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books:

	• Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (American Empire ... Greg Grandin Metropolitan Books, 2006 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Empire's Workshop

Book is thoroughly researched. Reads as somewhat dry, but the author does an incredible job at tying together complicated areas of American foreign policy in Latin America and history to weave a cogent and scary picture of imperialism and its effects. I could see this book being a must read in a university political science course.

Time frame and condition was great

Shipping was as sugggested and dilevery was in a few days. I have not reaad the book as yet. So cannot comment on the contents.

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Enlightening but hard to read

I found this book enlightening. I had thought that the evils we (the US) sometimes do in the world were aberrations caused by greed of individuals accepting corporate donations. I have been off the mark. It turns out that this is a cohesive philosophy with actual followers: authors, scholars, and theologians. It was the theological underpinnings of this philosophy that shocked me. Some theologians say that third world poverty has a religious and moral dimension. It is the fault of the poor because they don't have respect for private property. A touch of Calvinism is involved too. Our prosperity is evidence that God prefers us. The profit motive is part of God's divine plan to discipline fallen man and make him produce. The Evangelicals actually sent _guns_ and bibles to the Contras! While the corporations might not be religious, they can certainly make common cause with this philosophy.

This philosophy is what made it okay to attack and kill human beings who had never done anything to us in Iraq. I had been mistaken in my thought that it was caused by a temperamentally belligerent president and a vice president in the pay of the military industrial complex.

This philosophy says it is okay to create instability and poverty in a nation because we can then lead these poor, tired people to unregulated capitalism which is the highest good.

Having said the book is enlightening, I must add it is hard to read. The run on sentences kept having me backtrack to antecedents. And words like "insurgents" must necessarily shift meaning depending upon who is in power. I suggest wading through it anyway.

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Great Book

Grandin's work brilliantly explains American foreign policy and the implementation of neoliberalism in Latin America at two key points in history: the first being FDR's Good Neighbor Policy and the second Reagan's post-Vietnam return to "hard power." Both turning points help set up the foundations for the current Bush Doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive force using a mixture of soft and hard power. As a student of politics and history with a focus on Latin America, Grandin's work is a must-read for all Americans

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

An eye-opening examination of Latin America?s role as proving ground for U.S. imperial strategies and tactics

In recent years, one book after another has sought to take the measure of the Bush administration?s aggressive foreign policy. In their search for precedents, they invoke the Roman and British empires as well as postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan. Yet they consistently ignore the one place where the United States had its most formative imperial experience: Latin America.

A brilliant excavation of a long-obscured history, Empire?s Workshop is the first book to show how Latin America has functioned as a laboratory for American extraterritorial rule. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States? imperial operations, from Thomas Jefferson?s aspirations for an ?empire of liberty? in Cuba and Spanish Florida, to Ronald Reagan?s support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush?s policies to Latin America, where many of the administration?s leading lights?John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich?first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics and first enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures.

With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin concludes with a vital question: If Washington has failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America?its own backyard ?workshop??what are the chances it will do so for the world?

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