SIMON BOLIVAR

A new view of the Great Liberator, depicting him more as philosopher and moralist, torn by inner conflicts which would not let him be wholly the dictator, and by his strange personality which brought him enemies, even among those he benefitted and trusted most, and left him in his old age, lonely, with his one friend murdered, and the woman he loved kept from him by fate. The early part of his life, influenced proundly by Rodriguez, pupil of Rousseau, by Humboldt, by Robinson, his teacher -- and by admiration of Napoleon, bore fruit in tension and divided purposes later on. This is a philosophical biography, with frequent interpretation provided by the biographer, rather than a biography of action as in Rourke's Man of Glory.