Like most commemorative albums, this is an uneven pastiche of essays, poems, photographs, and memorials compiled to please a local lay readership. It makes no pretension to scholarship, so should hardly be judged on that basis. The history of the Bolivian oriente is sufficiently distinctive and unfamiliar, however, that even a mediocre contribution deserves some attention.
Papers which reflect systematic research and analysis, although written in “popular” style with sparse documentation, are historian H. Sanabria’s succinct résumé of “Cuatro Centurias de Vida Cruceña,” anthropologist D. Heath’s reconstruction of the development of “Los Cambas: Un Pueblo Emergente,” and educator A. Peredo’s outline of “Evolución de la Instrucción Pública.” Other brief essays, for the most part anecdotal, deal with flora and fauna, demography, development of means of transportation, incipient industrialization, local heroes, and other aspects of culture in the region.
