romantic patriot and rational economist. >> this is volume 1. when can we expect million 2? >> guest: there is so much to do. i do very much hope within two years we should be fair but i don't like to put a precise time on it. >> host: what working routine do you have? >> guest: ipod el of the material and right and pilot and write so sometimes i may not be writing for months. the best way be to highlight everything and write everything that you can't. you forget everything. it is so much. it is unbearable and hopeless and you forget it all. there is never a completely right time to write. i write quite fast and come back later in the light of subsequent thoughts and facts and try to

give its shape. >> host: congratulations again, thank you very much and we look forward to the second installment. >> my name is kevin elson and we are in bellingham, washington. we have been in business nine years now, started in 2004. primarily we use of heidelberg wind mill which is of letterpress found in most commercial print shops. they use it for die cutting and oil stamping, scoring but we use it for a printing. not that many people in modern time use heidelbergs for printing because they are

slower. a lot of print shops use these 40 ft. long, six, our presses which sent tens of thousands of prints an hour. this is more meticulous doing artistic printing but it is the heart of our business. when you find something made with so much attention it just has more presence like if you are sending a card to someone that hasn't been mass-produced but handled by an individual i would hope that it would have more meaning to the person on the receiving end, that it is made with love. >> more from book bindings and letterpress as booktv and american history tv look at the history and literary life of bellingham, washington, today at noon on c-span2 and sunday on

c-span3. >> reporter: next, marie arana's book on bolivar, he was subsequently dubbed the george washington of south america. from politics and prose in washington d.c. this is about an hour. >> so many friends in the audience i am just going to pretend i am sitting by my fireplace at home with john and talking a little bit about this book. it is such a pleasure to work on and people find that hard to believe. it is not an easy thing, writing a biography of a very famous leader which everybody has an opinion on whom so much has been

written already. it is true that there are 2,083 books in the library of congress on simon bolivar. 90% of those are in spanish. this is an extraordinary life that was lived in the largest sense. a canvas that is huge, stretches through most of south america, and a life lived large in other ways as well. simon bolivar was a very dramatic and commanding personality. he was called byron asked by his soldiers because he rode 70,000 miles to liberate the country's the liberated. an extraordinary physical feet if nothing else, but he also was

a man of the enlightenment, someone who had been inspired and the youngest age reading voltaire and john locke and came out of that experience probably 20 or 21 with a passionate sense of his country, the colonial yoke that it suffered under. and he was all for liberty and freedom, greatly admired in the united states, greatly admired in many respects, napoleon, there were aspects of the empire, the napoleonic empire he did not admire but this was the man also of flesh and blood.

he was a great womanizer. he had 35 mistresses that we can count after his wife who was greatly beloved to him died he was 19 years old when she died and he went on to pledge that he would never marry again but that didn't mean he would not have a good time and he did. he was a great dancer, loved music, it is best thinking on the dance floor. he felt a ballroom with what of pretty women and what of polkas and dancing was the perfect place to think through the gordian knot he encountered and he would go back in the middle

of a dance, all sort of happy and elated and sweating in the middle of it, go to a back room and dictate three letters and a time to three secretaries and go back to the ballroom again. why did you choose to work right about simon bolivar, as a writer, my whole career is to explain latin america and latin americans to north americans and english speakers. it is not an easy task because there are great differences and great divides of personality, heart between north americans and south americans but every

single book i have written has been another brick on the edifice trying to explain who we are. and as of by cultural person, people who are by cultural, you know you are thinking with two heads and feeling with two cards, and wanted to get a sense of the other side. the latin american side which is so different to north american english readers. i have always been captivated as a child, i was not a very well-behaved child and i was very often dragged by my collar

to sit in my grandparents''s living room which is dark and airless, frightening porcelains and things like that. i was made to sit there in that dark chamber to come to a place, i remember it on on hard stool, but got mother is 83, told me it was hardly a hard stool, soft plush cushion share. i am not sure. i was made to look at the portraits that surrounded me and one portrait, my great great

grandfather and he had fought -- the spanish brigadier in general and the first spaniard to charge and the first spaniard to fall. and a sword to his heart at the beginning of the battle he was on the left. on the right is a portrait of a wistful, beautiful young woman. she had never met him, she was born a few weeks after a sword pierced his heart. across from me, and married at the age of 16. the rebel general who fought and

