Earning glory on the fields of battle, Simon Bolivar, who fought to free South America from Spanish rule from 1810 to 1825, was one of the most influential figures in Latin American history. Richard W. Slatta and Jane Lucas De Grummond bring forth the entire story of Bolivar, with special attention to the ups and the downs of his military career. Bolivar’s life contained all the makings of an epic war hero repeated comebacks from defeat, flashes of military genius, tremendous mood swings, dogged persistence, a near-manic quest for glory, and fall from political grace. Egomaniacal, he strived for military might and political power. Drawing from an Immense corpus of writings left behind by Bolivar, his allies, and his enemies, the authors transport the reader back to the life and times of
the Liberator.
The first biography to suggest that Bolivar suffered from bipolar disorder, Simon Bolivar’s Quest for Glory shows how the conflicts he fenced during the independence era set a political pattern followed by much of Latin America for the next century.