Martin Austin Nesvig. Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. 366p. alk. paper, $60 (ISBN 9780300140408). LC2008-054919

most outstanding of all child composers " (192), serves as Cooper's star example of a prodigy who veers later into conservatism. Despite the scarcity of documentation across the spectrum of child composers , Cooper's observations in this chapter are among his most interesting. Despite the book's reference value and insightful observations, however, its limitations tend to overwhelm it. Again, the basic source material for many compos-ers' childhood composition is generally lacking. This can be the case for many reasons, including documentation gaps for earlier composers, later compos-ers' suppression of their own youthful music, or a simple lack of publications for childhood works. Furthermore, Coo-per's checklist is " compiled mainly from standard dictionaries, biographies, and thematic catalogs " (8). Thus there is an unavoidable but powerful bias toward children who eventually became adult composers, or at least adults with a strong connection to the music industry, such as conductor Fürtwängler or musicologist Fétis. This unavoidable bias is especially problematic considering Cooper's desire to address " not the childhood works of major composers, but the major works of all child composers " (4); his goal as stated may be nearly impossible. Consequently , many of Cooper's conclusions in the central chapter on " common characteristics " of child composers are difficult to substantiate: what does it mean, for instance, that, among this particular sample of musically important people who composed as children, so many of them became composers as adults? In addition, it is problematic to evaluate the young composers for the quality of their work by " adult " criteria such as whether or not they composed a " major work " by the time they were sixteen (65–66). Cooper situates his work quite appropriately within the context of feminist and other musicological methods: prejudices about gender, race, and sexual orientation have similarly sidelined other groups of composers within the Western musical canon. Certainly (as Cooper supports with innumerable quotations) the musical works of child composers have too often been viewed as " juvenilia " and thus have been marginalized in the course of both music history and the history of a composer's own development. Frequently, a young person's music follows the models the child knows—in which case it might be dismissed as derivative—or it deviates from the standards of the day—in which case it might be labeled incompetent. Cooper addresses the fundamental question of youthful musical creativity in many of …