A Modern Latin American Hero

Frankly, I dreaded picking up this book. A weighty post-mortem on a Latin American economist who achieved iconic status in international relations by developing several “theories of development” did not much appeal. I am a slow, and thus necessarily a selective, reader.

It is a tribute to the author, Canadian scholar of Latin America Edgar J. Dosman, that not only is he the first anywhere to produce an in-depth biography of Raúl Prebisch, but also that he has managed, through it, to tell many different stories: of the charmed early years of Argentina and then its vertiginous decline as of the mid 20th century; of the development of autonomous economic thinking in Argentina in the 1920s; of the complex and often antagonistic relationship between Washington and Latin American capitals throughout the 20th century; of the emergence mid-century of international economic institutions; and of some heady years when it seemed briefly that the United Nations might make a...