The ReVista book review section features reviews of recent books about Latin America, the Caribbean and the Latinx community in all disciplines.
Recent Reviews
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...
A Review of Mapping the Amazon
A Review of Mapping the Amazon In her book Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom, Amanda M. Smith renews the critical readings about the corpus canónico of the 20th-century novels about the Amazon. And she does it from the perspective of a...
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...
The Return of Collective Intelligence
A Review of The Return of Collective Intelligence Ancient Knowledge and Modern Science: A New Paradigm for a New World My college Native American Culture professor, the Mescalero Apache scholar Inez Sánchez, told our class that we should regard the word "primitive"...
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