Not so much a biography as an administrative history
Although the subtitle, “A Life,” indicates that this book is a biography, this Bolivarian life and times weighs more heavily on the side of the times than the life. Large portions of the book are not so much about Bolívar as about what South America was like during his lifetime—the political landscape, socioeconomic climate, and relations between the races and classes, for example. A sizeable roster of Bolívar’s generals gets much coverage as well, with their own minibiographies scattered throughout the chapters. Lynch does not seem to have written this book for a general reading audience but rather for readers with prior knowledge on the subject, like college students in Latin American Studies. One is just expected to be familiar with many of the soldiers and politicians mentioned in the book, and Lynch references other biographies of Bolívar, arguing various points against them, with the assumption that the reader has already read them. The academic nature of the book is not a flaw, but something that prospective readers should be aware of before making the decision to purchase.
There isn’t a lot in this book about Bolívar’s early life. One chapter covers his childhood, another his time spent in Europe as a young man. By Chapter 3 Bolívar is already in full freedom-fighter mode, which is Lynch’s main concern. There isn’t much about Bolívar’s personal life, other than a few brief mentions of some mistresses, including one in particular who played a major role in his life. One doesn’t really get much of a sense of Bolívar’s personality or what he was like as a human being. Instead, this book focuses almost entirely on Bolívar’s career as a warrior and statesman, making it not so much a biography as a history of Bolívar’s military and political administration, for lack of a better word. By comparison, Ron Chernow’s biographies of George Washington or Alexander Hamilton are patchworks of the political history, military careers, public statesmanship, personal lives, and intellectual development of their subjects. Simón Bolívar: A Life is about 80 percent political, 20 percent military, with almost nothing about its subject’s private life.
Some reviewers have argued that this book doesn’t have enough military content for a biography of Latin America’s greatest warrior. I thought there was plenty for my tastes, but I’m not interested in the specifics of troop movements and battle strategies. Lynch delves into much interesting analysis of Bolívar’s political thought. For all his glory in achieving independence from Spain, Bolívar was a failure as a founding father and head of state. He envisioned a united South America (minus Brazil), but he was never able to overcome the internal strife, class conflict, and racial tensions in and between Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and beyond. His political philosophy was a strange jumble of liberalism and conservatism. Though he believed in freedom, equality, and the abolishment of slavery (and put his money where his mouth was more so than Thomas Jefferson), Bolívar believed in absolute monarchy, particular with himself as the ruling dictator. Lynch thoroughly analyzes all these issues in a manner that will be satisfying to scholars in Latin American history, but for the average general reader the individual human being of Bolívar himself gets lost among the policy debates and administrative details.
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