Margaret E. Crahan

Esclavos, patriotas y poetas a la sombra de la cruz: Cinco ensayos sobre catolicismo e historia cubana (review)

on its own. Significantly, the present edition preserves the ancillary information appended in the 1959 version assembled by Fernando Ortiz, including his notes as well as elaborations contributed by Francisco Arango y Parreno and John Thrasher during the nineteenth century. Also included in the text is Humboldt’s account of his visit to Güines, Batabano, and Trinidad. His analysis of his map of the Cuba appears in the index. This volume has been luxuriously produced, abounding with colored plates featuring Humboldt and other luminaries, contemporary maps, plant illustrations, and lithographs depicting scenes from Cuba. The quality of the paper and its binding are first rate. The editors and publishers are to be congratulated on this magnificent work. No library on the eighteenth-century empire will be complete without it.

Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (review)

In the late 1970s, there were approximately 340 detention centers in Argentina. The prisoners were mostly under 35 years of age and came primarily from working and middle-class families. Given the age of the detainees, many were parents of small children, some of whom were detained with them, while others gave birth while imprisoned. A good number of these children were given to members or sympathizers of the military who had taken power via a coup in March of 1976. It was the conscious policy of the dictatorship to separate these children from their biological families, given that the latter were considered responsible for already having produced children who were subversives. It was regarded as necessary to turn the children over to decent, patriotic families for their own good and that of the nation.