Reviewed by: The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panama by Ezer Vierba Marcos Pérez Cañizares The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panama. Ezer Vierba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. xxxii+323, black & white illustration, footnotes. $95.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-2263-4231-3. $30.00, paperback, ISBN 978-0-2263-4245-0. $29.99, PDF, ISBN 978-0-2263-4259-7. Ezer Vierba has written what is to be one of the most unusual books (an "adventurous experiment in historical writing") to come out of the North American Historian's GuildTM in the last decade or so (xxv). It is challenging to distill what The Singer's Needle is about. At a certain level, it is a retelling of Panama's twentieth-century history through three events that highlight the forms power took in shaping subject creation. Yet it is also a bold attempt to theorize on historical writing by employing narrative form as method. Vierba employs a palimpsest of fiction and nonfiction writing to create a "polyphonic history." Characters are presented in "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of valid voices . . . [who are] not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse" (xxvii). The goal of such history is to shed light on the past by juxtaposing various interpretations of the past, which Vierba does by—for the most part—skewing an omniscient narrator and employing fictional characters with their own social worlds and voices. If this sounds too postmodern (especially to those—like yours truly—who are more inclined toward "history-as-social-science"), the book remains grounded by using more conventional research methods and scholarly debate through the footnotes. At its best the narrative achieves a verisimilitude of voices and contrasting interpretations that are the markers of lived historical discourse. But at times it exposes Vierba as a puppeteer caught in an act of ventriloquy most foul. The book is best understood as a series of interwoven theoretical interventions that are stacked within themselves. We are introduced to our first character, the editor K. B. W., in what serves as the introduction to the book through an "editor's preface" where the editor employs historians' "confessional style" (xii–xxiv) to speak and theorize on the difficulties of assembling and composing the book. In regard to creating fleshed-out characters with their own voices, Vierba managed to dupe me; it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that [End Page 138] K. B. W. is not (wholly) a real person. Here K. B. W. provides a brief sketch of Panama's twentieth-century history and opens up the first level of theoretical intervention through two venues: (1) a Foucauldian analysis of discipline and punishment that highlights the importance of form or aesthetic in the exercise of power, and (2) the importance of experimenting and innovating with historical writing, starting by disaggregating the unity of authorial voice. Part I of the book is composed of the first three chapters and employs the history of the Coiba penal colony as a lens to understand the programs of Panama's liberal regime in the first half of the twentieth century with a particular focus on the years 1912–1935. Vierba posits that the colony functioned as a pilot project that included the latest developments from American and European penology but also served the state's ideological program of modernizing Panama, and by "civilizing" the interior areas and convicts. Vierba also tests out his theory of "polyphonic history" by including conversations or interviews between various ex-Coiba prisoners as collected by Tali del Valle, an ethnographer, graduate student, and daughter of a prominent ex-convict, the ingeniero del Valle. Tali's notes, various documents, and reports are also presented as organized by K. W. B. (if that is not sufficiently meta then just wait until key character and ex-Coiba prisoner Carpintero discusses implied author theory and works of Gérard Genette [104]). And it actually works. The intricate weaving of voices, theoretical debates, and archival evidence forms a dazzling experience that immerses the reader in multiple interpretations...