Book of the week: Bolívar: American Liberator

(Simon & Schuster, $35)

The life of Simón Bolívar has long begged for a storyteller with a sober eye, said Earl Pike in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The 19th-century aristocrat who liberated six South American countries was widely reviled as a despot when he died at just 47, but he is still cited as a spiritual forebear by countless leaders who’d never want to be branded tyrants themselves. Given how difficult Bolívar has been to read, “it makes sense that someone with a novelist’s grace and a journalist’s precision” would produce perhaps the first English-language biography that captures the so-called “George Washington of South America” in all his complexity. Previous biographers tended to laud or vilify their subject; former Washington Post books editor Marie Arana “manages to both praise Bolívar’s achievements and critique his shortcomings.” Her effort illuminates the man, as well as “the messiah (or demon) he sometimes became.”

Arana makes Bolívar’s life “truly Shakespearean,” said Joseph J. Ellis in The Washington Post. The Caracas, Venezuela–born copper heir was a passionate, mercurial man who, inspired by Enlightenment thinkers, waged war against a colonial power that he regarded as irredeemably corrupt. Eventually, he would liberate from Spain a landmass seven times the size of America’s original 13 colonies, displaying a kind of “intuitive genius” never seen from Gen. Washington. Bolívar was even less like Washington post-triumph, said Paul Berman in The New York Times. Though he abolished slavery in 1816, he claimed that South America’s ethnic divisions required rule by “an infinitely firm hand” and positioned himself to be president-for-life. Yet cataloging Bolívar’s exploits interests Arana more than offering any judgment about his politics. She’s created the 600-page equivalent of a “dreamily entertaining” Technicolor epic.

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Alas, Arana gets her subject all wrong, said Felipe Fernández-Armesto in The Wall Street Journal. “Good as she is at describing pageants and tragic episodes,” she’s an unreliable historian—misreading the causes of the wars that swept the region and failing to note such recent revelations as the decisive role that yellow fever played in defeating Spain’s armies in Venezuela. Worse, though Arana acknowledges that Bolívar was flawed, she never makes a serious attempt to explain his contradictions. In the ongoing battle between the man’s admirers and detractors, “Arana aligns herself with the hero-worshipers, in prose almost as billowy and romantic as Bolívar’s own.” Readers still await a portrait that feels compellingly true.