by Jorge Castañeda and Patricio Navia

07.02.2008

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 416 pp., $16.00. Translated with an introduction by John M. Cohen.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Feast of the Goat: A Novel (New York: Picador USA, 2002), 416 pp., $15.00. Translated by Edith Grossman, originally published by Alfaguara under the title Fiesta del Chivo.

Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 400 pp., $30.00.

Jaime Suchlicki, Cuba: From Columbus to Castro and Beyond (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2002), 278 pp., $24.95.

Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay: A Novel (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 272 pp., $13.95.

City of God, 130 min., Miramax, 2002.

IT WOULD normally be far-fetched to combine into a book essay works as different as a novel about the improbable love between an Irish woman and a future Paraguayan dictator written by a Paris-born New Yorker, a novel—written by a Peruvian who resides in Spain—about a woman who works and lives in the United States in the 1990s but visits her ailing father in the Dominican Republic and remembers the dark years of the Trujillo dictatorship, a detailed and highly analytical account of recent economic and political developments in Latin America written by the editor of the Americas section of the Economist, and an electrifying film about street children who go through a real-life “survivor” experience in Rio de Janeiro. If you throw in a classic narrative by a sixteenth-century conquistador-turned-historian and advocate of indigenous rights in the Americas, and a detailed account of the history of Cuba—from Columbus to Castro, and beyond—relating all those works should seem a formidable task. But these are the top picks of America’s Southern Command, the Department of Defense’s arm in the region. They tell a story of a Latin America mired in income and social inequality, facing challenges of historical proportions, dictatorial leaders and international influence. At times these themes are at the very heart of the works, at others they lurk in the background, but all provide a glimpse into a region on the brink of monumental change.

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