Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story Audiobook (Free)

Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence

Against the background of a thousand many years of vivid history, acclaimed writer Marie Arana tells the timely and timeless stories of three contemporary Latin Americans whose lives represent three driving forces that have shaped the type of the spot: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone).

Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above ocean level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the about Sterling silver, Sword, and Rock: 3 Crucibles in the Latin American Tale highest human being habitation on the planet. Like her past due husband, she functions the platinum mines much as the Indians were forced to accomplish during the Spanish Conquest. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. And today, just as after that, a miner’s success depends on a huge global marketplace whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places.

Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and today lives in a quiet community outdoors New Orleans. He was among a huge selection of criminals Cuba expelled to the US in 1980. His tale echoes the violence which has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus to the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions to the armed service crackdowns that convulse Latin America to this day.

Xavier Albó is a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people. He considers himself an Indian in head and center and, for this, established fact in his used nation. Although his purpose is to learn rather than proselytize, he is an inheritor of the checkered past, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, changing the natives to Christianity, frequently forcibly, in your time and effort to earn the New World. Since, the Catholic Chapel has played a central role in the political existence of Latin America—occasionally for good, sometimes not.

In Sterling silver, Sword, and Rock Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these stories with the annals of the past millennium to describe three enduring themes which have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian occasions: the foreign greed because of its mineral riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, as well as the abiding power of religion. What emerges is certainly a vibrant portrait of the people whose lives are progressively intertwined with this own.