Two years as director of the Centro de Estudios sobre Desarrollo Económico at the University of the Andes provided John Hunter with the background for this irritatingly uneven work. The slenderness of the book does not prevent a diffuse and illogically-organized treatment of contemporary Colombian economy. The reader is alternately pleased and puzzled, for certain individual sections are among the more perceptive discussions to have appeared in the literature. It is consequently difficult to render a fair overall judgment.

The very purpose of the volume is uncertain. It is written with a strongly personal cast, and references to the author’s family and its living experiences are not always relevant. The prologue itself decries any effort to match or better existing works on the Colombian economy, although the author, an economist at Michigan State, might have offered fresh insights. He calls the book “a frankly personal account,” yet it can no more qualify as a travel book than as an economic study. The several chapters might best be regarded as a series of loosely-related essays; no further classification seems possible.

Discussion of recent and current political problems is superficial and unsatisfactory. The reader is made wary when he finds the name Rojas Pinilla consistently misspelled (pp. 14, 98, and between). It further seems inconceivable that such names as Gómez and López could be used without the accents. And if these criticisms are niggling, there is little excuse for the virtual absence of discussion of the rural violence that has dominated Colombian life for more than a decade. In the last chapter Hunter suggests that it has virtually been brought to an end (pp. 95 and 98), when nothing of the sort has happened.

The above criticisms seem strong ones indeed, as they are. Yet the book has certain merits as well. A brief introductory chapter on the contrasts of Colombian geography is one of the most succinct treatments this reviewer has seen, and effectively provides a setting in which major economic problems may be understood. What appear to be the heart of the book—central chapters on economic developments and trends—set forth in useful fashion some of the fundamental dilemmas facing all developing countries, Colombia included. Problems of economic priorities and of governmental choices are often virtually insoluble, and Hunter shows this effectively in the Colombian context. He is also appropriately wary of often-questionable “official” statistics.

Later passages add insight into problems of higher education in Colombia. While little is surprising to the Latin Americanist, the author’s personal observations lend a tone of reality that helps to underline the great problems of university teaching and scholarship. Discussion of the rather untraditional University of the Andes is balanced and informative. At this point, having rearoused the reader’s attention, the author suddenly turns to chapters on emeraldmining and the problems of American academicians living abroad. These seem almost totally unrelated to what had preceded, and the criticisms made above are once again applicable.

This is a frustrating work. Disorganized, less than scholarly in the absence of either bibliography or index, it has no real place in the literature. Yet there are portions that are worthy of preservation. One has the inescapable feeling that Professor Hunter could have done much greater justice to his subject.