Recent Books
190 foreign affairs
and practice, of British governing
institutions; in contrast, Patterson blasts
Jamaica’s post-independence elites for
their divisive politics, corruption, incom-
petence in business, and wasteful luxury
consumption. Patterson is an institu-
tionalist interested in how to create
effective bureaucracies and leadership, a
focus evident in how he appraises
Jamaica’s excellence in track and field, for
example. The sporting tradition that
brought the world the sprinter Usain Bolt
stems not from genetic factors but
from good public health, strong athletic
programs, and revered role models.
Patterson locates the roots of the island’s
high crime rates in the historical brutality
of slavery, the country’s poverty, and
gangland battles for political patronage.
The book concludes on a hopeful note,
sketching a rising generation of more
capable democratic politicians and
business executives.Religion and Brazilian Democracy:
Mobilizing the People of God
BY AMY ERICA SMITH. Cambridge
University Press, 2019, 222 pp.Jair Bolsonaro won the 2018 Brazilian
presidential election with the decisive
support of evangelical Christian voters.
In the last 30 years, the number of
evangelicals in Brazil has more than
doubled, largely at the expense of
Catholics. As in the United States, in
Brazil, the entrance of evangelical
clergy into electoral politics has bol-
stered right-wing political movements.
In her timely, data-rich study, Smith
attributes the reactionary backlash in
Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America
to the emergence of issues that trigger
fear among evangelicals: gay andIndia will help generate further growth
in the region by increasing demand for
resource-based commodities. Toro
Hardy urges Latin America to coopera-
tively pool its resources, assisting
“high-tech artisans” in reindustrializing
the region on its own terms.
Ernst and Haar have put together a
solid, accessible primer that usefully
summarizes both the social science and
the business literatures across the
related themes outlined in the book’s
title. Some prominent ones, such as the
rule of law, corruption, and global
supply chain strategies have ready
application to Latin America. In their
conclusion, the authors remark that in
Latin America, global disruptions are
generating both right-wing and left-
wing forms of populism but are also
reducing poverty and generating greater
citizen involvement in civic life. The
authors add that the most sweeping
impacts of the disruptions in the region
have been in business: Latin America is
the world’s fastest-growing area for
businesses such as Airbnb, Coursera,
Netflix, and Uber.
The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the
Postcolonial Predicament
BY ORLANDO PATTERSON. Belknap
Press, 2019, 432 pp.
Patterson explores the paradoxes of his
native Jamaica in a series of stimulating
essays. A historical sociologist, he
burnishes his command of the scholarly
literature on Jamaica by drawing from
his experiences on the island as a young
man and, later on, as a policy adviser.
Patterson attributes neighboring
Barbados’s superior economic perfor-
mance to its faithful adaptation, in form