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Frank, one of the best contemporary Marxist economists, specializes in analysis of imperialist extraction of colonial nations' economic surplus. Considering Frank's abilities however, these nine essays which emphasize the mediating role of Latin American capitalists in this siphoning process are rather disappointing. The first few, on colonial and agrarian structures, largely concern academic disputes to which Frank brings excessive and unnecessary quotations from other sources. More cogent are the essays on Latin American independence movements and the economic impetus behind liberalism and bourgeois nationalism over the last century and a half. The major essay, Neoimperialism and Neodependence, based on a view first developed by the German-Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, documents the decapitalization of Latin America. Opposing Lenin's notion of imperialist desires for colonial cheap labor, Frank describes the intense industrial stagnation which has indeed created a huge pool of cheap labor, but shows that at least 25 percent of that labor remains chronically unemployed. Frank condemns the development strategies put forward by the Organization of American States and the U.N. as pious and totally unrealistic expressions of faith. He espouses a revolutionary solution, but one that is undeveloped and vague. Despite Frank's tendency to bog down in academic wrangling and leave his major theses intellectually unfinished, the book will attract specialists, and particularly, connoisseurs of his earlier books. (Kirkus Reviews)

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