In reviewing a book which contains 85 essays by almost as many different authors, one can do little more than indicate what the book contains and how well it seems to achieve its purpose. Claudio Véliz’ Handbook is an impressive compendium of information about contemporary Latin America and the West Indies. It should be especially useful to teachers and writers who already know something about the area but need up-to-date, precise information on specific countries or topics. The authors, most of them British or Latin American, seem in most eases to have first-hand acquaintance with their subjects, and in general, considering the limitations of space, they cover them well. Very brief bibliographies are appended to each chapter.
The first 26 chapters deal with individual countries or groups of countries. In each case, after a very short historical introduction, there are several pages on recent political events, about a page on the country’s economy, and three or four pages of “basic information”: statistical and other condensed data about climate, population, government, economic factors, education, etc. In the second section, on political affairs, these are dealt with in a series of essays on topics like party systems, the political. activities of the military, students, and other social groups, and relations with other countries. In some cases the effort to cover a complicated subject in a few pages leads to broad and unconvincing generalizations, but several chapters, like those on students in politics, Britain and Latin America, and Russian-Latin American relations, are good. There is little discussion of such basic political problems as the authoritarian tradition and the obstacles to stable republican government. There is no chapter on electoral practices.
Part Three, on economic affairs, is perhaps the best section of the book. Topics like the agrarian problem, inflation, and central banking are more easily treated in short essays than are political problems which cannot be adequately discussed without going into the different conditions in individual states. Here too there is a tendency to generalize with too little attention to specific situations; but there are good case studies of industrial development in each of the more important countries and analyses of a few important industries. There are also effective chapters on Latin American international economic institutions. One of the most interesting essays in this section is Peter Nehemkis’ very pessimistic discussion of the Alliance for Progress.
Part Pour, “The Latin American Social Background,” includes population, the urban and the agrarian working classes, the more important Indian groups, education, the Church, the trade union movement, and football. Part Five is entitled “Contemporary Arts.” Here, though there are introductory chapters on the Indian and the Ibero-American heritage, the emphasis as the title suggests is on present-day writers and other artists, with little mention of their nineteenth-century predecessors. There are several chapters on literature, including short ones telling us what there is to tell about authors in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. This section also covers theater, painting and sculpture, architecture, music, cinema, and the press. It brings together a great deal of information about contemporary Latin American culture which would be difficult to find elsewhere.