Guide to Further Readings:
Our listings are arranged by the chapter sequence in the text, which necessarily leads to overlap in coverage. Titles have been chosen to provide interesting, accessible, and profitable reading for novice students of modern Latin America. Only books in English are included, with an emphasis on recently published titles. Readers seeking more detail will find further leads in the suggested books.
Scholarly journals offer outstanding and up-to-date articles about the history, politics, and culture of Latin America. The Hispanic American Historical Review publishes studies on both the colonial and national periods. Noteworthy interdisciplinary journals include the Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, Latin American Perspectives, and Latin American Research Review. Several publications have a country-specific focus: Cuban Studies, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Mexican Studies. The journal of Latin American Politics and Society concentrates on the social sciences, whereas NACLA: Report on the Americas offers analyses of contemporary issues. In addition, Current History devotes one issue per year to coverage of Latin American topics.
Several nongovernmental organizations produce regular on-line commentaries and syntheses of economic, political, and social issues facing Latin America. Among them are the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA). A more extensive list of helpful websites can be found at the end of this section.
Chapter 1: Why Latin America?
A good introduction to the world of Latin American thought is Ilan Stavans, ed., The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). A multidisciplinary reference work is Simon Collier, Thomas E. Skidmore, and Harold Blakemore, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean, rev. ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The premier overall history is Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vols. I–XI (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984–95). An invaluable guide, which includes much bibliography, is Barbara A. Tenenbaum, ed., Encyclopedia of Latin America History and Culture, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996).