The editor and seventy contributing editors, many of the latter from Latin America, examined a total of some 40,000 articles, monographs, government documents, and books published mainly during the years 1960-1962, and listed in this issue of the Handbook, with brief comments in most instances, on at least a tenth of the total examined. Elimination was based mainly on judgment of quality, but partly on length (above ten pages) in the ease of articles. No doubt, several meritorious books and more articles and monographs were omitted either inadvertently or because of mistakes in appraisal. To expect perfection in a task of such magnitude is to expect the impossible.
Readers unfamiliar with previous issues of the Handbook should be cautioned against assuming that all these items are in the field of history, for more than two-thirds of them are not. In fact, the coverage embraces thirteen “disciplines”—plus a general survey, a short section on travel, and a special article—arranged alphabetically, beginning with anthropology and art, ending with philosophy and sociology, and including economics, education, geography, government and international relations, history, and Latin American language, law, literature, and music.
Typographical errors are probably not numerous. Annotations are enthusiastic, mildly critical, or noncommital. Errors of omission will not be fully disclosed until the volume is industriously utilized by numerous scholars laboring in the thirteen “disciplines” included therein. But this reviewer feels that this twenty-fifth number of the Handbook is a valuable contribution to Latin American studies which will be appreciated by all those who make use of it in their research. It represents a laudible effort in Pan Americanism, and the scholars whose hard and often tedious labor produced it deserve more than a thousand thanks.
If lamentation were permissible here, one might justly lament the apparently obvious fact that more and more capable scholars throughout the Americas have not been producing more and better publications devoted to improvement in inter-American relations—and lamentation would seem to be especially appropriate in respect to scholars in the United States, where interest and effort appear to be concentrated in other and more distant foreign areas rather than in nearby Latin America.
