The ReVista book review section features reviews of recent books about Latin America, the Caribbean and the Latinx community in all disciplines.
Recent Reviews
Spatial, Sonic and Sublime Remains of War
Spatial, Sonic and Sublime Remains of WarI read Javier Uriarte’s book over the course of a winter long both in metaphor and reality, during a pandemic that peaked in snowy New England in the early months of 2021. One might imagine that The Desertmakers: Travel, War,...
Social Movements and Government Actions in Ecuador
Social Movements and Government Actions in EcuadorResource Radicals provides ethnographic detail that contextualizes broad, and often confusing, social and political movements common in Latin America. The book focuses largely on relatively recent, resource-focused...
Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude was Written and Became a Global Classic
Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude was Written and Became a Global ClassicWhen, at the age of seventeen, I heard that Gabriel García Márquez had won the Nobel Prize, I was surprised, not that he had won it, because I knew of him at the time as a writer...
Poetry and History in 18th-century Brazil
Poetry and History in 18th-century BrazilIn his presentation of the beautifully published volume, Obras Completas de Alvarenga Peixoto, historian Kenneth Maxwell turns our attention to one of his specialties, the late 18th-century rebellion in Minas Gerais, known as...
The Price of Gold
A Review of The Price of Gold: Mechanized Mining in El Chocó, Colombia Images of a Pawned Future I loved to be in the Chocó. My work on a biodiversity conservation project allowed me to travel frequently to the seldom-visited northwest fringe of Colombia. The...
Bolivia in the Age of Gas
A Review of Bolivia in the Age of Gas Re-thinking Resources and Revolution in BoliviaBret Gustafson’s Bolivia in the Age of Gas is an ambitious and exquisitely detailed historical ethnography of Bolivia and its complicated relation with gas (and oil). Fossil fuels,...
El jardín pandémico
A Review of El jardín pandémico From Chaos to Intimacy through a Dialogue with Plants Imagine the tranquility of a garden. With the aroma of flowers mixed in with the buzzing of bees and the contrast of shady trees against the fierce Paraguayan sun. From the intimacy...
How Democracies Die
A Review of How Democracies Die Challenges and Threats of Modern Democracies: Some Lessons from the U.S. Experience For Latin American Democracies How Democracies Die analyzes the main dangers that modern democracies face. As the authors warn, 21st-century democracies...
Browse by Popular Themes
Arts and Humanities
Business and Economics
Culture
Film and TV
Food
History
Indigenous Issues
Public Health and Medicine
Public Policy and Governance