The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now

by Alma Guillermoprieto

Overview

An extraordinarily vivid, unflinching series of portraits of South America today, written from the inside out, by the award-winning New Yorker journalist and widely admired author of Samba.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307787965
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/16/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alma Guillermoprieto writes frequently for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. She is the author of Looking for History, The Heart That Bleeds, and Samba, and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1995. Raised in Mexico and the United States, she now makes her home in Mexico City.

Editorial Reviews

In 13 savvy and sensitive dispatches first published in the New Yorker as ``Letters from Latin America,'' Guillermoprieto ( Samba ) tells memorable tales of dislocation and change. Her reports on embattled leaders like Carlos Menem of Argentina, Alberto Fujimori of Peru and Fernando Collor de Mello of Brazil, are never just profiles but rather narratives about national culture. The Collor piece contrasts the public spectacle of his corruption with the murder of a TV starlet in the soap opera-obsessed country. Guillermoprieto also finds quirky, interesting specialists: a Mexican garbologist, a Peruvian Senderologist (after Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path guerrilla insurgents) and a Colombian violentologo , who researches the violence of that unfortunate country. For her many resonant subjects, the author looks to every stratum of society, be it a teenage Colombian assassin, a favela-dweller in Rio converted to the growing evangelical church or a Bolivian beer magnate-turned-politician. Born and raised in Mexico, Guillermoprieto learned her trade in England and Washington, D.C., before moving to New York City. If her ironic tone approaches melancholy, her textured reporting evinces deep care for the region that forms part of her own bicultural identity. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Here are a varied and interesting assortment of profiles detailing the daily struggles of citizens and institutions in nine Latin American countries as told by an insightful and articulate journalist writing for The New Yorker from 1989 to 1993. As a native of Mexico and a resident of New York, Guillermoprieto has an excellent vantage point from which to view the successes and failures of Third World countries experiencing the growing pains and culture shock of political, social, and economic evolution and transformation from the customs and values of the old order to the modern, industrialized state of the future. The clash between the new and the old, as these countries strive to become more ``Western'' and seek to imitate U.S. democratic and capitalistic institutions and practices, sometimes leaves behind a cultural vacuum as well as ethical and logical contradictions, which the author dutifully explicates. Especially useful for academic libraries.-- Philip Y. Blue, Dowling Coll. Lib., Oakdale, N.Y.

Library Journal

This is a presentation of authoritative, clearly written essays--called by the author "dispatches," a term that is, intentionally or not, reminiscent of the old days of trench-coated foreign correspondents--about the Latin America of the past four years, published originally in the "New Yorker". Mexican-born, U.S.-raised, Guillermoprieto has been all over the region about which she speaks; and her pieces are based not only on her own observations but also on her conversations with citizenry high and low. Specifically, she writes about Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Panama. Whether she's talking about violence and drug traffic in one country, or guerrilla activity in another, or the ubiquity of garbage in yet another, her overarching theme is why these countries find the clothes of late-twentieth-century modernity ill-fitting and what that discomfort portends for their particular futures. Guillermoprieto offers no easy answers, simply appreciating the largeness of the questions."

Brad Hooper

"Powerful...a literary gem...wonderfully written dispatches that capture the richness and intensity of Latin America's reality. Those wanting a feel for the spirit of Latin America or what lies behind the headlines will hardly find more vivid accounts of the region's recent history."—The Miami Herald

"The Heart That Bleeds is the work of a master...Guillermoprieto has brought back reports that are unforgettable, brave in their clearsightedness, but unstinting, too, in their passion and sympathy. The countries of Latin America now have their Orwell."—David Remnick

From the Publisher