Sprawling overview of the history of the western hemisphere. Jumps around a bit and never stays in one place enough for the reader to get a thorough idea of what's going on. ( )

A grand, but short book. Fernández-Armesto stuffs so much into these few pages, but doesn't bog down in detail, yet often takes the seemingly mundane to paint a larger portrait. His point? That until the nineteenth century, North America, everything north of the Rio Grande, was a relative backwater when compared to the South. Starting with the Amerindians and through the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. He then tries to explain how the North rapidly industrialized while the South sank into relative oblivion. He doesn't say the Anglos were better than the Latins, but nor does he fall into the postcolonial trap and blame all southern "backwardness" on the US or "modernization theory," et cetera. A lot of food for thought, and a definite addition to any Atlantic/Transatlantic history bookshelf. ( )

As I’m apparently the only person in the US that gets slightly offended when the term “American” is used solely to represent us/US gringos (I’ve asked numerous South American friends and oddly they don’t seem to give a crap), I really enjoyed this book. Part of the pleasure comes from the author’s ability to condense the thick history of the post-Columbian Americas into just over 200 pages, yet it comes off as quite comprehensive.

The effusive writing reeks of an Iberian intellectual, yet his weaving of large historical generalities with specific details [Jefferson hanging painted buffalo hides and “savage” Tennessee carvings in Monticello’s atrium] was most effective. His hope is a reunification of North and South into simply “that hemisphere” as apparently it was originally perceived by the Old World. He offers something of an historical balance as the southern Americas were, until the late nineteenth century, clearly the dominate half. The North (for his sake of argument, territories lying north of the Rio Grande) was a mere colonial backwater comparatively. Of course with the onslaught of industrialization in the north, coupled with certain sociopolitical fallout in the south, the power shifted to our current state. Offering an historical balance of both general periods, he seeks a perceptual equality across the Hemisphere that potentially could signal a real economic/productive/political equilibrium in the future.

Strangely, when he arrives at “The American Century” he, himself, falls into the trap of referring to the US as “America” and US citizens exclusively as “Americans.” I was nonplussed. Nonetheless a very engaging read. ( )

It sounds like a good idea. And there were some points in the book that sounded like they were worth some investigation. But for the most part I felt like the author was rather upset that the U.S. was so prominent in the Americas and that south america got shafted. I think the author's biases just came out way too much and there wasn't enough depth in it.

The Americas is an excellent book. In just over 200 pages, Fernandez-Armesto condenses a very impressive range of reading and studying and his own analyses to provide a Pan-American approach, a look at the histories of North and South America, how they have intertwined and influenced each other (as well as Europe, home of the countries that originally built empires in America), how they learned and borrowed from each other in the spread of political and economic ideas and philosophies, how they influenced each other and the home countries economically, how they treated native peoples, how they have evolved into today's situation with the dominance of the USA and its different courses of history and development.

In F-A's view, the Pan-American approach puts the problems of the regions in perspective:

"It suggests that divergence is either a brief and uncharacteristic episode in a common history or a predictable, containable effect of the essential plurality of a hemisphere always characterized by diversity, which has sometimes favored one region, sometimes another. It makes the present state of the hemisphere seem neither inevitable nor indefinitely sustainable. Gringo privilege is a product of history, not of fate. US hegemony is not the end of history, just another phase of unpredictable durability."

Some quotable quotes:

"On the whole, it is a mistake to suppose that great events must have great causes or long-drawn-out origins."

"In history there is not, in my opinion, much difference between perception and reality. History offers few lessons. One of them, however, is that facts are less potent than the falsehoods that people believe. If enough people believe a falsehood, it eventually becomes true; in the meantime they behave as it it were true and its influence on the course of events becomes immense."

"Perceptions are a function of perspective; shift perspective and you see things differently."

F-A ends on hopeful note in responding to the question of whether the rest of the Americas could transform itself and catch up with the North. He cites three factors that he has argued throughout the book facilitated the development of the North: first, exceptionally favourable demographic changes; second the availability–in the North American prairie–of a vast, previously underexploited environment and the means to transform it, and third, expanding economic opportunities created in part by a context of rapidly expanding trade and in part by the prospects opened by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

F-A argues that there are modern parallels which, if well managed in the rest of the Americas, could lead to similar transformations: stable and young workforces; new opportunities for wealth creation through postindustrial technologies; and underexploited environments in the forests, the ocean and Antarctica.

This is a book that very much shifts perspective and makes one think.
(July/06)