“An extraordinarily ambitious book . . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez.”

Daniel Geary, The Mark Pigott Professor in U.S. History, Trinity College, for The Irish Times

“Historian Greg Grandin’s audacious new book . . . will, for many readers, upend conceptions of the hemisphere . . . each day’s headlines further confirm the deep-rooted patterns that his brilliant and urgently needed history traces . . . America, América pursues its course across the centuries with verve, superb pacing, and impressive delicacy of touch.”

Esther Allen, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A sweeping, magisterial analysis of 300 years of conflicting geopolitical understandings of sovereignty that have defined Anglo-American and Spanish American relations . . . The relevance of this history cannot be overemphasized.”

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, The Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, University of Texas, for Science

“Written with great flair and imagination, scattered with scintillating turns of phrase and pervaded with a sense of barely suppressed indignation.”

Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles, for The Literary Review

“Grandin has written a stirring new book… America, América shows how over the course of five centuries, America in the north and America in the south have shaped each other through war, conquest, competition and cooperation. Their intercontinental relationship has had implications for not only the Western Hemisphere but also the modern world . . . Grandin is such a terrific writer and perceptive historian that I was swept along by his enthralling narrative.”

The New York Times

“An authoritative history of the debates and brutality that made our world.” 

Kirkus (starred review)

“Scintillating . . . It’s a monumental new view of the New World.” 

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living.” 

Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of Doppelganger

“For nearly a century, historians have attempted to tell a ‘common history’ of ‘Greater America,’ one that brings the history of the United States and Latin America together in a shared and durable conceptualization. In America, América, Greg Grandin does just this and advances an urgent vision of the relational history of the hemisphere. Adding to his already extraordinary corpus of works and reinterpreting five centuries in broad and beautiful strokes, it ends with a chilling conclusion about the diplomatic and moral failures of our current politics and its return to unilateralism and deliberate misunderstandings of the past. A major and desperately needed synthesis of the Americas and the making of modernity.”

Ned Blackhawk, author of National Book Award-winning The Rediscovery of America

“America, América is the best kind of book: masterful and erudite yet absolutely riveting. By considering the long, sweeping story of Latin America and the United States in the same frame, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin has given us a novel and necessary understanding of a deeply entwined history that is sure to surprise readers, not least because he shows convincingly and urgently how a different past—and with it a different, better present—might have been possible.” 

Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History

“Greg Grandin’s America, América takes José Martí’s famous essay, ‘Nuestra América’ and recasts it as a sweeping historical epic. Here is Our American history, told as it never has been told before, full of staggering violence and loss, unforgettable villains and heroes, and the courageous endurance of the poor multitudes, so many sources of inspiration. Beautifully written, this brilliantly researched and reasoned book helps account for the sorry state of the present while offering historical lessons on how we might reach a better future.” 

Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

“In this sweeping and provocative work, Greg Grandin provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the intertwined histories of the two Americas, foregrounding Latin American resistance to the hegemony of the United States. This is a compelling new vision of the relationship between the two continents.” 

Amitav Ghosh, author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy and Smoke and Ashes

“In his awe-inspiring masterpiece, Greg Grandin shows how hemispheric relationships have defined the history of the United States for five centuries. Latin Americans did more than decry our failures to live up to the new world’s revolutionary ideals. As our country ascended to hegemon in the last century, our neighbors pushed—in part because of their unequal might and wealth—for the reimagination of how the globe itself ought to be governed.” 

Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself

“Fifteen years since its original publication, historian Greg Grandin has revised and reissued his now classic 2006 book, Empire’s Workshop. Having dedicated the intervening years to studying US imperial power, Grandin’s razor-sharp insight into the structural contradictions of the US imperialist project make this work required reading.”

Jacobin

“Greg Grandin’s examination of America’s empire in Latin America provides a critical view―squarely opposing any notion that the United States has advanced toleration, the rule of law, or democracy in its imperial realm . . . He addresses empire in terms of its dominated periphery and makes important contributions by presenting imperial and domestic policies as inseparable realms.”

Emily S. Rosenberg

“Read Empire’s Workshop and the whole disastrous Bush adventure in Iraq suddenly appears as the logical continuation of a century of U.S. intervention in that sad laboratory called Latin America.”

Ariel Dorfman

“Grandin has always been a brilliant historian; now he uses his detective skills in a book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present.”

