Simón Bolívar (Simon Bolivar): A Life

I haven't finished the book yet but I love it so far. I doesn't get stucked in irrelevant details but it does give a good picture of the environment of Venezuela at independence times. I hardly think there was a man as Bolivar with such deliverance, driving force, genius and love for his country and all the slaved americas.

John Lynch does another excellent job of preparing a biography on a Latin American dictator. Simon Bolivar's life was a contradiction from his rise to power as the liberator of Latin America to his downfall as a dictator. Bolivar would free four countries during his rise to power, have a nation named after him and introduce liberalism to an entire continent. Unfortunately in the process his jealously and paranoia would create a dictatorship that would rival any in Latin America. His cult of personality was very strong and he exercised supreme power. While not always the greatest general he had a George Washington like quality for wining at the key moments and always presenting the best face on his defeats. Bolivars life is broken into three stages by Lynch Revolution, Independence and nation building. Throughout each of these phases we see a different Bolivar. It is not a continuous strand of evolution but a radical change in each. I think Lynch makes a case although he does not specifically state it that after nation building Bolivar ends his life disgraced and out of power with people hunting him for the nations he tried to build.

This is the first English language biography of Bolivar in approximately 50 years. It is based on a great deal of modern scholarship and authored by a recognized expert on early 19th century Latin America. It is thoughtful and thorough. It is, unfortunately, a somewhat frustrating book. Lynch is a competent, as opposed to good, writer. The narrative tends to skip around a bit and parts are repetitive. Lynch seems also to have had his fellow scholars in mind as the target of this book. The text seems to presuppose a fair prior knowledge of 19th century Latin American history. In several respects, this book seems to be essentially a summary of modern scholarship on Bolivar rather than a full fledged interpretative biography. Within these limitations, this is a useful book. Lynch does an excellent job of describing Bolivar's complex personality. Lynch emphasizes the continuity in Bolivar's motivations and thinking throughout his career. The product of an elite Venezualan creole family, Bolivar grew up to espouse a complex mixture of idealistic Enlightenment rationalism and romantic nationalism leavened by a healthy dose of pragmatism. His pursuit of personal glory seems also to have a major factor in his incessant pursuit of freedom from Spain. Lynch does well also in describing the highly adverse conditions under which Bolivar pursued his aims. A major theme of the book is the frustration of Bolivar's Enlightenment reformism by the actions of the native elites he set in power and general weakness of civil society in early 19th century South America. A useful book but one which underscores the need for a major biography.

For anything anyone has ever wanted to know about the Liberator, here it is..truly what the English-speaking world has waited for. The Liberator with all his mastery and faults presented in hard-copy, whose feats rivaled that of Alexander the Great and whose faults are greater than our accomplishments. He was unlucky enough to inherit South American Independence and charged the harder task of handing freedom to the population out of a Dostoyevsky novel. Lynch explains why the dreamer who wished to unite a continent failed to do so. Here is the tragic tale of someone who inspired by Rousseu's noble savage believed that a population could truly be democratic and found that democracy cannot be for every one and that a foreign military power cannot a build a nation. What America Washington inherited, was what misfortune Bolivar inherited. He freed/conquered more land and people than Washington, Jackson, Scott, Lee and Napolean combined. He was the greatest American General, The West ever produced and he lies forgotten as 3rd World History, and is suddenly slightly resurrected by John Lynch. Lynch proves you cannot study any revolution until you study Bolivar. He believed in a people that did not believe in itself. Half a century before the United States challenged itself to abolition, and 150 years before Great Britain accepted racist Apartheid as immoral, he politically challenged a continent to accept that slavery and racism were not only uneconomic, but an incompatible hypocrisy in a democratic society. Almost 200 years before the American Civil Rights Movement granted non-whites economic and political equality, he dragged non-whites out of poverty and into viable recognition in their societies, granting them opportunities that the United States would only do with much more bloodshed 2 centuries later. In short, Superbly Written.

I am a novice regarding South American history, though Simon Bolivar has always interested me. A trip to Ecuador, where I saw one of the Liberator's swords in Quito, further spurred my curiosity about him. For those who don't know, Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) was the George Washington of South America, a general who liberated Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador from Spanish rule. The country of Bolivia, which became a test case in the 1820s for Bolivar's constitutional ideas, is named after him. Unfortunately, books about the general (and later president) are hard to find in the States. The most popular is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "The General in His Labyrinth," which explored Bolivar's last, frustrated days. In the novel, "El Liberator" is succumbing to consumption and curses the Revolution he had unleashed. No English biography of Bolivar has been written in 50 years. To fill the gap in Bolivar historiography, John Lynch, an Emeritus professor of Latin American history at University of London, has produced a solid work of scholarship. His likely audience for this book would be graduate students about to study for their comperehensive exams or people who are somewhat familiar with Bolivar's accomplishments. Lynch's book is informative, but isn't as easy to read as some biographies are, such as David McCullough's "John Adams." "Simon Bolivar: A Life" doesn't begin with Bolivar's birth, but an earthquake that rocked Venezuela (place of SB's birth) in 1812. The earthquake was seen by some royalist clergymen as divine punishment for Venezuelans revolting against the Spanish. Lynch's book is relatively brief (300 pages), but dense. One will not find short, reader-friendly paragraphs in these pages. The author does not write for a popular audience, but a learned one. We are given much information, not just about Bolivar's life, but the social, political, and economic aspects of the Revolutionary period in South America (from the 1810s to the 1820s). Lynch's work will help students of Latin America who must answer such questions as, "how revolutionary was the Revolution? Could Bolivar's model of govenment have worked?" To some extent, Bolivar's only real accomplishment was throwing off Spanish rule. Slaves in the liberated countries were not freed in the general's lifetime, and the plight of the Indians did not improve very much after the Spanish were defeated. Warlords quickly filled the political vacuum left by the royalist government. Bolivar was a creature of the Enlightenment, but he did not believe that South America could ape the American or French Revolutions. The general sought to apply revolutionary ideas in a South American context: he knew monarchy was disliked, but also that democracy couldn't work. South America's problem was that it was too democratic, too chaotic. When the Spanish left, warlords sought to control local communities at the expense of Bolivar's desire to have a centralized republic. To use an analogy from early U.S.