Initialed notices were written by Paul Doughty, John P. Dyson, Vladimir Honsa, James H. Kellar, Lawrence Lewis, David M. Pletcher, Robert E. Quirk, Walter Poesse, Otis P. Starkey, and Jeffry Adelman, all of Indiana University.
Encouraged by the success of an earlier edition (reviewed in HAHR, February 1962, p. 112), Bayitch has returned to the grueling work of bibliography to produce a greatly expanded book. This edition is nearly three times as long (and nearly three times as expensive) as its predecessor. Its usefulness may not rise in quite the same proportion, but this handy, well-organized guide should be on the reference shelf of every library dealing in any way with Latin American subjects. It will be especially useful to liberal arts colleges where the mastery of Spanish is not an absolute prerequisite to writing term papers or doing collateral reading on Latin America.
The organization of Bayitch’s Guide is much the same as before, the bulk of the book being devoted to a subject guide for all Latin America and to guides for each country, subdivided into several dozen topics. In the former section the Caribbean and Central America are covered in separate divisions. Bayitch’s reason for giving the Caribbean area this special treatment is that he includes British, French, and Dutch areas with the Spanish American. He does not explain why he has prepared a regional index for Central America. The entries include books and articles from both specialized and general periodicals, although not many of the last named would be called “popular.” (For ephemeral articles in Time, Newsweek, and the like, the student will still need to consult the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.) Bayitch’s Guide contains entries through 1965 and a few in 1966.
A shortcoming of the first edition was its lack of an author index; this has not been corrected. Inevitably there are a few omissions and errors. The enormous value of this bibliography, however, far outweighs these minor defects.