Naomi Klein

“Stirring . . . With an unassailable command of the facts –is it possible that he’s read every word ever written about his subject? — Grandin explains how Kissinger’s more baleful tactics have imprinted themselves on presidents and policymakers from both parties. . . . this is the sort of book that will always be timely, because it asks us to consider the link between today’s politics and tomorrow’s unanticipated consequences.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“A tour d’force. Greg Grandin exposes Kissinger’s vaunted approach to statecraft as little more than compulsive activism, typically relying on the threat or use of force, ignorant of history, devoid of any moral or ethical component, and discounting serious analysis in favor of intuition. Some realism. The field of Kissinger Studies begins here, with this book.”

Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War

“A brilliant, original, carefully researched and wide-ranging book. It will change the way we understand the United States’ role in the world during the past half-century.”

Ben Kiernan, author of Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur

“Nearly forty years after leaving government Henry Kissinger still casts an improbably vast shadow: puppet master of detente, shuttle diplomatist as canny magician, statesman as superstar. But as Greg Grandin shows in his absorbing tour de force, Kissinger casts a much more immediate — and malign — shadow over the country’s foreign policy, one in which acts of overwhelming violence are deemed vital to American “leadership” and “credibility.” Hovering over the Iraq War, no less than over Vietnam, is the spirit of Henry Kissinger. Grandin, with scrupulous research and impassioned prose, lets us see it. An essential and most timely book.”

Mark Danner, author of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War

“Greg Grandin’s brilliant account of Kissinger does far more than just limn the criminality of the man. He strips Kissinger’s vaunted realism to the bone revealing a skeleton of romantic American exceptionalism and a loving embrace of the will to power for power’s sake. Kissinger’s Shadow reveals the in-built denial mechanism of our all-pervasive national security state, which will never let past catastrophe get in the way of bold action in the future.”

Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars

“The Empire of Necessity is scholarship at its best. Greg Grandin’s deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry is compelling, brilliant and necessary.”

Toni Morrison

“In this multifaceted masterpiece, Greg Grandin excavates the relentlessly fascinating history of a slave revolt to mine the enduring dilemmas of politics and identity in a New World where the Age of Freedom was also the Age of Slavery. This is that rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely.”

Philip Gourevitch, co-author of the The Ballad of Abu Ghraib

“Greg Grandin has done it again. Starting with a single dramatic encounter in the South Pacific he has shown us an entire world: of multiple continents, terrible bondage and the dream of freedom. This is also a story of how one episode changed the lives of a sea captain and a great writer from the other end of the earth. An extraordinary tale, beautifully told.”

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost

“Rooted in an event known primarily through the genius of Herman Melville’s transcendent Benito Cereno, The Empire of Necessity is a stunning work of research done all over the rims of two oceans, as well as beautiful, withering storytelling. This harrowing story of Muslim Africans trekking across South America, and ultimately a unique window on to the nature of the slave trade, the maritime worlds of the early nineteenth century, the lives lived in-between slavery and freedom all over the Americas, and even the ocean-inspired imagination of Melville. Grandin is a master of grand history with new insights.”

David W. Blight, author of A Slave No More.

“Greg Grandin is one of the best of a new generation of historians who have rediscovered the art of writing for both serious scholars and general readers. This may be his best book yet. The Empire of Necessity is a work of astonishing power, eloquence and suspense—a genuine tour de force.”

Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

“Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone—about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.”

The American Scholar

Picked by TLS‘s Sir Ferdinand Mount as best book of 2010: “alive to every nuance of the story but is sparing with the condescension of posterity . . . .”

Sir Ferdinand Mount

One of the BBC’s Ten Best Driving Books of 2010 : “The thinking man’s car book. . . . “

Published in Brazil as Fordlândia: Ascensão e queda da cidade esquecida and called “um grande livro ” by country’s leading columnist.

Elio Gaspari

“A “Best book of 2010” (paperback), NPR’s”

The Takeaway

“This remarkable and extremely well-written work is about more than the dark history of Guatemala and the cold war in Latin America. It is about how common people discover politics. It is about the roots of democracy and those of genocide. It is about the hopes and defeats of the twentieth-century left. I could not put this book down.”

Eric Hobsbawm

“This remarkable recounting of popular resistance and Cold War terror in Guatemala weaves biography and history, ideology and politics, into a coherent narrative of the local embedded in the global. Greg Grandin has written a book that is moving and compelling.”

Mahmood Mamdani

“Brilliant, bold, and beautifully written from the first page to the last, The Blood of Guatemala convincingly challenges previous interpretations of the histories of ethnicity, commmunity, state, nation, and nationalism in Guatemala. Greg Grandin has skillfully united the disciplines of history and anthropology; he is part of a new generation of committed, sophisticated, and clearheaded intellectuals.”

Deborah Levenson, Boston College

“A remarkable tour de force,”

Kenneth Maxwell, Foreign Affairs