William LeoGrande's Top Book Recommendations
Want to know what books William LeoGrande recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of William LeoGrande's favorite book recommendations of all time.
Recommended by William LeoGrande, and 1 others. William LeoGrandeOf all these books, this one is probably the most fun. I chose it because a famous, earlier work by Dorfman on the same theme, How to Read Donald Duck, is no longer available. Ariel Dorfman is one of the leading literary figures in Latin America today. This book is a collection of early essays from the 1970s; this English version was published in the 1980s. It’s one of the founding works in the... (Source)
Recommended by William LeoGrande, and 1 others. William LeoGrandeThis is the most recently published book in my selection. It’s a history of the Bacardi family, beginning in the middle of the 19th century when the famous rum empire was founded in Cuba. If you told me you could sum up 150 years of the island through the story of a single family, I would reply it couldn’t be done. But Gjelten has done it. What makes this possible is that key members of the... (Source)
Recommended by William LeoGrande, and 1 others. William LeoGrande. It complements Schoultz’s book well because it focuses, very specifically, on the countries of Central America. It covers a shorter timeframe, picking up when the United States first intervened militarily in Central America at the turn of the 20th century. This was the time when the United States was expanding its commercial interests beyond the borders of the 48 states. That expansion fed most... (Source)
First published in 1959, Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates to this day. Conceived as one of Graham Greene's 'entertainments,' it tells of MI6's man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from...
Recommended by William LeoGrande, and 1 others. William LeoGrandeYes. What I like about this book is how Greene captures so beautifully the Cold-War contradictions of U.S. policy in the region. Even though the United States plays no role directly, Greene captures the way in which U.S. policy is often so blind to the realities on the ground that it produces disastrous, unintended consequences. The story is, of course, about a British citizen living in Havana... (Source)
This perception of inferiority was apparent from the beginning. John Quincy Adams, who first established diplomatic relations with Latin America, believed that Hispanics were "lazy, dirty, nasty...a parcel of hogs." In the early nineteenth century, ex-President John Adams declared that any effort to implant democracy in Latin America was... more
Recommended by William LeoGrande, and 1 others. William LeoGrandeWhen I was at college, I was very interested in American foreign policy. It occurred to me that Latin America was the region with which the United States had the longest history of involvement – and the most intense relationship. That led me to study the internal politics of Latin-American countries – politics that are directly influenced by the relationship with the United States. Washington has... (Source)
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