Category: Book Reviews

As something of an old hand in the history of coffee enterprise, I don’t very often discover a new work that so effectively answers questions I’ve had for decades. Michelle Craig McDonald accomplishes this and much more in her multifaceted study of the coffee trade and consumption from the early 18th to late 19th centuries in what became the United States. Beyond this, however, she managed to produce an accessible, engaging text based on deep archival research, a gem for both general readers and scholars in her own field.

When I was in undergrad at Emerson College, I met a student from Croatia who spoke to me in perfect Spanish. When I asked her how she was so fluent, she predictably told me she’d studied it in school. To my surprise, however, she punctuated her explanation with, “I [also] grew up watching Mexican telenovelas!” It was the turning point at which I began thinking of telenovelas as existing beyond televisions in Mexican households.

Her new book, The Years of Blood, offers, as its subtitle suggests, “stories from a reporting life in Latin America.” A widely decorated journalist, Guillermoprieto has written, in fact, several lives’ worth of reportage on the region. While she began chronicling Latin America in 1978, this volume collects essays published in the 21st century—most after 2010.

It was 1972, and three young men—one accompanied by his wife— arrived separately in Chile from different points in the U.S. Upper Midwest. None had ever been to the slender, mountainous Andean nation. Like some 20,000 other foreigners who’d also recently traveled there, they were chasing a dream: to be part of the social and economic revolution Chileans had embarked on two years earlier by electing Salvador Allende as their first-ever socialist president, the first socialist leader democratically elected in Latin America.

Death does not always mean an end. In early 2013, Venezuela’s president known as Comandante Hugo Chávez died after struggling with cancer. Having won the 2012 presidential elections—and perhaps anticipating the imminent end of his life before taking office—he proclaimed Vice President Nicolás Maduro as his political successor and publicly urged supporters to vote for him should the electoral process need to be repeated.

In the early winter of 1990, one year into the presidency of Carlos Menem, the Buenos Aires police held a public auction of a small fleet of cars that had long been in their service. Immersed as I was in primary research for the book I was writing on the legacies of repression and torture in Argentina, I was horrified.

Christopher Loperena’s book, aptly titled the Ends of Paradise, brings forth sharp analysis of the threats to Garifuna life in Honduras through what he calls a “racialized extractivisim” (13) that involves land theft supported by the state, state-developed tourism and appropriation of culture by the mestizo nation.

As the director of a doctoral program in spirituality, colleagues and students often ask me if I have any recommendations for articles or books they should read. Because the field of spirituality is a new one in academia, fresh research is always emerging. This year, my number one recommendation is Chris Tirres’ new book, Liberating Spiritualities.

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 historians of Bolivia, education, Indigenous movements and so much more.

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 Boston Globe and other newspapers. It’s almost conventional wisdom by now — a quiet, often-ignored truth that sits beneath the headlines and political slogans.

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 the Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees whom I worked with as a volunteer with the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and from local solidarity events, visiting speakers and documentaries.

About ten years ago, when I arrived at the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery in the mountain town of Orizaba, Veracruz, in Mexico, I was excited that the administrator I’d spoken with earlier had arranged a private tour for me. Founded in 1896, the Moctezuma Brewery was saved from bankruptcy when it was bought out by Mexico’s behemoth Cuauhtémoc Brewery in 1985. It is best known globally for its Dos Equis amber lager and for Sol, the light, golden, pilsner-style beer now sold in over 70 countries around the world.

I remember reading with emotion during my adolescence “Juan López and John Ward,” the poem that the great writer of fantastic literature Jorge Luis Borges dedicated to the Falklands War of 1982. What moved me, I think, was the idea that two young men who could have been friends (united by their love of literature, in addition to belonging to the same generation and sharing the same name) saw each other face-to-face only once, but since that one encounter was during a war, each became both Cain and Abel.