Book Reviews

A Review of An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana When first reading the title, An Ordinary Landscape of Violence, I asked myself if there is really anything “ordinary” about a landscape of violence? Preity R. Kumar argues that violence is...

A Review of Lula: A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future André Pagliarini’s new book arrives at a timely moment. During the summer of 2025, when the book was released, the United States began engaging in deeper debates about Brazil’s political...

A Review of The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening Alejandro L. Madrid's new book challenged me, the former organizer of a musical festival in Mexico, to open my mind and entertain new ways to perceive a world where I once...

A Review of The Interior: Recentering Brazilian History The focus of The Interior, an edited collection of articles, is to "recenter Brazilian history," as editors Frederico Freitas and Jacob Blanc establish in the book's subtitle. Drawing on the multiplicity of...

A Review of Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to IraqScott Wallace’s Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq is really several books at once that cohere into a magnificent whole.  It is the evocative,...

A Review of  The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia Brooke Larson’s book on the history Indigenous education in Bolivia is a masterpiece. It is deeply researched, beautifully written, a pleasure to read and a gift to...

A Review of Immigration, Policy, and the People of Latin America: Seven Sending Nations No one truly wants to leave their homeland. That’s a saying I’ve heard countless times in two decades of reporting on immigrants and immigration policy in the United States for the...

A Review of Afrocentroamérica: Entre memoria y olvido In graduate school at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, I knew that I wanted to work on Central America, on U.S. involvement there, and on social or labor history. What I knew about Central America came from the news, from...