church, but that he made himself the source of his power instead of the people. He was especially impressed with Rome and thought a lot about how Rome had risen from a small village far away from the center of culture (Greece) to an empire that absorbed and even made Roman citizens of so many disparate races and cultures and held it all together for such a long time. He read widely and embraced enlightenment values. He strongly believed in liberty and equality. He said that the European settlers were already no longer European. They had been affected by the place they had landed in and had absorbed the ideas of the peoples around them. Therefore, he believed that skin colored should not matter and that every person should be treated equally in all areas. In that, he was ahead of his time. He was impressed at how the United States brought together the English colonies and envisioned a United States of South America composed of the Spanish colonies.

He returned to Venezuela with a vision to throw off the yoke of Spain and succeeded 3 times only to see Spain return with a larger army and retake its errant colony. However, he kept coming back, learning from mistakes, each time starting with a small ragtag group of untrained people and building them into a fighting force that overwhelmed much larger well-trained armies. He quickly realized that it was not enough to lead his own homeland to independence because as long as Spain occupied any part of the continent, it would be able to get a larger army together and come back. He realized that he had to look further and led a successful revolt in what is now Columbia and Panama (and parts of Bolivia and Ecuador) before returning to Venezuela to try again. He also learned quickly that he could not build a stable country based only on the European settlers, but that he had to include the native peoples and black slaves on equal footing. He built his army and promoted generals from all races. The abolition of slavery was funamental to his cause (and part of what made his first attempts fail). 

But, he was not able to spread his vision to others, at least not beyond a theoretical assent. He died at the age of 47 of leukemia. All of the “states” had split up into separate nations. Venezuela had forbidden him to enter into the country again and had expropriated the last small properties that he still had left. He had used everything else to pay for the wars of liberation. He was not welcome in Peru, Bolivia, or Ecuador, and Columbia also had demanded he leave and never return. He sent his few belongings on to Europe but he died before he could set sail himself and without knowing whether his life’s work would succeed or fail. He was penniless and dependent on the help of others. After his death, he was buried in Columbia and 12 years later Venezuela would demand he be exhumed and buried in his hometown of Caracas, Venezuela. Columbia agreed, but first removed his heart and kept it in an urn in Columbia. 

Bolívar is often treated like a saint or a demigod (witness modern day Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador), but not in this book. Arana writes of his successes, which are truly amazing, as well as his failures and weaknesses. He was impressed with the infant nation to the north, but not its democracy that he felt would not work in South America due to cultural differences. He did not believe in true democracy where everyone could vote, at least not in his time in South America. He didn’t believe that the people were ready for it. He did believe in a Republic, but with a strong leader, and even promoted the idea of a President for life who would be able to appoint his successor. As time went on, he became more and more autocratic, though he continued to demand that he only be called “Liberator.” Some of his distrust of democracy, dependence on a strong military, and reliance on a strong leader for life has been passed on and hindered democracy in South America until recent decades. It is said that we can learn from history or we can repeat it. Arana’s painstaking research has given us a lot to think about and much to learn from.