Fox News reports, “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wasn’t the first to discover the book he gave to President Obama last week in an attempt to ease diplomatic tensions — college students in the U.S. have been turning its pages for years.” The book the story refers to is the 317-page Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano.

In the article, academics were called upon to explain the fervor surrounding the book, and how its use among college professors in numerous undergraduate courses highlights its importance. Including historian Paul Ortiz…

Associate Professor Paul Ortiz at the University of Florida said he most recently used Galeano’s book while teaching a class on African and Latin American history last fall.

“The way I present him is that he himself was an oppositional scholar,” Ortiz said. “He was writing against the mainstream economic viewpoint of the development of the Americas.”

University of Minnesota sociology graduate student Ryan Alaniz was also asked to comment on the book…

Ryan Alaniz, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, said he requires students to read portions of the book’s introduction for a sociology class he teaches called “Sociological Perspectives of Race, Class, and Gender.”

“The story of global capitalism is often told from a U.S. viewpoint often without the recognition that people in other parts of the world may have a very different explanation,” Alaniz wrote in an e-mail. “To gain a more holistic understanding of the consequences of capitalism, a critical student must be exposed to different interpretations of those consequences. Galeano’s book offers a critical Latin American perspective.”

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