Author: Alejandro Quintero Mächler

Fresh insight into seemingly exhausted topics often comes from unexpected places. Luís Cláudio Villafañe’s biographical account of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), one of Latin America’s most influential and well-known artists, may serve as an illuminating case in point.
Instead of enlarging the already incommensurable literature on the subject with a specialized monograph or yet another mythologizing account, Villafañe chose to gather, digest and put in order all the existing material on the so-called “Prince of Spanish Letters” and produce a concise, much-needed retelling of his extraordinary life and times.

Colonial Reckoning. Race and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Cuba is the latest work by historian Louis A. Pérez Jr., whose broad academic interests have mainly revolved around the island’s culture, identity, historiography and political economy, as much as its conflicted albeit intimate relationship with the United States