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The Latin Americanist, June 2008 Church and the military apparatus, the large landed estates, and forced indigenous and African slave labor. The search for a national and cultural (mestizo) identity coinciding with the “Second Conquest” of the sparsely inhabited interior regions in Latin America are key topics in the nineteenth century throughout the region. The twentieth century finds Latin American nations attempting to stabilize their political and economic institutions in the midst of confronting the hegemonic reach of the Untied States. Since the 1980s, a return to democracy across the region has been accompanied by the “Third Conquest” of globalization. The author leaves open for interpretation if increasing hemispheric economic integration in the twenty-first century will lead to a common future for the Americas. A more general division, that may be helpful in university courses that cover narrower Latin American historical periods, would be to use the first half of the book in a colonial Latin American survey class (sections 1 and 2), and the second half of the book for a post-colonial Latin American survey course (sections 3 and 4). Although the author may argue that all sections of the book build upon each other and are necessary in the resulting Latin American story he tells, professors in academic departments that divide Latin American Studies courses into colonial and post-colonial studies may be tempted to utilize the half of the book that corresponds to the more limited time scale of these courses. This is not to diminish the value of this work as a whole, but rather to say that this manuscript is suitable as a teachable text in a one-term Latin American history course, or to use in a colonial or post-colonial Latin American course. This book is well-written and jargon-free, with accessible prose for the novice student of Latin America. The text weaves together simplicity of explanation with complexity of information. Having used several different general survey texts in my introductory Latin American Studies course, I can truly say that this is my favorite. I plan on switching to the use of this book in the next version of my general survey course in Latin American Studies. Eric Minzenberg Latin American Studies Miami University WRITING FROM THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: THE MEMOIRS OF DARIÉN, 1514-1527. By Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Trans. by G. F. Dille. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006, p. 240, $22.50. G. F. Dille’s translation of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s memoirs of his formative early years in the ‘New World,’ drawn from his multivolume Historia general y natural de las Indias, is long overdue. Despite Oviedo’s standing as one of the most important early commentators on 90 Book Reviews ‘the Indies,’ the complete version of his Historia general y natural was not published in Spain until the middle of the nineteenth century, when José Amador de los Rı́os edited it for the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. English translations have been equally slow in coming, and have tended to focus on Oviedo’s commentaries on key moments in the colonial history of the Americas, such as early explorations of the Amazon River. Dille translates Part II, Book XXIX, chapters VI to XXIV, a key but lesser known section of the Historia general y natural in which Oviedo writes about a thirteen-year-period spent in and around Darién (in present-day Panamá). Darién was one of the early colonial settlements on mainland America, the strategic position of which made it, as Dille explains, an important “staging post for claiming, exploring, and exploiting the entire Pacific coast of the Americas” (xiii). Although Oviedo’s memoirs of this period end with the failure and subsequent abandonment of the city of Darién (which Oviedo largely attributes to the bad governorship of his political enemy, Pedrarias), references to the newly ‘discovered’ Peru and to Spanish incursions in the northern territories of Chief Nicaragua paint a picture of a colonial enterprise that is far from over. Although this section on Darién represents a relatively small portion of Oviedo’s magnum opus, it not only covers a crucial...

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