Click here for an index of Book Summary . This volume brings together essays on Latin American politics, economics, and culture written over the past fifteen years by Mark Falcoff, a resident scholar at AEI and the author of its monthly Latin American Outlook . This summary is abridged from the introduction to A Culture of Its Own .
Foreign areas have a way of finding and recruiting their own specialists.
In my own case, it all began with the study of Spanish at the age of fourteen. Very soon after discovering, to my horror, that I would have to master two different versions of the verb to be , I stumbled upon the more agreeable fact that to learn a new language is to enter an entirely different cultural universe. That universe has its own historical memory, its own sensibility, and its own peculiar weaknesses. It exults in some of the same victories and mourns many of the same defeats. It practices particular virtues and vices and has its own notion of the good life.