标题: 2022.06.28 了解美洲的七本书 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-6 23:06 标题: 2022.06.28 了解美洲的七本书 Economist Reads | Latin America
Our Bello columnist on the essential books for understanding Latin America
The seven books for getting to grips with the Americas
Cuba, Havana, Folkloric Show In The Street. (Photo by Giovanni Mereghetti/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Jun 28th 2022
Share
Give
This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
Latin america is hugely diverse but there are also common themes. One is that some of the best writing about it is by novelists and journalists. Another is that the region is immersed in one of its periodic bouts of re-assessing its history. A third is that politics has sometimes been marked by violence. Many of the best books about the region are, naturally enough, written in Spanish or Portuguese. Here is a small selection of books in English that reflect those trends while paying homage to the region’s diversity. What they have in common is that they are all good reads.
Conquistadores. By Fernando Cervantes. Viking; 512 pages; $35. Penguin, £12.99
A balanced retelling, published in 2020, of the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru, which draws heavily on the letters and diaries of the protagonists. Fernando Cervantes, a Spanish historian at Bristol University, does not shrink from chronicling the brutality of the invaders but seeks to judge them according to their own times rather than 21st century notions of human rights. The assumptions and behaviour of Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro and the rest were nurtured by a late medieval religious culture, not purely by the lure of gold and still less by modern notions of statehood, he argues.
More Summer reads
• How Super Mario became a global cultural icon
• What if the Ottoman Empire had not collapsed?
• Hayek, Popper and Schumpeter formulated a response to tyranny
• Our Free Exchange columnist considers just how Dickensian China is
• Six guides to biology as seen at different scales
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend. Oxford University Press; 336 pages; $21.95 and £14.99
The people vanquished by Cortés whom we often call Aztecs but who called themselves Mexica quickly adapted to their new world, learning to write in the Roman alphabet. They used that skill to write their own history, drawing on a prior oral tradition. Camilla Townsend, a historian at Rutgers University, has mined these “annals” to offer a fresh account of the Mexica in their own words. It covers their arrival in Mexico’s central valley from what is now the south-western United States, their experience of the Spanish conquest and their subsequent adaption and survival. Published in 2019, the book shows they were less obsessed with human sacrifice than the Spanish chroniclers claimed.
Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America by Enrique Krauze. Translated by Hank Hefetz and Natasha Wimmer. HarperCollins; 560 pages; $19.99
A flowing history of the dominant trends in political thinking in the region told through the lives of a dozen Latin American intellectuals, writers or political leaders, mainly of the 20th century. They range from José Martí to Eva Perón and Mario Vargas Llosa to Hugo Chávez, with the longest chapter being reserved for Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet who became a political liberal and was the author’s mentor. Published in 2011.
Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution by Alma Guillermoprieto. Knopf; 304 pages; $15.95
A personal account of the six months the author spent as a teacher of modern dance in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1970, at a juncture when the revolution was past its heroic dawn and well on the way to becoming a culturally conformist Stalinist dictatorship. The experience “thoroughly unravelled” Ms Guillermoprieto’s life. She arrived as an aspiring artist and left as the future writer who would go on to become perhaps the best journalistic chronicler of contemporary Latin America. We published our review of the book in 2004.
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez. Translated by Edith Grossman. Vintage; 304 pages; $17. Penguin; £8.99
An unsurpassed journalistic account by Colombia’s most famous novelist of the horror inflicted by Pablo Escobar, the murderous drug trafficker from Medellín in the late 1980s and early 1990s. First published in Spanish in 1996, the events in the book involve the kidnapping of Diana Turbay, a journalist and daughter of a former president. It traces the agonising choices officials had to make, torn as they were between the national interest and personal ties. As was so often the case where Escobar was involved, the story doesn’t end well. We published an obituary of Gabriel García Márquez in 2014.
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. Picador; 416 pages; $20. Faber & Faber; £8.99
Peru’s Nobel-prize-winning novelist is at his psychologically probing best in this fictionalised account of the moral corruption and political repression of the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the self-styled Generalissimo who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. First published in 2000. We spoke to Mario Vargas Llosa about liberalism, dictatorship and more, in 2018.
Beef, Bible and Bullets: Brazil in the Age of Bolsonaro. By Richard Lapper. Manchester University Press; 272 pages; $29.95 and £11.99
A readable account of how Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidency through a culture war which melded an ad-hoc coalition of farmers, evangelical protestants and the security forces. It takes in, too, the damage he has done to the country and its democracy. By a former Latin American editor of the Financial Times.
Our Bello columnist wrote a special report on Latin America in June 2022. He is also the author of two books of his own:
Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America. By Michael Reid. Yale University Press; 440 pages; $18 and £14.99 (2017)
An account of the region’s long struggle for democracy and development up to the present day.
Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power. By Michael Reid. Yale University Press; 352 pages; $16 and $12.99 (2015)
A guide to history, politics, economic development and society in Latin America’s largest country.■
经济学人读物｜拉丁美洲
我们的贝洛专栏作家介绍了解拉美的必备书籍
了解美洲的七本书
古巴，哈瓦那，街上的民俗表演。(Photo by Giovanni Mereghetti/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
2022年6月28日
