While much has been written about the politics of the General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorial regime of the 1970s and 1980s and similar attention has been paid to his economics because of the early willingness of Pinochet's Chile to take the advice of Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" and impose neoliberal policies, Huneeus (Institute of International Studies, U. of Chile) believes that not enough work has gone into examining the interrelationships between the two dimensions. His study therefore examines the role of the military in the political order, the legitimation strategy of the Pinochet regime, the key actors in the formulation of the regime's political and economic programs, the 1982-83 economic crisis and the political changes it spurred, and the eventual consolidation of democracy. His study offers explicit comparison to the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the "new authoritarianism" of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil and implicit comparison to the totalitarianism of Adolf Hitler. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)