Books: Colossus of the South

INSIDE LATIN AMERICA—John Gunfher —Harper ($3.50).

There are plenty of good books on Latin America* in the bookstores, but this is the one that everybody is going to read. Last week its advance sales (including Book-of-the-Month Club orders) reached 225,000 copies.

There are two good reasons why: 1) John Gunther has enormous prestige as a news coverer of continents (Inside Europe; Inside Asia); 2) his amassing of colorful detail is as easy to take as gossip.

The worst and best that can be said of Inside Latin America is that it is typical...