charged down the hill, managed to free peru and ended by the way with the peruvian freedom, ended all of spanish rule in latin america. i always felt although i was sitting there being punished for being bad, rebellion was really great. wrote over the old guys, throw overboard the yoke. i have been fascinated with bolivar ever since. bolivar is a towering figure and i wanted to give you a sense of that pie sort of reading some of what i have written about who he is. by the time, exactly 200 years ago in 1813, by the time he

began his admirable campaign in which he was not known at all, he was beginning to be known in south america but by the end of its, by the end of 1813 he was known around the world, in washington john quincy adams and james monroe agonized over whether their fledgling nation founded on principles of liberty and freedom should support his struggle for independence. in london hard bitten veterans of england's war against napoleon, mostly irish, signed on to fight for bolivar's cause. in italy the poet lord byron named his boat after bolivar and streamed of immigrating to venezuela with his daughter. there would be five more years of bloodshed before spain was thrust from latin american shores, 14 more years, it was a 14 year war.

there were 14 years of war and great bloodshed after spain was thrust from latin american shores. at the end of that savage and chastening war one man would be credited for single-handedly organizing and leading the liberation of six nations, a population 1-1/2 times the size of north america or modern europe, the odds against which he fought a formidable established world power, of vast areas of untracked wilderness, the splintered loyalties of many races would have proved daunting for the ablest of generals, strong armies at his command that bolivar had never been a soldier. he had no formal military training yet with little more than will and a genius for leadership he freed much of spanish america and laid out his dream for unified -- despite all of this he was up highly

imperfect man. he could be impulsive, headstrong, filled with contradictions. he spoke eloquently about justice but wasn't able to meet it out in the chaos of revolution. his romantic life had a way of spelling into the public realm. he had trouble accepting criticism and had no patience for disagreement. he was single-handedly, singularly incapable of losing a game of cards. hardly surprising that over the years latin americans have learned to accept human imperfections in their leaders. bolivar taught them how. as bolivar's fame grew, he was compared to george washington. he was called the george washington of south america and there were good reasons why. most of them came from wealthy

and influential families, both were ardent defenders of freedom, both were heroic in war but apprehensive about marshaling the peace, and both resisted efforts to make some kings. both claim to want to return to private life but were dragged into the public's fear of shaping governments and both were accused as we all know of undue ambition. there really the similarities between george washington and simon bolivar end. bolivar's military action lasted twice as long as washington. the territory covered with seven times as large and spanned an astonishing geographic diversity from croc infested jungles to the snowcapped mountains of the andes. unlike washington's work, bolivar could not have been won without the aid of black and

indian troops. his success in rallying all races to the patriot cause became the turning point in a war for independence. it is fair to say that he fought both the revolution and the civil war. perhaps what really distinguishes both men, simon bolivar and george washington can be seen most of all in their written work. washington's words were measured, dignified, the product of a cautious and deliberate mind. bolivar's beaches and correspondence remind me more of thomas jefferson. they were fiery and passionate and elegant and beautiful, represents some of the greatest writing in latin america. although much was produced in haste, on the battlefields and on the run, the prose is lyrical and stately, clever but

historically grounded, electric but yet deeply why is. it is no exaggeration to say that bolivar's revolution changed the spanish language, for his words marked the dawn of a new literary age. the old dusty castilian of its time with it ornate flourishes and cumbersome in his remarkable voice and penn became another language, urgent, vibrant and young. this was a man -- bolivar was really the expectation of what latin americans are because he represented a history that really defined the continent of south america. their revolution that he thought was so different, in such contrast to the revolution that

was fought here. he had to employ, when he started it was a white man's work essentially because he was a very rich man, he came from probably the richest family in venezuela and one of the richest families in all of latin america, a very wealthy man, his parents, his family had been in venezuela for at that .200 years, and -- for more. and they had accumulated wealth of cocoa plantations, indigo plantations, copper mines, they own 12 properties in caracas alone. it was a tremendously rich family. it began as a kind of an aristocratic discontent with the

