Key Points
This standard account by one of the leading historians of Argentina is particularly good on the formation of the modern nation-state, the settlement of the pampas, the divide between sophisticated Buenos Aires and the more backward interior and on the rise and apogee of Pern, who first became Argentinas president in 1946..
Andrew Graham-Yooll was the news editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language daily that was one of the few newspapers to try to report the truth during Argentinas nightmarish descent into internecine war between left- and right-wing Peronists in the 1970s and into military dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983..
Toms Eloy Martnez, a journalist and novelist, who (like Graham-Yooll) left Argentina to escape death threats from members of the security forces in the 1970s, blends fact with fiction in recounting the adventures of the corpse, which today rests in Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires..
Argentinas financial and economic collapse in 2001 hastened the transformation of a society that had considered itself to be European into a fully Latin American one, with a large informal economy, widespread poverty and political clientelism (the exchange of votes for benefits)..
In El Nudo" (The Knot", which is not yet available in English), Carlos Pagni, one of Argentinas leading journalists, tells the story of the conurbano through a mixture of history, sociology and reportage..
