Customer Reviews

Buenos Aires: A Cultural History (Cultural Histories Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is not a "travel book" in the usual sense -- you will not, for instance, find anything about where to stay or eat. Rather, this is an historical, cultural, and literary guide to Buenos Aires that will make your time there more interesting and worthwhile.

Progressing geographically through the city's most important streets, plazas, and neighborhoods, Wilson uses the observations of writers, artists, foreign visitors, politicians, academics, and others to give the reader a "feel" for both the city and its inhabitants. These observations are supplemented with just enough historical framework to provide context. Buenos Aires is a city filled with buildings, streets, and monuments that stir up a great deal of emotion in its inhabitants; what this book does is help to explain why these locations are so important and how they fit together -- geographically, historically, psychologically -- to make up the city.

This book was along with me during my recent trip to Buenos Aires and undoubtedly made my time there more satisfying. Its only real deficiency is a lack of good maps -- there is one, but it is very general and doesn't cover enough territory. Nonetheless, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone traveling to Buenos Aires.

I think some of the other reviewers did not think this book was a good tour of this marvelous city. I disagree. It greatly widened my understanding of the cultural underpinnings of the city. For example, before going for a walking tour of Belgrano, we read the part on it to my fellow travelers the chapters concerning that part of town. Instead of just seeing some great architecture and a dynamic neighborhood, we had some idea of what we were seeing. It improved my understanding of the place, Buenos Aires itself and Argentina in general immeasurably.

This book will not tell you about where to shop, find hotels, or restaurants. It may not be the first place to for a norteamericano to begin investigating this important and beautiful city and country. It is an excellent place to begin investigating its literary and historical environment. It is a good book to carry on the airplane ride.

Jason Wilson is an editor of travel writing collections of some note, and I have much enjoyed other books in the Cities of the Imagination series (most notably Elizabeth Nash's Madrid volume), so I looked forward to the arrival of this book from Amazon with much anticipation.

I was, for the most part, greatly disappointed.

The book was intensively researched, and you can count on several apt quotations per page. Hardly a signicant writer about Buenos Aires in the last three centures goes uncited, and it seems as if every block on the city grid gets its moment.

The flaw - and it is a near fatal flaw - lies in the organization. Wilson organizes the book rigidly according to geography, going more or less block by block around the city, and detailing who lived in this building or what writer set a scene in that block of apartments.

Whereas Nash weaves the history and neighborhoods of Madrid into broad thematic stories, Wilson tells no stories. He bludgeons you with facts and literary quotations, tied together only by geography. It is a hard and boring slog, and even if you push through, you emerge with no unifying concepts that might help you understand this vast and magical city.

It's a shame, really, that the book is so dull and mechanically structured, because the research that went into it clearly was extensive, and because Buenos Aires seems to offer more potential than most cities for a proper Cities of the Imagination treatment. It reads, unfortunately, as if time ran out for the actual writing of the book, and the writer delivered a data dump organized by zip code.

If you drive a tour bus around Buenos Aires for English speaking tourists, this book will prove a handy reference, barrio by barrio, street by street. If you are researching your own book on Buenos Aires, the bibliography alone will save you months in identifying the books you should read. If, however, you are planning a visit to Buenos Aires and want one cultural guide that will help you understand the living, breathing city, this is not the book to choose.

Because the book is organized around the cafes, theaters, and other cultural landmarks of particular streets, the book was an enormous help in understanding the city. By reading it beforehand, it allowed us to prepare our daily itinerary from a cultural-historical perspective. Forget the naysayers, here is no better book in understanding and appreciating the city of Buenos Aires as Jason Wilson's book. I've given it to all my friends.

Unlike books that tell you the statistics of a city and analyze what it all means, this book surveys literary explanations. I think the book lives up to its title. It is a cultural survey, with a unique way of ordering the history.

Going neighborhood by neighborhood, historical literary references are listed. The key to enjoying this book is to read each neighborhood separately and think of the book as an anthology. Don't look for chronological order cover to cover. It goes by neighborhood and starts all over when the next one is covered.

