Category: Book Reviews

I remember when I first heard Lillian Guerra speak: over fifteen years ago, at Brown University, about her third book, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance (1959-1971).

Los niños del Amazonas. 40 días perdidos en la selva is the first true book by Colombian journalist Daniel Coronell, whose long and impressive career speaks for itself: news director of manifold networks; recipient of prestigious recognitions such as Emmys, Peabodys and Simón Bolívar prizes; and arguably the most widely read columnist in Colombia, where he is as much admired as he is feared.

Water is a powerful tenet of Afro-diasporic religions that troubles academic disciplines and racial categories that define state, military and geographic borders.

It feels as though work takes up more and more of our lives, expanding into time it never used to touch.

In Now We Are in Power, Angus McNelly provides an incisive examination of Bolivia’s complex political trajectory under Evo Morales, analyzing it through the lens of Antonio Gramsci’s seminal concept of “passive revolution.”

Once home to sprawling banana plantations under the control of U.S. multinationals, the history of the northern coast of Honduras is crucially bound with capitalist exploitation and extraction.

Few people have written more lucidly about Venezuela’s democratic decline and autocratization over the past 20 years, especially for an English-language audience, as political scientist Javier Corrales.

Young adults traveling to find themselves is a tale as old as time. It’s not hard to conjure images of historical figures or folk heroes sailing out for adventure, looking for fame, fortune or—perhaps more important—meaning.

Amelia Fiske’s ethnography, Reckoning with Harm:  The Toxic Relation of Oil in Amazonia, widens and deepens details of Ecuador’s highly controversial, post-1960s, Amazon oil development.

Taking care of patients in rural Haiti or in southwest Uganda, say, who are sick from diseases long since vanquished from the United States, in communities that did not get much access to Covid-19 vaccines when they were most critical, a healthcare practitioner might easily fall into despair.

Havana, founded on Cuba’s southern coast of Cuba, was moved to the northern coast when the conquistadores learned how to take advantage of the Gulf Stream’s force on their way back to Europe.

We are often told that good government requires a well-functioning government bureaucracy, in which public employees are appointed and promoted based on objective assessments of their merit and expertise.