Shattered Hope

By Piero Gleijeses,

Book cover of Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954

Book description

The most thorough account yet available of a revolution that saw the first true agrarian reform in Central America, this book is also a penetrating analysis of the tragic destruction of that revolution. In no other Central American country was U.S. intervention so decisive and so ruinous, charges Piero Gleijeses.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Shattered Hope as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I read historian Shattered Hope while a graduate student at an American university and it forever changed my sense of the complexity and nuance of Cold War-era U.S. interventions in the Americas, in this case, Washington’s overthrow of a democratically-elected leftist head of state: Jacobo Árbenz. Two decades hence, I love the book even more for its boldness and historical rigor but also the author's willingness to break taboos like the widely-held notion that there was little communistic influence in Árbenz’s government. 

From Russell's list on U.S. involvement in Latin America.

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