While checking out all of the organizations tabling at the grassroots media conference last week I saw the cover to the right and stopped in my tracks. This new book on Bolivia, was just a few days old was being sold by Upside Down World (an online magazine on activism and politics in Latin America) and was written by Benjamin Dangl, a young independent journalist, banjo player and one of the magazine’s founders.

I’m just a few chapters in, but thus far The Price of Fire, seems to be a thought out and well articulated intro to what is happening in Bolivia right now. Of course it is carries with it all the baggage that my film on Bolivia will carry (it’s created by a liberal-arts educated, white male from the global north) but that said it really seems like Ben and his collaborators have done their homework. The resulting work is a well notated and necessary historical and international context to the often oversimplified conflicts that have rattling South America in recent years.

I went down to bluestockings bookstore for the first stop on the book tour last Thursday night and met Ben and his partner April, and there I discovered that during their South American travels they came to know my friend and fellow meerkat Danielle who’s been living in Bolivia since last fall. Small world. Turns out that they had just come in from Paraguay only hours earlier and this was the first time that Ben actually got to see the book in print and not just as a word document on his laptop.

Click the pic above for a photo of the author or the one below for a brief video snippet from the book reading:

• Learn more about the book at it’s website (boliviabook.com…the fraternal twin with our site boliviamovie.com)
• Make friends with the book on myspace.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.