Carlos B. Quiroga, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist, is the author of this book which its dust-jacket recommends as having “the highest sociological, philosophical, and even religious value.” It is also historical, since he tells the story of Latin America from pre-Columbian times to the present. The book really concerns his personal meditations on the destiny of America. Such thoughts do not derive from Quiroga’s systematic observation of reality but rather from his innumerable readings, which include the Rig-Veda and the Bible, every philosopher since the pre-Socratics, and modern writers as unphilosophical as James Burham, Victor Alba, and Juan Marinello, to mention only a few of the hundreds of names that appear in these pages. Unfortunately their opinions are reproduced without specifying the sources from which they have been taken. At the end, the book becomes prophetic or poetic. Quiroga is certain that all of us are “children sprung up from the most remote stars”; he invites us to sail “in the blue sky” and kindly suggests that we “jump from one spiral nebula to another always searching for the truth” (p. 308).
It is difficult to decide whether this book review should have been entrusted to a historian, a poet, a philosopher, or an astronaut.
