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==