Wilson makes it clear that this is a fantastic city by cultural measure. There is none like it anywhere.

I am in love with Buenos Aires, I go there quite often, and I have several tourist guide books. None of them gave me the information I wanted. I already know where to stay or dine, but I wanted to know more then just the few lines other touristbooks write about certain places. There is a lot of history in Buenos Aires, which you can feel, but it is impossible to get to know the details. With this book the buildings, and the city come to life.
Jason Wilson gives the historic information together with comment given by writers or other famous people. I constantly had my pen with me, noting the authors and books quoted. Thanks to him, I will be reading a lot more about my loved city! I used to look up at the old beautiful buildings, wondering who build them, who lived there. Now I know!

In case you are not really into history, nor into literature, you should not read this book. Then you will find it boring. For those interesting in history : buy this book and you will love it!! I would recommend this as a 2nd guide book, next to the one with the places to stay and the restaurants etc. Maybe this goes to deep to start with.

I hope you enjoy this book -and Buenos Aires!!

I spent a week in Buenos Aires and brought this book with me with the hope that it would introduce me to the uniqueness of this contradictory and culturally rich city - it did not. I have not read a more disjointed, dysfunctional guide than this one.

Jason Wilson uses the word 'Babylonic' to describe Buenos Aires, and in a Freudian way, that very word describes how this book reads. Wilson uses the words of other writers to express (evidently he cannot) the soul of this city. All the multitude of quotes muddles your mind and the book ends up sounding like babble.

Quote after quote assails you from writers you will be sorely pressed to recognize. This book could, maybe, work best in an Argentinian Literature course where the readers would have a pejorative understanding of the writers quoted. BUT, it is not, in any way, suitable for the average, or even above average, traveler in Buenos Aires. If you want an understanding of Argentina's Culture, then you should consider 'Culture Shock! Argentina' (however it too could be seriously improved, see my review). Not Recommended

Before I go live in a city, as I will Buenos Aires in 2012, I read a lot of books about it-- in the past, I've done this with Cape Town, Melbourne, Tokyo. This is one of the best. Every page is good, and I made myself slow down the pace of reading just to enjoy it longer. Bravo.

Since I lambasted another book about Argentina I thought I should take a moment to write something about a book I continue to enjoy. I'm never impressed by guides and this book isn't that kind of book. It's a great book though if you want to get a better context for neighborhoods you'll be in. I read all the parts of this book pertaining to the neighborhoods I thought I would be spending time in as well as some of the general history before coming to Buenos Aires. I thought it greatly improved my appreciation for each neighborhood. Yes, it does this from a historical and literary point of view (as well as a little history behind various statues), and if that's not your thing you might hate this book. I loved it. After reading about the barrio Boedo for example, I felt I had a decent sense of what the neighborhood was like and how it's past made it what it is. So far, my experience supports the image of Boedo depicted in the book. You'll be lucky to get even a paragraph in a tour guide, not that there was a great amount in this book either (as Boedo isn't a big destination spot), but there was enough to get the flavor of the place.

I live in Buenos Aires now and I still go back to it to look a couple things up. Right now una porteña is browsing through it and she thinks it's great. I think it has a lot to offer, even if you already know about Buenos Aires.

I brought this book down to Bs As with me for a 2 wk visit. I planned to read it completely but, due to the writing style and contents, I ended up only reading hear-and-there as I visited neighborhoods.

While helpful at times when walking through the city, the constant quoting of literature with which I was not familiar left the writing feeling fragmented and difficult to move through. It seemed as though the author avoided doing any processing of the sources by just assembling a long string of direct quotes with little context on the literary work, its author or historical background provided. If you were a literature major you might have gotten more out of this but I'm fairly well read and I recognized few to none of the references in any given passage. After reading about the neighborhood I was walking through I felt only marginally more educated on the cultural context of what I was seeing. You can probably find something more useful elsewhere.