Vidas argentinas is a book of brief biographical sketches of seventeen leaders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of them politicians, including Mitre, Roca, and Saenz Peña, and less well-known men such as Indalecio Gómez. The vignettes are carefully eulogistic and gracefully written, but the book adds nothing new to Argentine historiography. Is is approximately the twenty-seventh printing of the forty-year-old original.
Bartolomé Mitre is one of the most complex, talented, and sympathetic figures of Latin American republican history. I suppose that this book could be called a “standard” biography of the great man, at least by traditional, still powerful Argentine historiographic standards. It is not as excessively eulogistic as much old-school biography, but it lays a pompous veneer over Mitre that obscures rather than illuminates his achievements and character.
