'Andrew Hurley's fine translation makes available this acclaimed Puerto Rican novelist's La renuncia del h$eroe Baltasar (1974), the fictive chronicles of an arranged marriage plotted to save Puerto Rico from certain slave rebellion. Interspersed lectures, letters, and documents reconstruct conflicts of class and race set in Island's colonial past. Occasional footnotes, but an introduction would have added insights for the nonspecialized reader'--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/Baltasar Montanez, an eighteenth-century Puerto Rican hero and the son of a slave leader, renounces his own people and marries the daughter of the secretary of state, in a deal created by the government to ease tension between the ruling and slave classes