I woke up this morning to learn that my book, Latin America Confronts the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015) was included in a new Latin American Research Review essay by Dexter Boniface. It’s a great essay, which offers a helpful assessment of the field and discusses several interesting recent books: “Controlling Their Own Destiny: Latin American Agency in the Context of US Hegemony.”
The essay looks at how recent work has adopted an “explicit focus on the agency of various political and social actors in Latin America…expanding the scope of inquiry beyond the confines of US foreign policy.” Boniface follows that discussion particularly through Cold War and post-Cold War periods. He also suggests ways to move this agenda forward substantively and to assess Latin America’s international relations today.
Professor Boniface also had some exceptionally kind things to say about my book, and he goes into great depth discussing the book’s case studies. About my book, Boniface kindly writes: “Tom Long’s book does stand out for its analytical rigor and should pave the way for more theoretically motivated scholarship on US–Latin American relations.” … “A more detailed, analytical, and cheerful study of Latin American diplomatic initiatives in the Cold War (and beyond) is found in Tom Long’s masterful Latin America Confronts the United States.” … “The book is one of the more sophisticated recent contributions to the literature on US–Latin American relations.” In short, it was a very nice way to start another day of being stuck at home!
In the unlikely event you chance upon this, you can find links to more reviews above. More info about the book here: doi.org/10.1017/CBO978 Or if you feel so inspired, the book is available from Amazon.
Tom Long, PhD 