Book description
Beautiful, brave, unscrupulous, Eva Peron rose from grinding poverty to become the glittering, hypnotically powerful First Lady of Argentina. To the millions of Argentina’s poor, "the shirtless one", she was the saint who built them hospitals and homes, gave them food and clothes and money. They called her Santa Evita, Our Lady of Hope. To her enemies, and she had plenty, she was a monstrous dictator whose Social Aid charity was the world’s most gigantic protection racket-cum-slush fund.
John Barnes explores the astonishing paradox of this socialite, feminist and champion of the poor who attacked the rich yet made herself a multi-millionairess. Even in death she haunts Argentina. Her embalmed body, stolen after she died in 1952, was "discovered" twenty years later and finally buried in 1976. Yet her charisma still lives on. In Argentina today she is as loved and as hated as ever.
