This volume, fourth in a series of six bibliographical guides, provides annotated entries on works dealing with, to a greater or lesser degree, the lives of individuals in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The entries are organized by country and subject; the latter range from aeronautics through armed forces and art to history, moving pictures, music, religion, and science. The Index consists mainly of monographic titles in Spanish which are available in libraries in the United States or Canada, and National Union Catalog location symbols are included in each entry to assist scholars in finding the title. The work is also well indexed by author, by short-title, and by name of the person studied—the “biographee.”
Much work has gone into the preparation of this volume, and it will no doubt prove to be a useful tool for both teachers and graduate students. Nevertheless some weaknesses, which might be corrected in a revised edition, should be noted. Much of the material cited consists of provincial or local histories, retratos y recuerdos, and biographical sketches of political figures. No work dealing with collective biography in the social history sense of the term (that is, prosopography) is included.
Although the compiler states that the Index contains only works which contain biographical information on three or more persons,” some entries do not conform to these guidelines. (See, for example, the entry for Bloody Precedent, the biographies of Juan Manuel de Rosas and Juan Domingo Perón.) The compiler makes no claim to have done an exhaustive job, but some omissions, including Jacinto R. Yaben’s 5-volume Biografías argentinas y americanas, Cayetano Brunos 12-volume Historia de la iglesia en la Argentina, José María Mariluz Urquijo’s El Virreinato del Río de la Plata en la época del Marqués de Aviles, and Luis de Elizalde, ed., El Doctor Rufino de Elizalde y su época vista a través de su archivo, are rather surprising.
On the whole, the annotations are useful, but some are vague, misleading, or inconsistent. Enrique de Gandía’s Buenos Aires colonial is hardly “a colonial history of Buenos Aires” (p. 73), but rather a narrative about the city during the late colonial period based on the letters of the merchant Gaspar de Santa Coloma. While I applaud the inclusion of the 1892 census of government employees (p. 18), I wonder why the urban and rural censuses reproduced in Documentos para la historia argentina are not mentioned in its annotation (p. 64). Lastly, the project, by choosing to index only monographs, ignores journal articles and doctoral dissertations which also contain important biographical information. It nonetheless makes this body of research more accessible to scholar and student alike.