colonial power, spain was assertive in making sure its colonies had no contact with each other, they were like spokes of a we'll. you could not travel from one area of latin america to another. you could not do commerce, you were prevented as a colony of spain from doing any manufacturing at all. you were prevented from owning a mine, you were prevented from any kind of commerce whatsoever and it was punishable by execution. so you see, a the whole business

of putting together a revolution in a place so isolated was a difficult thing and this is when bolivar came up against. it wasn't automatic that countries would welcome him to liberate them even though they wanted to be liberated. it wasn't automatic that the races with all pay -- the races kept shifting. in the beginning of the blacks on whom so much of a revolution depended were aligning themselves because they knew what that meant. they didn't know what the revolution would bring but feeling that they already knew the evil that existed in the colonial system they could deal with that but they didn't know what was coming with the white aristocrats of latin america and so they were very hesitant.

it wasn't until simon bolivar who had been exiled for the second time or when to exile for the second time because the revolution kept failing, each republic that was set up first by a commander who himself is a tremendously marvelous romantic story, fell apart, the second republic fell apart and he found himself in haiti welcomed by alexander, what happened in haiti was they had had a very bloody revolution in which all whites were sent running or killed, slaughtered and alexander medved said to bolivar

you will never win this thing. you are going back now for the third republican. i will help you, i will give you ships, i will introduce you to all these english commercial establishments of men who can help you, but you must promise me one thing, and that is your next time out and this is already 1815. your next time out the moment you hit the short you must liberate the slaves, you must end slavery. and in fact, what would be a greater moral instinct than the american founders, jefferson and washington, that you could fight

for freedom with slaves in the country. he immediately understood and had already figured that out, he knew that he was going to have to reach out and get the indigenous and at that .300 years into the colonial history there was a few huge population with the blacks and indians, the slave trade, the atlantic slave trade and he knew he would have to engage those many races to win the revolution and to really get it going. it wasn't easy, you can imagine. there were lots of suspicions, lots of, at the time, every general wanted his own country.

the fiefdoms were very difficult to fight. but there was a point at which, and it was a very daring point and i will tell you about it in a minute, in which the whole tide of history changed, and that was that he engaged, managed to engage in enough of whom lived in the plane's, who were able at least to give him the impetus for the courage to think differently about how the revolution should be fox and he had the very daring thought, this was in the middle of 1819, much blood had been spilled, and the revolution had grown so

bloody that half the population of the continent of venezuela had been killed, some towns had been completely wiped off of the map. maybe i will cease to worry about venezuela and did the spaniards in the hard by crossing the andes and going to new granada which is now colombia. it was ridiculous. it was rainy season. they were on the plains, looking at the andes, the planes are parked in the summertime and absolutely flooded in the rainy season, hole rivers become sees.

great lakes, no one would have suspected that anybody would be so foolish as to take an army with the women and soldiers through this flooded plane and over the snowcapped mountains of the andes which everybody knows you are taking an army over peaks that are 18,000 feet high. it was a revolutionary thought if i may make a pun, nobody would suspect that he would attempt it. why go to another country when you haven't won liberation for your own. he kept a secret, soldiers did not know where they were going, they were waiting through the water, sometimes having to kerri

is the women on their backs, the cattle were expiring one after the other. and he got to the bottom of the range, the venezuelan part. and finally explained what he wanted to do, soldiers were for it. he took the army of 2,500 people with women, some of the officers had their wives, cattle and horses and with the printing press he went -- he really did feel that words were the greatest weapon and he pulled it off. he went through the spot which is the highest point where the spanish had no garrisons for miles and he went over and came

down the other side in tatters you can imagine. there were so many who died but the third of the british expeditionary force died in the process. all of the cattle were gone. many of low horses did not make it. but the number of people who came down the other side of the mountain were terrified, the spaniards, they were enough to actually send the viceroy running, he ran, put on a half, put on a poncho and left a million pesos on his desk and ran for cover. they were detonating, you can imagine, detonating all the ammunition so he couldn't get at it, and he rode into the capital all by himself and there are

wonderful descriptions of that ride which is the way i start the book. it is of marvelous story full of adventure, of romance. i could talk about his mistress, his favorite mistress, about whom much is known but not enough is written. she was a great beauty, first, as we say in spanish -- [speaking spanish] -- whatever she wanted to say she was very direct, she had opinions, she dress like that man, she was like nothing bolivar's generals had ever seen. some adored her, some despise her, but she was at three times

