In their introduction to this fascinating collection, Jürgen Buchenau and Lyman L. Johnson state that since the end of Spanish colonialism, five Latin American nations – Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru – have each experienced ten or more severe earthquakes. There is nothing particularly new in the book's central theme that natural disasters often cause major political and social ‘aftershocks’. Instead, the great strength of this book is its broad-ranging approach to the question of how earthquakes have influenced the course of Latin American history. The seven chapters provide detailed individual case studies of the consequences of specific Latin American earthquakes, covering the 1746 Lima earthquake, the 1812 Venezuelan earthquake, the 1906 Valparaíso earthquake, the 1944 San Juan, Argentina, earthquake, the 1972 Managua earthquake, the 1976 Guatemala earthquake and the 1986 Mexico City earthquake. Unsurprisingly, the social and political aftershocks varied significantly in each case study.

All seven chapters are centred upon the consequences of earthquakes for city dwellers, and there is plenty of interest in this book for scholars of urban history. The editors note that the built environment functions as the material interface between nature and human societies (p. 5), and in his chapter on the 1944 San Juan, Argentina, earthquake, Mark Alan Healy quotes the Mexican seismologist Cinna Lomnitz in reminding us that ‘earthquakes are not disasters in themselves, structures make them so’ (p. 103). In terms of the physical reconstruction of cities following earthquakes, Healy's chapter is of particular interest. In the aftermath of the 1944 earthquake, despite the failure of wider attempts at social reform, the city of San Juan was rebuilt as ‘a concrete fortress arrayed against future attacks of nature’ (p. 124). More generally, fascinating histories of religion and secularization run throughout this collection. Virginia Garrard-Burnett shows in her essay on the 1976 Guatemalan earthquake that religious responses to earthquakes often differed significantly between urban and rural areas.

The collection might have benefited from a fuller discussion of the epistemological question of how to use contemporary science to understand past earthquakes, and several of the authors could have been more precise in their use of terms such as ‘destroyed’. But overall, the essays in this collection work extremely well together and the book could be usefully assigned in a general survey class of Latin American history, or in more specialized classes on the environmental or urban history of the region.