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JOHN KING, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 356 pages.
The Cambridge Companion is one of a number of recent anthologies in English dedicated to Latin American culture, including Swanson's The Companion to Latin American Studies, Hart and Young's Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, and Del Sarto, Ríos, and Trigo's The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader. Given the broad scope of the subject, King's Companion provides a much welcomed and needed source with chapters that introduce essential information about the history, literature, popular culture, art and architecture, music, theater, and cinema of the region. The text also includes a useful tenpage chronology of major events in Latin America from 1488 to 2000, two maps that allow one to compare the Latin American states of 1830 with those of 2000, and helpful lists of further readings at the conclusion of each chapter (some more thoughtfully developed than others).
All of the thirteen essays in this volume are intelligent, comprehensive, and informative. The distinguished experts delight the reader not only with their vast knowledge, but also with their ability to condense general themes into cohesive units that are...