It's amazing what a little free publicity can do.
A book that criticized the United States for its colonization of Latin America shot to the top of the Amazon.com charts after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave President Barack Obama a copy of the tome during a meeting on Saturday.
After Chavez gave Obama a copy of "The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" , the book shot up Amazon.com's bestselling list, rocketing from #54,295 to #2 in the course of one day.
It's currently ranked behind "Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto," by Mark R. Levin, and immediately above the record-breaking "Twilight" vampire series by Stephenie Meyer.
"Open Veins" published in 1971 by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, claims that the U.S. "buried their teeth" into Latin America, pushing Western ideals onto their civilization. It lashes out at the more than 500 years of colonial involvement in the region -- particularly how Latin American people were forced into "menial labor."
Obama politely accepted the gift from Chavez and later joked to reporters that he thought Chavez had written the book -- and that he should give the Venezuelan President one of his own works.
