A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously presents Mark Falcoff's essays on the region. Many of them are contentious; none of them are dull. He ranges from bilingualism to the cult of Garcia Lorca, from U.S.-Cuban relations to Chile's curious love affair with Germany. On more than one occasion, Falcoff takes aim at American journalism and scholarship, both of which, he argues, have all too often produced a fantasy version of Latin America which reflects our own national narcissism rather than genuine curiosity about the other. Latin America, Falcoff argues, is not merely a geographical extension of the United States, or a kind of downmarket version of the American Southwest. It is a culture all its own, with its own historical memory, sensibility, and worldview. Its achievements -and its miseries-are also its own, not the end-product of policies made by the Pentagon, Wall Street, or the CIA. Falcoff writes about the region with originality, iconoclastic wit, and distinctive literary flair. His volume will interest Latin American specialists, diplomats, and journalists as well as those general readers who think they are not interested in Latin America-or who only suspect they might be, but don't know quite where to start.
Few dispute that a major turning point in the history of present-day Chile commenced with the election in 1970 of a Marxist physician, Salvador Allende. What followed were three years that shook South America, if not the world. Land reform, factory expropriation, the politicization of a sector of the armed forces, curriculum reform in education, each in their turn led to a hardening of political fault lines, and created the basis for the overthrow of the Allende regime. This work, by one of the foremost analysts of modern Chile, features an interview with an earlier president of that beleaguered country, Eduardo Frei. In what is likely to be viewed as the most authoritative statement to date on U.S.Chile relationships during this stormy period, Falcoff debunks the myth of a CIA-inspired overthrow of the democratic forces, placing responsibility on Allende's failure to obtain or even seek a decisive electoral mandate, on a governing coalition internally inconsistent and frequently at war with its constituent elements, on an economic policy that polarized supporters and enemies, and ultimately on the need to turn to the military for the stability that its policy failures could not achieve. The final chapter, on the assumption to power and political changes rendered by the present ruler, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, indicates that the problems of Chile are not attributable to any single ruler or party. Falcoff indicates that core problems in Chile, from capital formation to the search for diversification, were exemplified in cultural, moral, and spiritual values between the Frei and Allende epochs. The prolonged Pinochet regime, for Falcoff, has postponed settlement of the major issues raised by the democratic era: equality and growth, legality and legitimacy. The costs of democratic order remain for Chileans to confront and resolve.
The year is 1971 and America's long romance with higher education is coming to an end, provoked by worsening economic conditions and growing campus unrest. Unfortunately for Geoffrey Yawlings, 27 years of age and a recent Ph.D. in history from Harvard, the only job he can find is a shaky two year contract at a mediocre state university in the Pacific Northwest--geographically isolated, deeply provincial--in a state where it rains nine months a year but which insists upon calling itself "the Utopia where all Americans dream of living." Geoffrey's new colleagues resemble nothing so much as recently demobilized officers of a defeated army and his students are stoned on pot most of the time. Worse still, the only way the university can be rescued financially is if the state legislature decides to approve a lottery. Then and only then will Geoffrey have a chance to waste his life in the academic backlands. But even this may not happen, particularly if a certain radical sociology professor manages to "sharpen the contradictions..". A Season in Utopia is a hilarious send-up of academic life in America--its characteristic human types, its rituals, frustrations, self-delusions, and harsh realities. Anyone who thinks his or her life would have been happier as a college professor needs to read this witty, entertaining book.
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