reviews

      • America, América,  A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin

      • The Continental Divide, Stories by Bob Johnson

America, América
A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin
Torva, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, UK, 2025

As Naomi Klein blurbs, this extraordinary work is “Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing.”  Consider two previous groundbreakers: Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, each of which focuses predominantly on its own sphere; what Grandin has done is rather a mesh, showing how tightly intertwined the Americas have always been, and offering new insights – some drawing raised eyebrows – along the way.

Grandin begins by introducing us to an extraordinary figure, one Bartolomé de las Casas, a priest who at first stood with Spain during the conquest, but in 1512 converted after an expedition to pacify Cuba where he was horrified by the death and destruction that he witnessed.  He became famous for his controversial writings in which he denounced the crimes committed by the Spanish conquerors against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and is often considered one of the first advocates of a universal conception of human dignity. His humanistic beliefs, shared by the theologians and scholars of the Salamanca School, helped form the basis of much thinking, political and otherwise, in much of América, extending through the centuries to contemporary social democratic policies.

In later years, we follow Simón Bolívar as he fought to liberate América from Spain, a war about as gruesome as the conquest. He ended up disillusioned when unity could not be achieved, but he did manage to compose a remarkable document in which he set forth a list of objectives, inspired by Las Casas, delivered in the Panama Congress of 1826. It called for mutual defense against European efforts at reconquest, the publication of a manifesto condemning Spain and the suffering it had caused in the New World, and the total abolition of New World slavery, among other things. It was not received well in the U.S.

Harking back to its founding, the U.S., Grandin reminds us, would certainly never have come into being without France and Spain coming to its rescue as it would not have been able to retain control over the American colonies on its own. Both France and Spain, having their own grudges against the British, threw their weight to the revolutionaries. Some in Madrid had warned of what could come as a puffed up America, after slaughtering the indigenous tribes, began its great expansionist movement west, little by little chipping away at Mexico until it amassed the west coast and points south, and would later try for control of much of Central America, Cuba, and Haiti, which in varying degrees it succeeded in doing.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1853 is cited as a pivotal moment. For Spanish Americans, like Bolívar, it was initially interpreted as a collective pact against European imperialism. “This sets our compass,” said Jefferson, “and points the course which we are to steer through the ocean of time opening to us.” But, Grandin notes: “If so, it was a compass that would point north any direction the holder desired. The doctrine’s magic, and the source of its enduring influence, is found in its ambiguity, in its ability to reconcile contradictory policy impulses [sanctioning] the idea that the U.S. had a right to project its powers beyond its official borders, to resolve matters anywhere in the Americans that threatened its domestic peace and happiness.” Hence, the justification of its pursuit of national interests in the name of universal ideals.

Bolívar had freed the slaves in América, who joined the fight against Spain; while in the United States of America, as it was now called, slavery was rife. Grandin, who drops a slew of little known facts along the way, informs us that Abraham Lincoln, one year into the Civil War, received a deputation of free Black leaders at the White House, where he suggested Central America as a place they might go; he also suggested Mexico and/or Panama. He felt Africa was too far away as free people “would rather remain within reach of the country of their nativity.” Before this delegation, Lincoln proclaimed the many reasons the “two races on this continent” could not live together. “It is better for us both,” he said, “to be separated.” Racism, in one way or another, was rooted in the U.S. from the beginning in a way it was not in South America, which had fought to overthrow the Spanish plantation owners in its bid for liberty.

We are led through Theodore Roosevelt’s exploits, through WWI, and on to FDR, whose New Deal was a shining light that resonated with South America and the universal ideals of Las Casas. By and large, there existed no significant conflicts among the two Americas.

Then came WWII and its aftermath, which changed everything. Latin America had had its own share of fascist sympathizers though did not participate in the war and even Argentina declared itself an ally as it chose to align itself with the winning side near the war’s end. But, as Grandin emphasizes, much help had been given to the U.S. by way of Latin America’s continuous supply of raw materials and resources as well as supplying strategic bases and naval cooperation, such as helping the U.S to establish military bases in several Latin American countries. So hackles were raised when it received exactly no money from the Marshall Plan. They were sinking in debt, poverty was rife and help was desperately needed. The U.S. said no, and not because there was not enough money to go round, but because it deliberately set out to “discourage Latin America from industrializing, lest investment be sucked away from resource extraction, from providing a ‘dependable flow of materials at the lowest cost’.”  Latin America was cut out, ignored, and poverty intensified while the U.S. prospered.

What came next was the Cold War, where the obsessive fear of communism in the U.S. led, as we know, to the propping up of right-wing authoritarian governments throughout Latin America.  Every attempt by the people to form a government best serving the needs of those in dire poverty, such as in Guatemala, got thwarted. As Grandin writes: “The CIA’s first real regime change took place in Guatemala in 1954.The campaign lasted nearly a year and served as an opportunity to apply psych-war techniques to oust a government – the best government that one of the poorest countries in the world had ever had, one simply trying to extend a modest program of social reform, including the distribution to peasants of fallow land owned by the United Fruit Company. . . [but] Washington spread the lie that their president was controlled by Communists,” and Washington’s replacement president ushered in a four-decade civil war that climaxed in acts of genocide against the country’s majority Mayan population.

