Sam Terry’s Reviews > The Penguin History of Latin America > Status Update

Skipped over a 60-page arts and culture section because I find them the least interesting and I’m eager to read something else. Call it cheating I don’t care.

The second half of this has been much more difficult for me to follow. I don’t have much of a background in economics, so I do find it a little hard to make sense of the all the desperate economic approaches of different leaders and their impacts. I will need to come back and distill things into a more easily digestible format.

Argentina 1912-1955. I think it’s useful to organize the last third of this book by country and just examine how each state developed in the 20th century, but it’s also been hard to keep track of the many developments in each country’s political economy. I probably just need to get through it all and then take a more brief pass to identify the most critical actors and most broadly applicable historical themes.

Can’t accuse Edwin Williamson of a left wing bias but I really appreciate his thorough and thoughtful coverage of the Cuban revolution

Haven’t been able to make much progress the last few weeks. Collapse of the liberal order and rise of nationalism, ISI and industrialization, consequence political and economic crises. Economics is not my strength and I’m a little hungover so I will have to give this section another pass.

Getting into the 20th century now. I am more familiar with this period of Latin American history than with the 1800s, but already I have found this text incredibly illuminating. I can’t wait to learn more about the patterns of domestic social transformation and foreign interference that belay the collapse of the liberal order