Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America

Since Alma Guillermoprieto became The New Yorker's Latin American correspondent a decade ago, she has emerged as the most informed and admired writer on her part of the world. In these superb pieces of reportage and analysis she anatomizes a region we are intimately linked with yet sadly ignorant of.

She writes in depth about three countries that are in deep difficulty: Cuba, to which she returned after many years—a place in an exhausting holding pattern, waiting for Castro's departure yet anxious about what may replace him. Colombia, in which she has spent several years and which is fatally splintered among the government, the left-wing guerrillas who control large sections of the country, thanks in part to money from the drug trade, and the right-wing paramilitaries. Mexico, where she lives, which is beset by the uprising in Chiapas (where she encounters the legendary masked leader, Marcos) and by the corruption of the government, yet emerging for the first time into some kind of real democracy.

Finally, she gives us the stories of Eva Perón—and so of Argentina; Che Guevara—and so of the aborted Marxist revolution in Latin America; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian novelist who in 1990 lost the battle for the presidency to Alberto Fujimori.

Looking for History is personal reportage that is infused with the author's unique understanding of a world that she is a part of, but that she can also stand apart from and sympathetically observe.