We are led through the Cuban Revolution, the CIA-backed military coup in Chile that ousted the socialist Allende and installed Pinochet, the Reagan era’s backing of the Contras in Nicaragua, and on and on. 

In an ominous Epilogue, the author reminds us that in the terminal years of the Cold War, the U.S. finally did break free of Latin America, the turning point coming from the Panama Invasion to the first Persian Gulf War. “Going global,” he tells us, “ – shaking off Latin America as a restraint and returning the region to the status of informal dependency – had the effect of unleashing Washington’s worst policy instincts. On others, but also on itself. . . . No other comparable nation presided over such an enormous redistribution of wealth, upward, creating a superclass of billionaires immune to democratic control.”

No surprise that the U.S. comes out looking bad. [One suspects Gov. Ron DeSantis and our president would like the book banned.] Much of its destructive history we know, but Grandin offers much in-depth analysis. As for Latin America, he presents some glimmer of hope in the leftist governments of Colombia’s Petro, Brazil’s Lula, Chile’s Boric, and Mexico’s Sheinbaum, but as of now those three South American governments are in peril, so who knows what the next chapter will be. Colombia has long been a proxy for U.S. interests, so it is particularly vulnerable.

In the end, we get a picture of two very different visions of the world: The Las Casas/Bolívar /FDR/Allende faction, for humanism, independence, and governance with a strong social welfare agenda with little racism in the mix (as concerns Latin America) versus a faction rife with racism, the idea of Manifest Destiny/Jefferson/ Marshall/Pinochet (and numerous other U.S.-backed regimes), and a current billionaire class for whom the word “socialism” is a threat to its interests, with everyone at the mercy of corporate globalism. Both America and América have, and have had, good and bad players, of course, but the Las Casas vision is purely América, and towards that end, Grandin believes there is lot to be learned from Latin America, where, for many, “nationalism is still a gateway not toward rivalry but universalism,” and most importantly for our times, for “how to go on the offensive [against] right-wing extremism.”

For all the detail, all the history, I cannot stress how readable this book is. It’s an important work that you won’t want to put down. It will introduce you to new heroes, refresh your history while filling in many gaps with stimulating info; and, yes, it will often make you angry, but in a thoughtful way, like What the heck was Abraham Lincoln thinking?  J.A.



The Continental Divide, Stories
by Bob Johnson
Cornerstone Press, 2025

In the spirit of Flannery O’Connor, but with a voice all his own, Bob Johnson grips the reader on page one and never lets up. Set mainly somewhere in the latter half of the twentieth century in the small town of Mount Moriah, Indiana, these fourteen stories reveal the crippling behaviors that derail lives. Quite often that behavior crosses over to pure evil. For those old enough to remember “Leave it to Beaver” or “Happy Days,” those settings may be familiar here and many characters are just as likely to be from middle-class families where the father works in a feed store and is deacon in a church, or even the town marshal, but all similarities end there.

In the title story, an eighty-year-old woman, known to be the “one to see the most sensible road to getting somewhere,” must use her skill to deal with her forty-five-year-old son, fresh out of penitentiary, who still likes to gawk at teenage girls, which gives the old woman the “creepy crawlies”—a feeling the reader shares right to the end.

In “Bird Fever,” we’re not confronted with malevolence so much but rather a young mother who is unnervingly hyper-anxious about the safety of her baby, demanding that her husband deal with the neighbor who allows wild turkeys to roam the yard, the result of which may or may not have brought on the baby’s life-threatening flu.

Evil rears up again in “Plucked from the Lame and Afflicted” where a young boy on a weekend trip with his pastor wanders off in the evening and gets lured to a destination which will forever mark his life; while in “Please, Mister, Please,” a good Samaritan stops to help a couple who have wrecked their car in the middle of the night, but nothing is what it seems. At times the evil is mainly lurking, as in “Little Dude,” where we perceive the worst is yet to come (and it does in the final story); while in “Her Precious Things,” the iniquity came far in the past.

Tempers often flare, proving self-destructive: In “Blue Moon” a man’s violent behavior is formed by an act of violence against him as a youth, while in “The Half Hour” it is no doubt exacerbated by a stint in the Iraq War.

Sometimes it’s a matter of bad luck: a man accidentally mishandling a chain saw that rips his face or a wrestling accident, but there are precedents which set the bad luck in motion.

No small town is without its bogeyman and in “Wicked Heart” it is “old Pete,” who two young boys become entangled with because they want to see his “naked pictures.”

Johnson keenly evokes the small town Indiana atmosphere, where the Amish have a hitching rail for their buggy, and where on the outskirts “the wild raspberries grew in abundance” and “rails shimmered between the fields of August corn,” but it’s the depiction of those flawed characters, some with more self-awareness than others, that long lingers. The tight, engaging plots unfold  with dramatic flair and a dash of absurdist humor in a blend of Donald Ray Pollock’s raw and unflinching  prose and Daniel Woodrell’s country-noir grit. What more to say?

The Continental Divide is a stunner.  Highly recommended. JA

• From The Barcelona Review, read “Please, Mister, Please,” originally titled “The Samaritan,” from issue 91