This little gem of a book often sparkles, when the light catches it just right. This is no small feat for a text only recently cut from rough stone as a doctoral dissertation at the Technische Universität Berlin. Antonio Carbone, its German-trained Italian author, offers an admirably concise and insightful study of a somewhat unheralded period in the urban history of Buenos Aires, what he calls “the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a major turning point in the history of modern cities and of modern Argentina” (p. 11). Even specialists are likely to be more familiar with Buenos Aires in the decades immediately following independence—examined in fine studies by Pilar González Bernaldo de Quirós, Mark Szuchman, Fernando Aliata, and Jeffrey Shumway—and especially with the capital city it became after 1880—illuminated in outstanding works by James Scobie, Adrián Gorelik, Diego Armus, Graciela Silvestri, and Claudia Shmidt. But Carbone has a...
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