Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:
“America, América” is implicitly a companion volume to Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The End of Myth,” which explored the role played by the frontier in the American imagination. Grandin posited that the mythology of an ever-expanding frontier encouraged fantasies of infinite growth and delusions of innocence. Instead of grappling with scarcity and contradiction, Americans learned simply to go west. He traced how the United States became “inured to its brutality and accustomed to a unique prerogative: its ability to organize politics around the promise of constant, endless expansion.”
South of the United States, a starkly different experience made for a different understanding of the world. In “America, América,” Grandin shows how Spanish Americans viewed frontiers not as escape valves but “as historic theaters of terror and domination.” He maintains that this sense of anguish gave rise to a strain of Latin American humanism that became foundational to ideals of international cooperation and global institutions, including the United Nations.
more here.
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