Bolívar: American Liberator

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. Simón Bolívar’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 Bolívar 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 Bolívar 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)