Latin America at the End of Politics

This is neither an academic book nor, apparently, one aimed at a scholarly audience (although an endorsement from Mark Falcoff indicates that the author “has something to teach both specialist and beginner”). The text has some simple and striking illustrations, a four-page bibliography of marked eclecticism, no index, and a title so provocatively beyond anything it can deliver by dint of reasoned argumentation that one might legitimately fear exclusive reliance upon whimsical allusion. This series of largely anecdotal and sometimes reflective essays blends character study, cultural generalization, and policy proposal in an almost picaresque survey. Colburn is not ostensibly writing an autobiography, but one encounters in some passages a modest but knowing apologia pro vita sua. The book’s approach is not unlike that of the “historioculturalists” promoted by the late Richard Morse, whose citrus humor is absent here, as in similar texts by Howard Wiarda and Glen Dealy. Colburn...