Word: bolivar
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...Nature is against us, we shall fight Nature, and make it obey." The speaker is Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator; the time, 1812; the occasion, an earthquake which, by some terrible stroke of malice, has shattered the cities controlled by Venezuela's rebellious republicans but left untouched the cities loyal to the Spanish king. A royalist monk shouts to the dazed people of Caracas that the cause of their misfortune stands before them: Bolivar. The crowd begins to seethe menacingly. Without a word, Bolivar strides up to the monk and strikes him down with the flat...
Such was Simon Bolivar, as Waldo Frank writes, and frequently overwrites, about him. The Birth of a World is in the grand, Frank-incensed style: dramatic accounts of battles, perceptive essays on Latin-American landscape and character, lingering portraits of Bolivar and his aides, pretentious speculations on the "wholeness" of Bolivar's personality...
...Genteel Revolt." The book begins as biographies are supposed to, with Bolivar's background. His land-owning family was rich and fashionably enlightened. Simon, born in Caracas in 1783, grew up in a "genteel atmosphere of revolt" and got an education based on Rousseau. He spent much of his boyhood in the country, leading a life of camping and hunting. A visit to Europe helped to make him a patriot: a Spanish officer sneered at the colonies, and young Bolivar flared up in such a hot retort that he was "advised" to leave Madrid. Back home, he joined...
...honor Simon Bolivar, Bogota's Teatro Colon scheduled a new French play about El Libertador's fight for freedom, entitled Montserrat. The Ministry of Education gave its blessing; President Laure-ano Gomez himself went to the opening-night performance...
Montserrat, which enjoyed a brief Broadway run last year in an English adaptation by Lillian Hellman, hammers hard against the brutal Spanish tyranny that Bolivar battled to overthrow. (Sample: "You live under the domination of men who are ferocious and pitiless. Do you have no pride? Do you not want to rebel against assassins?") Members of the audience, all of whom had been living for 18 months under a state of siege imposed by the Conservative government, loudly applauded every reference to liberty. One man even rose and shouted, "Viva la libertad...