Simon Bolivar

Simon Bolivar was one of the most important figures in Latin American History on Independence. I chose to read this book because I had always heard a lot about Bolivar though never really studied what had exactly happened during his “ Quest for Glory”.

I think the title of the book is just right, what also encouraged me to read it was that it is classified as the first book to suggest that Bolivar suffered from bipolar disorder. And well, that meant a lot for me, apart from myself being a passionate of revolution I personally don’t like books that tell you only the good side of stories, I like to learn the realistic side, I think it is always good to know the “ugly truth” about great stories, it just gives them a sort of human sense.

About the authors, the first one is Professor Richard W. Slatta. He teaches history at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He has researched and published articles on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL),

And published a number of popular trade books, he also loves the research of cowboys and ranch life.

The second, is Jane Lucas De Grummond, she is professor emerita of history at Louisiana State University. She was actually the first woman to teach at Louisiana State University. She has also published Envoy to Caracas, The Baratarians and the Battle of New Orleans, and (with Beulah de Veriere Smith Watts) Solitude: Life on a Plantation in Louisiana.

The book is a complete biography of Bolívar, since his birth until his death. It starts with a funny comparison about Bolivar and George Washington. The authors made a very clear contrast stating that President George Washington had been as glorious as Bolivar, but he was actually a good and decent person who would have never been labeled as a “womanizer”, to give an example, as Bolivar did during his lifetime.

The biography starts off with his birth, Simon José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolivar, was born in Caracas 1783. He later became an orphan, and it was said that since he was a kid he showed signs of strength and courage. He had always been rich, but that didn’t stop him from analyzing the reality in which his country was living.

As I read how Bolivar found his destiny, I really liked the part of his life in which he went abroad to Europe to study and then returned to Latin America. That really made an impression on me, because as a student I could have thought that national heroes were just brave and fought to get an important political position in their homeland. But as I read how intellectually prepared Bolivar was and how he was able to study Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu’s ideas, I got a bigger picture of how things worked back in that century.

He declared himself ,a Napoleonic fan, and studied lessons of the Enlightenment. He was young when he assisted Napoleon’s coronation, and was inspired by it. It was during his stay in Europe, specifically in Rome, as a young man when he realized he could return and make a difference

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