in his life the person who saved him from assassination. the stories are dramatic, absolutely hard to believe that something like this could happen. cinematic, really, of the 12 sick in the palace -- bolivar stake in the palace, sein the p to bring her, is most unguarded moment. i am too sit, you have to come, feeling terrible, i need your help. goes through the palace and is sitting in a tub trying to pull

his fever because he is so ill and she comes in and reads to him and eventually he gets up, goes to bed, falls asleep, she does as well and suddenly she awakes to the barking of dogs and it is an organized assassination of 150 people who converged on the palace, at this point, quite famous and quite powerful, some of his generals and certainly his vice president versus wishes of his power, and he says what do we do? and she said he doesn't have a pair of boots. is. of gone out for cleaning, he has a sword, he has a pistol and he says i will just go open the door. because someone is banking at the door, no, get dressed.

he gets dressed, she says put on my galoshes and jump through the window. she puts on his mistress's galoshes, and that would be a great get away. as it happens there are no guards outside so he is able to jump, goes to the door, there she is, the general on the other side, actually several soldiers described her as a sword in her hand, hand on hip, what do you want? and the story goes on, i will let you read it for yourself. it is quite amazing at every level. you can see my excitement, how

do you explain the latin american personality to a north american reader? by showing how different the colonial system was, how much history. you describe it as an in sane kind of alice life that bolivar lived. from venezuela to new granada to ecuador liberating panama on the way to peru which was the hardest of all. i hope you will enjoy reading it. i want to hear your questions and i hope you will have many questions for me because this is always for me my favorite part.

thank you. [applause] >> that was a great speech, thank you very much. i came out here to buy the book, number one because i read 5 or 6 fabulous reviews of it. i didn't realize you had an in-house review were, john overbear, this is superb and i can't wait to look at the book and it helped my life in south america, new a lot about bolivar but i learned a lot from listening to you a number of things including his wonderful stuff in colombia and we hear a lot and it irritates me as someone who loves this hemisphere to hear about the late departed exit in sea of venezuela, who uses a simon

bolivar as a tool to bad govern wonderful people in a wonderful country. to what extent bolivar lived a long time in venezuela, to what extent was he distorting history and doing the usual crap that he did for 14 years, or is there the historical responsible basis for saying, using bolivar as part of the venezuelan package? >> that is a very good question. there is very little. i speak about this in the epilogue, there is very little to compare with hugo chavez except for the thing that ever since he died, he died absolutely destitute, penniless, he had given up all his riches, and hugo chavez died a very rich

man opposite experiences bear, but bolivar, let me put it in it the most concrete way, he knew that he was a liberal, a man of the enlightenment, and he was cast by his enemies as being anti liberal. he was not anti liberal. he was one of the most liberal in mind leaders in the western hemisphere, but through the years after he died, he died completely rejected by his own homeland and on the way to exile it didn't take 10 or 15 years before he was brought back as the great hero, his greatest

general, his closest general, daniel o'leary, said of him, irish, said of him there is something about bolivar, it is the magic of his prestige. there were two presidents before hugo chavez who did what he did. take bolivar's legacy and use it as their own. is amazing to see, people on the right use him, people on the left use him, for hugo chavez, bolivar would have been horrified to see how his name is used in the bolivarian republic but it has been used many times before. he is constantly being brought out by leaders throughout latin america to argue different

points which is why people are very confused about just who bolivar was and what he believed in. what hugo chavez and bolivar 11 do have in common is this, bolivar dreamed of unifying latin america. he wanted a unified america because he felt it would be stronger agreed counterpoint to the united states which was growing very strongly hugo chavez had a dream, the bolivarian nations which are ecuador, bolivia, cuba, they all call themselves bolivarian nations that have little to do with bolivar. thank you for the question.

