Greg Grandin

Life

Grandin received a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1992 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999.

He won the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Award for the best book published in any discipline on Latin America for Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Eric Hobsbawm called The Last Colonial Massacre a "remarkable and extremely well-written work" that

is about more than the dark history of Guatemala and the Cold War in Latin America. It is about how common people discover politics. It is about the roots of democracy and those of genocide. It is about the hopes and defeats of the twentieth-century left. I could not put this book down.

Grandin has published widely on U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War, and Latin American politics in The Nation, The New York Times, Harper's, and the London Review of Books. He has appeared on the Charlie Rose Show and has interviewed Naomi Klein and Hugo Chávez.

After the death of Chávez, Grandin published a lengthy obituary in The Nation, opining that "the biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn't authoritarian enough."

In the summer of 2009, he reported from Honduras on that country's coup, appearing numerous times on Democracy Now! and Grit TV and writing a series of reports in The Nation and elsewhere on the consequences of the overthrow of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.

Grandin worked as a consultant with the Historical Clarification Commission (Spanish: Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, or CEH), the Guatemalan truth commission, and has written a number of articles on its methodology, including its genocide ruling and its use of historical analysis.

Grandin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2010.

Selected works

Author

• Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?, Verso, 2011, .
• The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, Metropolitan Books, 2014, .
• Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman, Metropolitan Books, 2015, .
• "The Strange Career of American Exceptionalism", The Nation, January 2/9, 2017, pp. 22–27.
• The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Metropolitan Books, 2019, .
• "Kissinger Still at Large at 100", The Nation, vol. 316, no. 11 (May 29/June 5, 2023), pp. 16–19. "We now know much more about Kissinger's crimes, the immense suffering he caused during his years in public office." (p. 19.)

Editor

Reception

Fordlandia was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker; NPR; The Boston Globe; San Francisco Chronicle; and the Chicago Tribune.

In 2020, Grandin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

References

References

1. "Greg Grandin | Department of History".
2. "NYU > History > Greg Grandin". History.fas.nyu.edu.
3. "The National Book Foundation". Nationalbook.org.
4. (March 9, 2010). "National Book Critics Circle: 30 Books in 30 Days: Fordlandia, by Greg Grandin – Critical Mass Blog". Bookcritics.org.
5. Gray, Kevin Alexander. (May 2014). "Hidden History of Slavery".
6. (2025-09-02). "The 2025 Cundill History Prize Shortlist".
7. Vitiello, Domenic. (2018-09-25). "Department of History". History.fas.nyu.edu.
8. (May 29, 1978). "Interview with Greg Grandin author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War". Press.uchicago.edu.
9. "Greg Grandin".
10. Grandin, Greg. (February 14, 2010). "Empire of Savagery in the Amazon". The New York Times.
11. Grandin, Greg. (December 2004). "The right quagmire: Searching history for an imperial alibi".
12. (29 November 2007). "Greg Grandin reviews 'Nixon and Kissinger' by Robert Dallek and 'Henry Kissinger and the American Century' by Jeremi Suri". LRB.
13. "Body Shock: A 40th Anniversary Conversation with". Naomi Klein.
14. Grandin, Greg. (September 27, 2009). "There Is Much to Do: An Interview With Hugo Chávez".
15. Greg Grandin. (2013-03-06). "On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez". The Nation.
16. "Defying Coup Regime, Zelaya Attempts Return to Honduras". Democracynow.org.
17. "GRITtv: Greg Grandin: Echoes of the 80s In Honduras". [[Free Speech TV]].
18. "The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective". Cambridge University Press.
19. (2000). "Chronicles of a Guatemalan Genocide Foretold: Violence, Trauma, and the Limits of Historical Inquiry". Duke University Press.
20. Greg Grandin. (February 2005). "The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala". [[History Cooperative.
21. (2010). "2010 Fellows and Their Affiliations at the Time of Their Election". American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
22. (January 27, 2014). "On This Spanish Slave Ship, Nothing Was As It Seemed". [[Fresh Air]] on [[NPR]].
23. Delbanco, Andrew. (January 10, 2014). "A Vengeful Fury". The New York Times.
24. Szalai, Jennifer. (May 12, 2025). "A Bold New History Highlights Latin America's Humanist Ideals". The New York Times.
25. "100 Notable Books of 2009". The New York Times.
26. (August 1, 2011). "Briefly Noted: A Year's Reading".
27. Heller, Zoe. (December 23, 2009). "Maureen Corrigan's Best Books Of 2009". NPR.
28. Kenney, Michael. (December 6, 2009). "Simply the best nonfiction". The Boston Globe.
29. (January 6, 2010). "Best Science Books 2009: San Francisco Chronicle : Confessions of a Science Librarian". Scienceblogs.com.
30. (April 12, 2009). "Our favorite nonfiction of 2009". Chicago Tribune.
31. "The Pulitzer Prizes".