#117: Past is Present
Marie Arana is the award-winning Peruvian-American author of Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, a book about a whole continent that manages not to be a thousand pages long\u2014even though it covers about a thousand years of history. She makes the compelling case that there are really three driving forces behind the entire region: exploitation and extraction; violence; and religion. Of course, all of these forces are deeply interrelated\u2014and that\u2019s the point. To drive home how tangled the past is with the present, Arana weaves the stories of three contemporary Latin Americans together with a millennium of history to ultimately show why you can\u2019t really explain the rest of the world without first understanding the story of Latin America.
Go beyond the episode:
- Marie Arana\u2019s Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
- Read Richard Moe\u2019s review on our website (\u201ca long-overdue and persuasive corrective\u201d)
- Here\u2019s a less blood-soaked tale from the cloisters of Peru: librarian Helen Hazen on a clutch of rare books tucked away in an Andean convent
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