>> two part question, by cultural person, could you enumerate several other, what you would consider gross misconceptions about bolivar on the part of north americans, how wheat misperceive his legacy and how we misperceive him. and any truth to the story i heard about the locket with george washington's hair? >> let me start with that first. george washington -- the grandson of -- or probably grand nephew really of washington,

wanted to send a medallion with a clipping of george washington's hair inside to bolivar because he felt gorge washington himself would have wanted to be associated with simon bolivar's name and it was lafayette who actually said of all the people, all the people in the world that george washington most admired it was simon bolivar. marty they lafayette said that himself. so the medallion was sent down. it was for bolivar the absolute pinnacle of achievement. he admired washington, he admired jefferson, he admired or american founders although he knew that his task was very different, that he could not emulate them. but he treasured this medallion

for all time and actually it is still in venezuela, very much on display and if you go to caracas, you can see it. the question about biculturalism is, misconceptions, bolivar's whole life was lived with people having misconceptions about him. he was fighting for the liberation of peru, back to his homeland there were rumors he wanted to make himself king and these were put forward by a his enemies and everybody and it was a way of tarnishing his name. the furthest thing from wanting to be king. and coming from the south.

and really turned bolivar against st. martin was he really believed south america, that peru should have a king and sent people to europe to rule in peru and bolivar said no, i am sorry, sacrificed a lot of lives precisely to get rid of kings. there are conceptions there as well that were used against him even by south america. i am not surprised. thank you for your question. >> like yourself i grew up here and i have to confess i know very little about simon bolivar and i am looking forward to the reading. as the son of a wealthy family, was he educated in spain or was

he -- >> it is a great story. >> if he was educated abroad he must at some point have learned something about history and traversing the andes is similar to hannibal going over the alps to sack rome. >> hannibal prepared for two years. thank you. the thing that is amazing about bolivar's education, he was an ordinarily erudite man. he could speak language, and read cicero and latin, he was aged hated because when he went to new spain as a young man he was sent at the age of 16 because his mother's family. he was a complete orphan, his

mother was dead, his father was dead and he was sent over by his family to see if he could persuade the spain to actually give him some noble position and he ended up under the tutelage of a wonderful venezuelan who lived in spain for a long time. who brought him in. he had never had a son. bolivar was an orphan. he brought him in, taught him everything, had to is coming and bolivar ended up astonished by his own interest in history and literature and music and he was trained in everything from studies personal library and also the tutors, the people who

came in, he was really as i say a person who changed the latin american language because he had listened to the european philosophers of the time, he had read deeply and appreciated good prose. he was the deeply educated man. >> i am going to revise it to a filibuster which i apologize, but why did bolivar refused to work with saint martin who offered to serve under him and was acutely talented military commander. more successful than bolivar. >> st. martin crossed the andes in -- and had something similar to bolivar which was that he too wanted to unite america. what happened in the process was

st. martin was very sick in the process. by the time he reached prove he was an opium addict, had terrible arthritis, he had been a soldier since he was 12, had terrible arthritis, was carried on a litter over the andes, but they actually sat down and met and st. martin was trying to say come help me with peru and bolivar was not convinced he wanted to help this man. the meeting was very awkward. no one was in the room to record it. there was enough written about it by both sides that we know what went on. but st. martin wanted bolivar to come and even said i will serve under you and bolivar knew that that was exactly what he didn't

work because a person who served under you will have greater prestige than the person who is actually moving so he said no, that is impossible and when saint martin, he actually writes that in a letter, st. martin wanted to serve under me and i knew that would be a mistake because he would have the moral advantage of having surrendered himself to me and bolivar refuse to help him very much, set i will send a few battalions and st. martin at that point left knowing that in order for peru to be free, to bring his liberating army he would have to make himself scarce, he left in the middle of the night. and wind down to mendoza, argentina and went into exile in

france. and two liberators in the same room, really vying for authority. thank you. >> what happened to slavery in the republic? did they take a haitian advice and end slavery? >> immediately. a lot of it was immediately word and not in actual act. it was very hard for some people to let go of their slaves but the revolution when the slaves have been freed and they have been told if they join the army they will gain their freedom immediately, so interesting to me that so few latin americans and i have come across this, don't realize it was the black forces and indian forces that won the revolution down there and great poets, how can you

speak such rubbish? the white aristocrats that were leading, but know, it was battalion after battalion of blacks and indians who actually won the freedom. >> any chance of a united south america? >> he tried. in 1926 he held the precursor to the o a s, he tried to call a conference of all these republics, the pan-american union and he had written a whole sort of vision for this greater america and people didn't come, they stalled, people died on the way, there were too many animosities, he didn't want to

invite the united states, then his vice president -- it became a -- that is when he said we have this revolution, we plowed the sea because he couldn't really move what he really wanted to move which was the unification of all of latin america. thank you. >> very brief, i would like to add a footnote to your answer about the education of bolivar by including -- >> one of his early tutors. he happened to be not much older than bolivar and budding as a tutor. thank you for that.

