Welcome to Litsy!

That last chapter title is also the the title of the Gabriel Garcia Márquez novel that led me here.

This is a terrific book - well written to capture the nuances. Enthusiastic but constrained. His life was an adventure story. What can an author do but ride through it: fantastic failures and miraculous successes, depopulating violence and an end of slavery, one devoted with integrity to liberty, his legacy of corrupt dictatorships. A new world.

Seriously, in the 1810‘s Bolívar was fighting (and lost to!!) the Legions of Hell, straight out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. A blond European madman led and accumulated thousands of mixed race and minority troops to overwhelm all other armies and literally wipe out entire villages through rape, pillage, and mass torturous executions. And they were unstoppable. It‘s hard to remember this is nonfiction sometimes.

Admittedly, my first question about Bolívar was why couldn‘t he replicate the northern American revolution. Then I read this, on Caracas - and took a skeptical view. I‘m only now realizing how painfully true was this comment above.

After The General in His Labyrinth, I looked up some books about Bolívar in my library. I‘m now reading (some of?) this.

Reviewed this recently, but saw #bookssetinsamerica #booktober and knew this had to be my pick. A book set in South America about the man who almost single handed created what we know as modern South America. Bolivar is an amazing figure, nobleman, soldier, politician, lover. A man who should be better known and remembered as the liberator of half a continent.

I read "The General in his Labyrinth" many years ago and this book was fascinating in that it told the rest of the story. Bolivar was a colonial grandee married and widowed at a young age. Upon returning from Europe, a changed man he became the leader of the independence movement. Despite defeats