Conferences are usually fun for the participants. Old friends renew acquaintance; egos are fed; deals are made. But conference reports are usually a bore; for the deft tends to become cute, the wit as triste as the smile on a high school yearbook photo; and the profound melts away into the surrounding puffiness.

This book is an exception—bursting with shop talk as relevant now as when the conference met in Rio de Janeiro four years ago. Some of the papers are elegant. Others are clumsy, but richly informative. Only one or two can be counted as rather weak, but in a book that has at least two undeniably virtuosic pieces, even the mediocre offers a welcome change of pace. Like its predecessor, Social Science Research on Latin America (1964, edited by Charles Wagley), this work should be read by all in the Latin American field and by all social scientists dedicated to a comparative approach. If this reviewer may be permitted a didactic note, he would add that these two books and such other works as Latin American History (1967, edited by Howard Cline), as well as many available reports from governmental and private sources, furnish ample materials for an excellent seminar on the history and nature of social studies of Latin America. Graduate students in area studies programs would do well to examine these materials as a guide to the choice and development of research topics on Latin America.

The book opens with four general essays centering in sociological, economic, political, and historical approaches to the social sciences in Latin America. Then come more specific essays on the standard disciplines, as well as Brazilian historiography and Latin American law and legal institutions. A few of the best examples may be cited. Florestan Fernandes lucidly argues for building Latin American university institutions within which a self-sustaining academic tradition may flourish and blames irrelevant North American scholarship for not assisting this process, whether through the choice of research subjects or in scholarly interaction. Daniel Cosío Villegas, on the other hand, praises North American historians as the major source of Latin American historiographical capital. Another confrontation arrays the theoretically inclined against the problem-solvers. José Nun concerns himself with political science approaches relevant to Latin America. Although his article is an interesting exercise in political theory, one may well criticize him for offhandedly dismissing the relevance of fascist and corporate models for Latin American political happenings and governmental forms. Víctor Urquidi counterposes an approach designed to confront the basic problems of economic development, thus falling into that substantial group which prefers to direct Latin American scholarship toward the solution of public problems. And so the book progresses in a rich interplay of themes, approaches, disciplines, personalities, and expositions of the major problems exercising the Latin American social science community.

The appearance of this volume coincided with the formation of the Latin American Social Science Council. Both are testimonials to the rapid emergence of the social science profession in Latin America. Gone are the old days of not so long ago when a North American social scientist could wander through Latin America, joyfully alone on a frontier. Now there can be a new excitement, the pleasure of working with colleagues at all levels of expertness and employing many different views. The old pleasure was first affective and then intellectual; the new one is the reverse—and this reviewer would count the change as progress.