The ReVista book review section features reviews of recent books about Latin America, the Caribbean and the Latinx community in all disciplines.
Recent Reviews
For Christ and Country
A Review of For Christ and Country, Militant Catholic Youth in Post- Revolutionary MexicoIn the opening scene of Robert Weis’s superb For Christ and Country, Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico,a young man named José de León Toral treks up a hill in...
Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon
A Review of Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon Writing the AmazonHere is how I would translate the experience of reading this book into an image: an old chest, half-opened, slightly scary but quite inviting. As you opened it up, maps, travelogues,...
Wait for Me
A Review of Wait for Me, True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll Revisiting Central America’s QuagmireForty years ago, when traveling to visit family and friends in Europe from conflict zones of Central America, I was often asked: “So, how are things...
Indigenous Peoples, Active Agents
A Review of Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia Indigenous Peoples, Active Agents Recently, the Amazon and its indigenous residents have become hot issues, metaphorically as well as climatically. News stories around the...
Beyond the Sociology Books
Beyond the Sociology Books A Review by Michael J. LaRosa If you are not from Colombia and hoping to understand the South American nation of 50 million souls, you might tend to focus on “Colombia the terrible”—narcotics and decades of socio-political violence. Or you...
Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in Brazil
Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in BrazilIn Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in Brazil, curator Antonio Sergio Bessa gathers together fourteen essays that provocatively reframe canonical practices of art and poetry in 21st-century Brazil. The...
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...
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