FDR's Good Neighbor Policy : sixty years of generally gentle chaos /

Written by a senior distinguished scholar, this broadly based, wide-ranging study goes well beyond its apparent chronological limits. Pike brings to this work what he has learned over a long and fruitful career; one might have minor quibbles with some of the factual data, but the whole remains nevertheless compelling although idiosyncratic. A very substantial introductory and background section leads to the period 1933-1945, examined in excruciating detail. Pike's exposition includes all the major players--FDR, Hull, Welles, Rockefeller--as well as minor participants and numerous other Roosevelt advisers. Pike also includes material on domestic policy and social and cultural considerations. He deals briefly with Cold War issues and brings the story to the present in his discussion of politics and economics, as well as culture and aesthetics. The book will leave readers neither satisfied nor content, but the more carefully it is read, the more thought-provoking it will prove to be. Graduate; faculty. B. B. Solnick; SUNY at Albany

A senior scholar of hemispheric relations signing off, Pike has some fun in this, his last book. While examining the origins and consequences of 1930s U.S. Latin America policy, he grants himself an autobiographical preface and the freedom to cite Peggy Lee, Clint Eastwood, Debussy, and other unlikely sources. Like Pike's previous book, The United States and Latin America (Univ. of Texas Pr., 1992), this one takes a relaxed, thematic look at social, economic, and cultural forces at work in the United States and its neighbors. Pike clearly admires FDR, in whom he sees a trickster's ability to fuse opposites‘as in his imperfect foreign policy that even so contributed to an enduring "gentleness of chaos in the New World," in contrast to cataclysms abroad. Readers seeking detailed analysis will be better off with Irwin Gellman's Good Neighbor Diplomacy (Johns Hopkins, 1979), still, this unique view is recommended for academic and larger public libraries.‘Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved