Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture. By Arnold J. Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xx, 245. $50.00, cloth; $18.00, paper

This delightful, highly readable book—entirely suitable for undergraduate teaching and for interested nonprofessionals (my mother loved it)—presents almost nothing new in the way of research, and indeed relatively few “facts” with which historians of Latin America are not already familiar; but it pulls together bits and pieces from various secondary works and travel accounts in such a fresh and exciting way that a book-length treatment is amply justified. Bauer takes very seriously, and uses systematically, material that most of us are likely to insert almost haphazardly into our lectures in order to spice up the presentation of dry statistics and abstract models of change: how people ate (not just their basic foods but also their cooking methods and equipment, and some pretty funky dietary practices), the ways they built and decorated their homes, the clothes and others items of self-ornamentation they chose or were allowed to wear—in short, the things they acquired. Using changes over time in patterns of consumption of these ordinary goods, he retells the story of Latin America (with a strong emphasis on Mexico, Peru, and Chile) from before the conquest to the present day. He divides the story into six chapters, covering pre-Columbian goods, “contact” goods (i.e., the immediate postconquest period), “civilizing” goods (the remainder of the colonial period, some 250 years), “modernizing” goods (the long nineteenth century, up to about 1920), “developing goods” (from the 1920s to the 1970s), and, finally, “global” goods (the 1980s to the present).