The intimate and highly revealing life story of the world’s longest-serving, most charismatic, and controversial head of state in modern times.Fidel Castro was a dictatorial pariah to some and a hero and inspiration for many of the world's poor, defiantly charting an independent and revolutionary path for Cuba over nearly half a century. Numerous attempts were made to get Castro to tell his own story. But only in the twilight of his years was he prepared to set out...

Hugo Chávez’s extraordinary story—in his own wordsHugo Chávez, military officer turned left-wing revolutionary, was one of the most important Latin American leaders of the twenty-first century. This book tells the story of his life up to his election as president in 1998.Throughout this riveting and historically important account of his early years, Chávez’s energy and charisma shine through. As a young man, he awakens gradually to the reality of his countr...

For decades, people have tried to persuade the leader of the Cuban Revolution to tell his own life story. Ignacio Ramonet, the celebrated editor in chief of Le Monde diplomatique, has finally succeeded. For the first time, in a series of extensive and probing interviews, Fidel Castro describes his life from the 1950s to the present day. In frank and compelling detail, he discusses his parents and his childhood, his earliest influences, the beginnings of the revolution, his relatio...

Fernando Henrique Cardoso received a phone call in the middle of the night asking him to be the new Finance Minister of Brazil. As he put the phone down and stared into the darkness of his hotel room, he feared he'd been handed a political death sentence. The year was 1993, and he would be responsible for an economy that had had seven different currencies in the previous eight years to cope with inflation that had run at 3000 percent a year. Brazil had a habit of chewing up finance ministe...

A New York Times Notable Book of the year.Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution.Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the h...

Ever since Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba in 1959, Americans have obsessed about the nation ninety miles south of the Florida Keys. America's fixation on the tropical socialist republic has only grown over the years, fueled in part by successive waves of Cuban immigration and Castro's larger-than-life persona. Cubans are now a major ethnic group in Florida, and the exile community is so powerful that every American president has kowtowed to it. But what do most Americans really know ab...

In February 1981, Spain was still emerging from Franco's shadow, holding a democratic vote for the new prime minister. On the day of the vote in Parliament, while the session was being filmed by TV cameras, a band of right-wing soldiers burst in with automatic weapons, ordering everyone to get down. Only three men defied the order. For thirty-five minutes, as the cameras rolled, they stayed in their seats.Critically adored novelist Javier Cercas originally set out to write a novel ...

By the time he was killed in the jungles of Bolivia, where his body was displayed like a deposed Christ, Ernesto "Che" Guevara had become a synonym for revolution everywhere from Cuba to the barricades of Paris. This extraordinary biography peels aside the veil of the Guevara legend to reveal the charismatic, restless man behind it.Drawing on archival materials from three continents and on interviews with Guevara's family and associates, Castaneda follows Che from his childhood in ...

This concise biography unravels Che's life, from his birth in 1928, the child of free-thinking radical Argentinian aristocrats, his development as a revolutionary in Guatemala, the Congo and in Cuba with Fidel Castro, to his untimely execution in Bolivia. Andrew Sinclair provides the reasons for Che's status as the most admired revolutionary of his time, and his enduring popularity.

'An ambitious, riveting and essential book that has much to teach us about the recent history of this region, and about the human impulse towards populism that continues to shape the world' Ben Rhodes, bestselling author of The World As It Is'A REVOLUTION IS A STRUGGLE TO THE DEATH BETWEEN THE FUTURE AND THE PAST.' FIDEL CASTROFor more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towe...

"An excellent account and analysis of the Mexican Revolution, its background, its course, and its legacy . . . an important contribution [and] a must read!" (Samuel Farber, author of Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959).The most significant event in modern Mexican history, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 remains a subject of debate and controversy. Why did it happen? What makes it distinctive? Was it even a revolution at all?In The Mexican Revo...

Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende’s democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende’s left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty ye...