>> you mentioned one gentleman, interesting to me, and that is co be read. taco bell about the person, and he was, and what influence he had on bolivar and if i could push you a little, second question, might give you an idea for your next book, if this lady -- any correspondence between her and madam whinge who is also irish and in the broader irish

right and operate, operating they had no means of income and it was these people who were recruited and some of them came, they named what effort -- the recruitment was very loose, it was done by someone who didn't know much about soldiering. of venezuelan diplomat who sat in london and was recruiting like mad, so people would say oh yes, i was the lieutenant colonel and in fact was just a scout but they would come over and were in these majestic uniforms, touted all over london and were given big champagne good buys and off they would come to this absolutely wild

revolution where soldiers were barefoot and fighting with spier's and sticks, and they were ludicrous, parading around in these fancy european, they could barely lumber along with all the heavy equipment they were carrying. daniel o'leary was one of those and he was very young and bolivar identified him very early and made him a general very quickly and daniel o'leary was not only one of his best generals but one of his closest friends. bolivar really like having, don't know -- like having english and irish.

and secretaries and assistance almost entirely english and irish, and he liked that when he spent time in london and appreciated their experience in europe and elevated them and daniel o'leary certainly rewarded him by collecting all of his letters. if you go, 32 volumes of letters and correspondence and speeches, it was bill leary who did it all, collected it all, annotated it all, quite a gift back to simon bolivar. anybody else? yes? >> one statue was exiled to the library. >> what i was doing?

such behavior. i was a pretty cheeky kid and i fancied myself a tomboy and i didn't have [speaking spanish] -- no hair on my tongue. i said things i shouldn't have. they made me sort of the prim little woman you see up here day. >> one more question about the irish if i may. slightly different aspect zen you talked about. can you comment on what was going on in chile and the role of higgins and his role in the latin american revolution? >> higgins was the illegitimate son of the viceroy, one of st. martin's closest collaborators

and higgins's story is fantastic. somebody should write that in marvelous, romantic fashion. higgins corresponded with bolivar. they didn't have too much in common but bolivar knew that he opposed people like st. martin and higgins that liberation of that part of the continent and was very respected very much. >> final question if i may. the united states had a number of agents in latin america when this was going on. there was correspondence between those agents and our secretary of state and our president. comment on the extent of that correspondence contributed to misconceptions on the part of north americans. >> absolutely. bolivar was in the middle of a rough campaign, he was not only

-- if i may say, suffering from him rolaids, carbuncled, any number of things when he was doing the 75,000 miles on horseback and in tune this moment when he is trying to obtain in the plains of venezuela the tremendous force, huge expeditionary force, the spaniards who were fighting to keep their grip on the colony, income, in comes these american agents and one of whom most famously was a reporter who came down and sort of freelancing information back to the president and his cabinet and he was not treated very well. you can just imagine somebody coming with the scribbling had

in the middle of a revolution, he was not treated very well. the reports that he sent back to washington where it scathing, absolutely scathing. this little upstart, this man with napoleon -- napoleonic ambitions, you couldn't say anything worse to an american than a man with napoleonic ambitions so it was really true, this kind of reporting that bolivar began to have a very negative reputation in the united states. also remember in the united states, slavery was the biggest commerce of what. we are talking about 1815 and forward. slavery was what gordon wood describes in empire of liberty,

was see huge commerce, the worst thing washington could imagine, talking about washington as a governing city, could imagine was actually supporting anybody who had liberated slaves and was using them to fight a revolution. this was anathema. the reputation began to get worse and worse in the united states because this lander was used against bolivar including the fact that a lot of people were dying in this revolution, was a very bloody revolution. didn't speak well for the whole enterprise, thank you. [applause] >> you are watching c-span2 with politics and public affairs weekdays featuring live coverage of the u.s. senate, weeknights watched the public policy events and every weekend the latest

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