davidaguilarrodriguez 's review for:

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

5.0

challenging dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

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I think this is my first 5 star non-fiction. This book is essential reading for all Americans. If you’re reading my review, stop and go get this book and read it now. Right now. I mean literally this moment you better not finish this sentence. GO!

Greg Grandin has written gripping narrative history — enthralling, horrifying, and impossible to put down. I was connected to certain historical figures, sad, angry, hopeful, despairing, and always riveted. It offered a fresh, devastating lens on the history of the Americas and insight into centuries of injustice. 

The structure is masterful. Grandin follows key figures and moments across centuries, circling back to people and ideas to reveal the cyclical nature of history. It’s an elegant braid of biography, politics, and morality, where each thread deepens the others. 

The themes are sweeping and urgent: imperialism, colonialism, revolution, the role of the U.S. in Latin America and the world at large. Grandin shows how the U.S.’s brutal experiments in the Americas served as testing grounds for strategies later unleashed globally — and domestically — by the political and economic elite. 

I learned so much, especially about José Martí and Bartolomé de las Casas, alongside truly chilling portraits of American villains. Grandin balances the broad sweep of centuries with intimate detail: the writers who bore witness, the leaders who resisted, the everyday people caught in the machinery of exploitation. 

His political lens is unapologetically persuasive and polemical in the best way. If you don’t feel inspired to revolution after this, I got nothing for you. He gives voice to the marginalized and suppressed, making the relevance to today’s atrocities impossible to ignore. 

The final chapters hit hardest, charting the post-Roosevelt descent into the full embrace of the military-industrial complex, CIA interference, and wars against the poor. It’s epic, tragic, and enraging. 

Grandin’s prose is vivid, poetic, and journalistic — history written in fire and lightning. 

The entire human race should read this book, or at least every citizen in both hemispheres of the Americas.