In anticipation of Chile's upcoming bicentennial, the country's publicly owned television station TVN organised a major ‘contest’ to determine ‘the top ten greatest Chileans’ of the past two hundred years. Modelled after a BBC programme, TVN put together a blue-ribbon panel of historians and other academics to arrive at an initial list of sixty notables. The list did not include General Augusto Pinochet. Chilean students and faculty from elementary school through the university were then polled to select the top ten. Among the winners are Nobel poets Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, folksingers Victor Jara and Violeta Parra, and in tenth place, former president Salvador Allende. Historic Chilean revolutionaries Lautaro, Manuel Rodríguez and José Miguel Carrera are also in the top ten. The founding father of Chile, Bernardo O'Higgins, and the major nineteenth century authoritarian moderniser, Diego Portales (a particular hero of Pinochet), came in eleventh and twelfth place, respectively. TVN will now produce a series of ten documentaries on each of the greatest Chileans, and in mid-2008 the country will be called upon to determine which one is the greatest.

As we think about how to assess the ways Chileans are coming to terms with their traumatic political past, TVN's top ten list is quite telling. While the fact that Pinochet did not make the list of notables touched off some debate, it also reflects a moment in which an increasing number of Chileans have rejected the dictator as a human rights criminal and a crook. The top ten include several left figures who are not officially celebrated, or even taught much, certainly in comparison to O'Higgins and Portales, in Chilean public schools. This presents us with a puzzle regarding the relationships between official and non-official memory narratives as they elide and bifurcate, evolve and transform. We want to understand where memories come from, what makes particular memory narratives surface and stick, what kinds of consensus on the past are politically achievable or morally necessary. Steve Stern's Battling for Hearts and Minds offers remarkable insight and research into the kinds of memory struggles that foreground the current memory moment.

Battling for Hearts and Minds is the second volume of his trilogy, The Memory Box of Pinochet's Chile. The volume is a masterful work that richly conveys the deliberate manipulations of memory deployed by the Pinochet regime, as well as the grassroots struggles to combat such manipulations. Somewhat in contrast to his first volume (Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998), here Stern moves away from an emphasis on his contribution to memory concepts (and jargon). Instead, he focuses squarely on developing the ever-evolving memory narratives that illustrate the bitterly divided understandings of Chile's past, from the 1960s, as major social transformations in the cities and countryside were launched, to the massive and brutal reaction to these transformative progressive projects. Stern typologises the narratives into four emblematic memory frames, indicating ways in which individual memories fit particular collective, implicitly ideological narratives (memory as salvation, as rupture, as persecution and awakening, and as a closed box). Yet he also demonstrates the fluidity within the frames as they adapt to shifting social and political moments and imperatives.

Perhaps the most powerful contribution of this volume is Stern's tracing of the ways in which the dictatorship itself deliberately crafted and embedded a particular memory frame into Chilean culture, especially in the early years of the regime. Stern shows the sophistication of the regime's understanding of the need to work hard and consistently to thwart, undo and re-invent memories of the Allende years, to exaggerate particular dimensions of conflict, to portray the revolutionary left in the post-coup years as violent extremists, as terrorists. The dictatorship understood the importance of dates, symbols, and above all, the use of the mass media to plant lies and play to fears. In the 1980s, Pinochet memory narratives softened somewhat, emphasising the gains the dictatorship had achieved to lay the basis for a new and ‘protected’ democracy.

Yet the regime continued to hammer the leitmotif of the errors and chaos of the Allende years, particularly as a build-up to the 1988 plebiscite. Here Stern offers a lens on how the opposition to the dictatorship developed an alternative memory narrative in the 1988 plebiscite campaign, to assure Chileans that ‘Happiness is on the Way’. Stern also takes us into the worlds of human rights advocates in political and cultural-artistic realms, youth organisers and indigenous activists as windows into struggles against the dictatorship's renderings and erasures. In a classic oral historian's fashion, Stern shares stories and voices of the seldom heard, yet these stories and their tellers are clearly crucial to understanding how the top ten Chilean list was constituted. Battling for Hearts and Minds also provides meticulous explanations of how Stern gathered and assessed distinct memory strands. In this 500-page work, almost 100 pages are notes, and Stern includes a thoughtful essay on primary sources as well as oral research as methodology. Combined with his lucid prose, this makes the volume quite valuable as a model for young researchers as well as for classroom use.

Over the course of the seventeen years since Pinochet stepped aside in 1990 – a period roughly matched by the number of years Pinochet held power – Chileans have undergone a fitful, often divided, process of collective remembering. Until Pinochet's London arrest, in fact, traumatic memories appeared to be suppressed, bursting onto the public scene as irruptions (as evoked by Alex Wilde, in his 1998 article in the JLAS) in an otherwise seemingly hushed official stance on the human rights atrocities of the past. Stern's first two volumes provide eloquent explications of collective memories from the 1970s through the 1990s, reaching the ‘impasse’ of 1998.

We now await the final volume, anticipating what memory narratives were forced to falter, and yet what memory frames persist in spite of innumerable public revelations about the truths of the atrocities of the dictatorship. Today in Chile we are witnessing an outpouring of representations of the atrocities, namely through the judiciary, in which large numbers of military officers are being prosecuted for human rights crimes, and through government-sponsored (though not initiated) memorials that have emerged throughout the country. Yet it remains fairly unclear what kind of effect or resonance such representations produce. This speaks to the continuing contradictions of memory struggles, to the difficulties of making major claims about memory and forgetting, and to the importance of listening closely to the storytellers.