Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse

October 1, 2021

Former New York Times reporter and translator-from-Spanish Neuman was stationed in Caracas, Venezuela, serving from 2012 to 2016 as the paper's Andes Region Bureau Chief. That gave him a close-up view of Venezuela's ongoing implosion. Here, while supplying details particular to Venezuela's situation, he also argues that the election of Hugo Chavez as president in 1998 presaged the appearance of strongmen worldwide who have gutted their countries. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from December 20, 2021
Journalist Neuman debuts with a heartbreaking and deeply reported account of the ongoing crisis in Venezuela. Depicting the country’s downward spiral since 2014—driven by a collapse in oil prices, U.S. sanctions, and hyperinflation—from the perspectives of political leaders and ordinary citizens, Neuman notes that one in six Venezuelans has fled the country during the crisis, an exodus “second only to the flight from Syria, which was in the midst of a civil war.” He begins the narrative with a vivid description of the 2019 blackouts that left the entire country in the dark, pinning the blame on decades of neglect by President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Neuman then explains how Chávez, who came to power in 1999 and died in 2013, created a cult of personality by stoking political polarization and invoking the country’s revolutionary past while funneling oil revenues into a national “slush fund” for development projects and borrowing heavily from foreign banks. Neuman excels at humanizing the suffering of ordinary Venezuelans who lack access to basic food, medicine, or shelter, and incisively analyzes how the country’s fractured and ineffective opposition has allowed Maduro to retain control. Through lyrical prose, in-depth interviews, and lucid discussions of political and economic matters, Neuman makes the scale of Venezuela’s tragedy clear. Readers will be riveted and appalled.

February 1, 2022
Journalist Neuman presents a jaunty, intimate look at the recent (and ongoing) implosion of Venezuelan society that emphasizes the perils of the petrostate and the human cost of endemic corruption. Beginning in the late 1970s, Venezuelans enjoyed low taxes, subsidized housing, and ultracheap gasoline, their rewards for living atop the world's largest petroleum reserves. But by the twenty-first century, the government was reduced to a distribution system for oil money. Corruption was widespread, as illustrated by shady import arrangements and abandoned infrastructure projects. Following the death of autocrat Hugo Ch�vez in 2013, Venezuela plunged into an inflationary death spiral, causing food shortages, political unrest, a contested election, and an attempted coup-d'etat. Neuman focuses on a series of frightening power outages in 2019, noting that the blackouts "got inside your head," destroyed all generosity, and revealed a nation in total breakdown. As Neuman tries to square the lively nation he once knew with its current poverty and cruelty, he worries that such governmental failure may actually represent "the Republican dream fulfilled," a "state reduced to the absolute minimum" in service to libertarian extremes.

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Starred review from January 15, 2022
Tracking the tragic demise of the once-thriving, oil-rich nation. As the Caracas-based Andes bureau chief for the New York Times from 2012 to 2016, Neuman is well qualified to recount the South American nation's precipitous decline. He records Venezuela's dramatic political and economic changes through interviews and deft firsthand observations, exploring the collapse of social institutions, entrenched poverty, staggering inflation, chronic blackouts, famine, and pervasive despair. Neuman points to two specific elements that help explain the tumult: the "Resource Curse" caused by its massive oil wealth, to which the entire economy was chained; and the violent rift between those who supported Hugo Ch�vez, the publicity-hungry president who nationalized the oil industry and centralized the government, and those who did not. Ch�vez "mined [the rift] and encouraged it until it became part of the landscape, something that people took as a given." When he died in 2013, after 14 years as president, he was succeeded by his crony Nicol�s Maduro, "a less talented politician who styled himself as the ideological heir of the man he called the eternal comandante." In 2014, the massive drop in oil prices collapsed the economy, as the country depended almost entirely on its oil exports, at the expense of all others. In 2018, the disputed reelection of Maduro, tainted by heavy-handed oppression of his opponents, led to the attempted coup by the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaid�, who declared himself interim president in 2019. Despite support by the U.S. and others in a concerted effort to depose Maduro--accompanied by crippling sanctions by the Trump administration--there was no citizens uprising, as hoped, just more misery. The author delivers the best kind of journalism, combining powerful facts and pointed observation, as he moves from one alarming event to the next, bringing into the spotlight countless Venezuelans who have little hope for the future. A heartbreaking yet authoritative, necessary look at a ruined nation.

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February 1, 2022

Veteran New York Times reporter Neuman debuts with a searing indictment of the Venezuelan petro-state. He argues that populist president Hugo Ch�vez, instead of diversifying the country's economy to sustain the socialist revolution he claimed to lead, coasted for 14 years on oil money. The Ch�vez regime doled out cheap gas and sinecures to persuade Venezuelans to ignore rampant incompetence, corruption, and democratic backsliding. But since 2013, as oil revenues collapsed and Ch�vez's successor Nicol�s Maduro embraced authoritarianism amid U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, the nation plunged into humanitarian crisis while the U.S.-backed opposition flailed ineffectually, Neuman writes. Venezuela lost two-thirds of its gross domestic product between 2013 and 2019, accompanied by hyperinflation and emigration of a sixth of its population. Neuman denounces Ch�vez and Maduro but gives the conservative opposition and U.S. foreign policy their fair share of criticism as well. Neuman, who lived in Caracas for years, writes lyrically and uses in-depth interviews and reflections to put individual faces to Venezuela's dissolving bonds of fellowship. However, his ham-fisted metaphors ("time was a fast-food sandwich") and patronizing comments ("I thought of Venezuela as the shouting country") sometimes detract from the book's geopolitical insights and heartfelt laments. VERDICT A riveting personal exploration of Venezuela's slow-moving collapse.--Michael Rodriguez

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