Initialed notices were written by Robert E. Quirk, David M. Pletcher, Stefan Robock, John P. Dyson, and Thomas G. Powell of Indiana University.
The memoirs of this veteran Latin Americanist are devoted less to Latin American studies than to the problems of growing up in the turn-of-the-century South and academic life at California, Chicago, and Duke. Whether recreating the world of his boyhood or blowing off steam on his favorite topics of argument, Rippy is good-natured and full of anecdotes. His many students will have no difficulty remembering the genial professor with the easy laugh and the rolling gait. Newcomers to the cloistered life may well get pointers from the unusually candid accounts of academic relations on the Midway in the 1920s and the 1930s. A sympathetic sketch of Herbert E. Bolton and the siglo de oro of Latin American studies at Berkeley will interest modern practitioners in the field.