The social and political results of natural disaster are the subject of Assistant Professor of History Mark Healey’s The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan After the 1944 Earthquake. Historians have almost exclusively focused on Buenos Aires in their understanding of Peronism. Healey seeks instead to expose the relations between the cosmopolitan capital and the provincial interior in the making of the new Argentina. The reconstruction of the city of San Juan after the earthquake was an opportunity for Peronism and for modernist architecture to transform the Argentine national state both politically and aesthetically. But, as “The Ruins of the New Argentina” demonstrates, the results were mixed. San Juan did not become the icon of modernism imagined by its planners, but a far more modest urban center. Moreover, the successful reconstruction of San Juan as an “anti-seismic” city enabled more durable power for local elites as well. This redoubt of provincial conservatism had no place in the radical project of Peronism, and was, as Healey writes, “excised from its larger narrative.” “The Ruins of the New New and Continuing Programs for Argentina” seeks to restore the case of San Juan to national political history, as well as to bring to light a telling example of the modernist experiment in the Southern Cone.