Love him or hate him, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sure can sell a book. After gifting the leftist tome "The Open Veins of Latin America" (the Spanish version) to President Obama last week in Trinidad and Tobago, sales of the Eduardo Galeano book have soared, landing the previously unranked book #2 in sales for all books (all categories) on Amazon as of this morning.
Chavez notoriously launched the sales record for Noam Chomsky's decades-old "Hegemony or Survival" at a 2006 UN general assembly meeting, which landed the book atop the Amazon sales list for the following week (and earned the 81 year-old MIT professor a spate of national interviews, to boot).
Chavez is a Madman of Vulgarity and Aggression. He has supported criminals that kidnap people for money and plant Land Mines to kill peasant children in Colombia. And that murder and kidnap Americans in Colombia. The FARC Guerrillas. There are hundreds of video hours to prove this statement. The FARC has killed dozens of Americans.
ReplyDeleteForget about Latin American Unity - The USA is still necessary to keep at bay some vulgar indecent Madmen like Chavez, the Castros, Ortega and Correa.
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“To President Uribe – with admiration” signed "Barack Obama" Uribe's unplanned power lunch with Obama - Obama's Secret Friend
A 45-minute one-on-one conversation, Uribe received his first invitation to Washington, effective immediately, and as if that weren’t enough, he got Obama to promise to visit Colombia.
On a small piece of paper, and in English, Uribe wrote the three items of his agenda : 1) Security with democratic values, 2) Investment with social responsibility, and 3) Social cohesion.
More Information Videos and Photos of the "Secret" Meeting, with a big photo of the "little piece of paper"
"To President Uribe with Admiration"
See here :
Milenials.com
Vicente Duque
Darn! You totally beat me to posting this article. You win. I will have to look for a new piece to write on.
ReplyDeleteThat book is not that crazy, it's interesting, but rather dated at this point.
Obscure? Maybe for you. This book is a classic in Latin America, and Galeano is one of the best known writers in the region.
ReplyDeleteI was going to answer to Duque but a closer look at his post made me realize it's not necessary. Empires will always need their henchmen and acolytes to do their dirty work.
Pepito
What Anonymous said.
ReplyDeleteGaleano is only obscure to those who don't read about Latin America... which, alas, includes 99.999 percent of the U.S. media and political opinion makers.
Is there any serious Latin Americanist who hasn't read Galeano since his book was published... what... 35 years ago?
Ahme: the definition of obscure = "relatively unknown."
ReplyDeleteI certainly wasn't suggesting that anything derogatory about the book -- heck, I've not even done more than skim it myself (go ahead, take your shots) and had only heard of the book in passing before. But come on, if by by Mexfiles calculation taht 99.99% of the US that don't consider themselves Latin Americanists haven't read it -- then at least in relative terms (as all things are), I think the term "obscure" applies.
" if by by Mexfiles calculation taht 99.99% of the US that don't consider themselves Latin Americanists haven't read it -- then at least in relative terms (as all things are), I think the term "obscure" applies."
ReplyDeleteThat only works if you ignore that for millions of people not in the U.S. the book is actually very well. I think what you mean is "obscure, for U.S. readers". No serious Latin Americanist will think of what is probably the most famous Latin American history book as 'obscure'.
Pepito