Histories of the Argentine tango are often polemical. Questions of propriety, national identity and social position have colored and distorted the perceptions of both authors and readers. In this tradition, Marta E. Savigliano, Assistant Professor of dance history at the University of California, Riverside, explores the history of the Argentine Tango as a dance form using sex/gender, wealth/class and color/race categories.

As a woman, a feminist and a dancer of tango, Savigliano is willing to investigate aspects of the tango that both attract and disturb many people. What is different and most provocative in Savigliano's history of the tango is her exploration of the sex-gender dynamics. Her description of tango includes its emotional context:

"As a powerful representation of male/female courtship, stressing the tension involved in the process of seduction, the tango performance has gone through several successive adjustments as it has been adopted and legitimized by the upper classes and by Western hegemonic cultures."

Savigliano's legitimization road introduces us to upper-crust Argentine lads slumming in the brothels of Buenos Aires, takes us through left-bank Paris of the 1910s, explains romantic reinterpretations of tango as it became THE dance of the Argentine middle class by the 1940s. We even visit more recent Japanese tango revivals.

Is the tango a display of unequal male-female power relationships? Who seduces whom?

Savigliano speaks as someone who knows well the tango, notably the heart and soul and the passion-tension in the dance. She views the tango woman not as a victim, but as a co-conspirator. The follower may not lead the tango, but she often knows more about what's happening than the leader:

"Translated into tango choreographic terms, [Tango] lyrics suggest that milonguitas could provoke the dance (call the attention of their target through their glances, figure, and dancing abilities) and tempt the class/race status quo into motion, but they would never lead or "mark" (marcar) in the moment at which the special steps were performed.

So Savigliano's answer is that the follower provokes and teases, and maybe controls the leader's heart and intentions, even while the leader is choreographing the dance, in spite of the fact that the economic power relationship may be quite unequal.

There are not many English language histories of the tango, so Savigliano's effort is a welcome contribution. On the whole, the writing style is accessible for an intelligent reader, although sometimes the academic approach is over-stressed and other times it is too artistic or impressionable.

The strength of this book is that human emotions and the male-female dynamic of tango have been brought into its historical analysis. The tango dance is quite unusual in this regard because without the experience of dancing tango an armchair historian simply persuing primary-source material would miss some of the most important elements no matter how deep the investigation.

Tom Stermitz
Chautauqua Publishing

Marchak comes from the class rooms of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of British Coloumbia. Not surprisingly, then, a large percentage of the book reads like a scholarly dissertation. There is a clinical objectivity in the way she sets out her argument, which takes the reader from the roots of terror to the bureaucratic management of El Proceso. However, while her academic studies provide the context, it is the often heart rendering testimonies from those who lived through the terror that make this book come alive. Sadly there are too few of them.

Marchak defines 'El Proceso' as "a process by which a military force constantly increased its power over the society by redefining ideological sins". Robert Cox, former editor-in-chief of the Buenos Aires Herald, described it in an editorial at the time as "a mindless Frankenstein's monster gone beserk". It is the latter's plain speaking that I prefer.

Being an academic I feel that Marchak is hamstrung by her desire to categorise movements and events in terms of -isms and-ists. She endeavours to define what the testimonies clearly show was an incredibly complex period of fear, denial and half-baked ideologies. She admits herself that the military's lack of any clear definition of the term 'terrorist' was one of the main reasons that so many people were disappeared, that fear was so widespread. The testimonies support this. Stories of people disappeared simply because they were obstacles to personal ambition, or because they had something worth stealing, illustrate that this is a period to which you cannot apply the broad brush of generalisation. Of course terms such as Marxist and neoliberal were bandied around at the time but one feels these served only to paper over the cracks of a deeply divided society. I don't think the author uses them any better.

But what 'God's Assassins' has done is to whet my appetite for more. Marchak raises several interesting questions - was Firmenich a double agent? And she makes some very poignant points - "the military was a creation of the society on which it preyed". I only wish that she had explored these further and illustrated them better with more eye-witness accounts.

Anyway, it's a gentle early-'New Age' reflection on being alive and realizing that everything is, in its own way, perfect. The author is a Vietnam veteran and world traveller who goes hiking (apparently regularly) through the Andes with his brother.

I'm not going to call it great, but it's a very pleasant, short read written from a loosely counter-cultural point of view. Wish I knew more about the authors...