Book reviews: 'America, América: A New History of the New World' and 'Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson'

A historian tells a new story of the Americas and the forgotten story of a pioneering preacher

Las Casas: A moral trailblazer
Greg Grandin is "a terrific writer and perceptive historian"
(Image credit: Alamy)

'America, América: A New History of the New World' by Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin's "stirring" new history puts forth a surprising argument, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. While demonstrating across 737 pages that the story of the United States can't be separated from that of the nations and territories that share the Western Hemisphere, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Yale historian presents Latin America as a beacon of human rights that has found the U.S. to be an at-best contentious New World ally. Grandin isn't blind to the genocidal violence of Spain's and Portugal's conquistadors. But he claims that the horrors of the conquest prompted a moral revolution that Latin America has carried into the present in its commitment to universal equality and international cooperation. While Grandin's devotion to this theme "sometimes verges on the sentimental," he's "such a terrific writer and perceptive historian that I was swept along by his enthralling narrative."

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