Martín Abel González, The Genesis of the Falklands (Malvinas) Conflict (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. xvii + 258, £60.00, hb.
the sense that this is a book from another era of scholarship. They rely too exclusively on older literature and largely ignore recent work: other than articles and working papers on narrow economic questions, the footnotes and bibliography cite hardly any titles published in the last  years. It may have been a choice not to reference works of the new social history that do not fit the analytical framework, but the authors also miss innovative scholarship that has moved the socio-political narrative of twentieth-century Brazil beyond the schematic portrayals of Cold War area studies. Recent work that questions the easy dichotomy of democracy and authoritarian rule by taking the legal foundations of the Brazilian state seriously would have greatly enriched the analysis. Consequently, Luna and Klein’s narrative is vibrant only when it comes to economic questions but rather stale in its social and political analysis. The economic mindset also shines through in interpretive missteps. In the section on the ‘military interregnum’, a very peculiar choice of terms, the text describes the government of the ‘hard-line group’ under President Médici (–) as a ‘relative success’ (p. ). This is puzzling in light of the preceding paragraph, which characterises Médici’s regime as ‘the most closed and repressive military regime in Brazilian history’ and highlights an ‘increasing concentration of income’. Only in a world where macroeconomic indicators were the only relevant measure of effective government would the use of the term ‘success’ make sense. The teacher of Brazilian history looking for a survey to assign to undergraduates will lament the book’s lack of structure. The four main chapters, between  and  pages in length, have no subheadings to help the reader navigate the content. The chapters’ internal logic does not become easily apparent, a problem aggravated by a lack of integration of economic analysis and political narrative. For example in Chapter , on ‘Formative Democracies and the Military Interregnum’, the section on the military regime opens (on p. ) with a seven-page political survey before abruptly jumping back to a parallel, but much longer narrative on the economy and economic policy. Inevitably, politics re-enters the analysis of economic policy, which makes for unnecessary repetition. Moreover, for a survey text, there is too much reporting of data and too little help with its interpretation. How is a reader not already familiar with the intricacies of Brazil’s economic history to assess the significance of this wealth of figures? In the end, Luna and Klein have produced more of a reference work than a fluid narrative survey. The wealth of quantitative information on Brazil’s twentieth century is most useful to the specialist, but the reader should not expect to find that long-awaited English-language synthesis.