Central America Books

This is an excellent book. It is the best project of an integrated approach to archaeology that I have seen to date. The extent of multidisciplinary researchers and the scope of the project are staggering. This volume sythesizes the data seamlessly. It is a must read for any professional or individual interested in anthropological and environmental archaeology, human ecology, environmental studies, Maya studies, etc. A really great report

Final report on the most important project with a regional scope ever to be undertaken in Costa Rica. This book should be on the shelf of every professional archaeologist or aficionado with an interest in the Precolumbian civilizations of Central America.

This classic study of Antigua Guatemala's colonial buildings is back in print after twenty years. It is clearly the classic work in the field. The result of thirty years of field work it documents the churches, public buildings and private homes in colonial Antigua.

A very pleasent book. Very positive. Good for kids in primary grades. It shows Argentina from beautiful Buenos Aires, to Tierra Del Fuego, the southernmost city in the world. It is a "easy to read" book, with plenty of pictures that will take you on a trip around the country. It shows Argentina's cowboys, food, dance, water falls and more. It makes it easy to picture the country's location on the globe by using simple explanations as the meaning of the word "hemisphere". Children will easily understand why the seasons are opposit from the Northen hemisphere.

John Lynch is a master in whatever he presents and this book is no exception. Rosas was the strongman of Argentina and unified the country during his reign. Lynch not only assesses the idea of a Caudillo and the cult of personality that leads to their power. If you are starting out in Latin American history this is an excellent place to start. This book will take you through the unification of Argentina and lay the framework for one of the most important parts of Latin America. The book is very well written and like all of his stays on target.

Good all around trail guide. Includes accurate GPS coordinates. Trail ratings are ok. The trip odometer settings are great if you don't have a GPS.

Documenting 35 years of cutting-edge work from one of America's most important contemporary artists, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson is a "must have" for academics, artists and anyone interested in contemporary film, video, performance art, installation art, feminism or new media. If Leeson's range of media seems impressive, run down the list of her technical innovations, which reads like the dreams of several artists rather than the achievement of one (a theme, by the way, underscored throughout her work): creator of one of the first interactive videodisc artworks, one of the earliest networked robotic art installations, the first artwork to use touch-screen interface and, most recently, a process for making virtual sets, called LHL, designed for her first feature film, Conceiving Ada. Her reputation as a constant innovator and "pioneer of new media" isn't surprising, unlike the fact that this book is the first comprehensive look at her work. If you don't know about Lynn Hershman Leeson already, you should.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, this book does an excellent job of both providing coverage while offering detailed analyses of Leeson's work. Edited by artist and art historian Meredith Tromble, the text includes a well-balanced selection of multidisciplinary essays written by art critics, historians and curators, film historians and theorists, and Hershman herself. Hershman's "Private I: An Investigator's Timeline," gives a succinct yet detailed account of her career while reenacting her playful, witty and sophisticated use of autobiography as a means to articulate the complexities of subjectivity in general, where binary distinctions such as public vs. private, personal vs. political, human vs. machine, art vs. science, fantasy vs. reality, and art-making vs. world-making are, through a plethora of odd meetings and wild matings, playfully problematized and profoundly upended.

The collection of essays are, for the most part, concise and insightful, produced by some of the best scholars in their respective fields. For example, Abigail Solomon-Godeau reads Leeson's strategies of "conscientious objectification," her "intervention into the mechanics of spectacle," as a form of "ethical self-reflection," while Amelia Jones locates Leeson in a genealogy of performative photographic self-display routed through Claude Cahun, recognizing Leeson's ability to simultaneously affirm both surface and depth in an image, the "simulacral nature of postmodern culture" and the lived experience of a subject in the flesh--in this case, "female experience in patriarchy." David E. James also addresses Leeson's work as a performance of self, but shows how Leeson complicates and extends this strategy by working with the influences, tensions and contradictions that circulate between autobiography (as authorial agency, biographical truth as well as fabrication) and the materiality of representation (in this case video), throwing into relief the tenuous and porous boundaries between the individual and the social, subjects and objects of knowledge, truth and fiction, life and death, and trauma and healing.

The book contains 17 color plates, a good number of figures, and a beautifully organized DVD that includes presentation of the artworks (both stills and clips), more essays on Hershman's work, and selected histories: videos, films, exhibitions and awards. While much of the material overlaps, the DVD will also point you to Hershman's website and impressive web-based projects, such as Agent Ruby. Be sure to check them out.

Excellent essays of different geographic areas of Pre-Columbian goldworkding, Peru, Columbia, Costa Rica and Panama. Some of the best gold art objects in private collections anywhere in the US. This collection is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,in the Mitchell Treasury.

This book challenges white male patriarchal assumptions. A brave and enormously intelligent book that subverts the paradigms of eurocentrism in the U. S. and elsewhere. A tremendous achievemnet.

After reading Bailyn's "ATLANTIC HISTORY: Concept and Contours" many of the more recent histories of North America I've read suddenly make a lot more sense, histories such as Alan Taylor's AMERICAN COLONIES, and WILLIAM COOPER' S TOWN, Linebaugh and Rediker's radical THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA, as well as Victoria Freeman's DISTANT RELATIONS to name just a few.

Bailyn provides admirable summary of the how the "concept" of Atlantic history was launched -- by Walter Lippman in an essay justifying America's involvement in the Great War -- and then taken up by politicians in the wake of WWII as justification for the such organizations as NATO whose mission was to bind together more tightly the interests of the states of Western "Christendom" against those of the Communistic (and godless) East. Some historians supported this new notion with tendentious misreadings of history, but others of a more empirical bent began to undertake histories that looked beyond the old narratives of individual nation states and focused instead the commonalities of conquest and colonization in the Americas and Africa as practiced by Westerners.

Bailyn dicusses the "contours" of Atlantic history by outlining the discipline's key findings, elucidating its key ideas, citing its indispensible texts, and historic techniques such as statistical investigations, e.g., the construction of a slave trade database compiled from actual records which demonstrate how the slave system served to underwrite the entire system of trade in the "inland sea" of the Atlantic. For the amateur historian, and perhaps even for the professional, Bailyn's "Notes" section is exceedingly useful as it offers a rich survey of the most important texts that have emerged in this rich and rapidly expanding field of study.

Here are a couple of exemplary passages from the book. "In its first, original phase Atlantic history in the broadest sense is the story of the creation of a vast new marchland of European civilization, an ill-defined, irregular outer borderland, thrust into the world of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and in the outer reaches of the British archipelago. Life in this contested marchland was, literally, barbarous: that is in its initial stages it was, in large areas, a scene of conflict with alien people, alien in language and mores, hostile in purpose, savage and uncultivated. Europeans, native Americans and displaced Africans, all -- each from their own point of view -- saw it that way. For all, others were intent on destroying the civility -- European, native American, African -- that had once existed. Latin America, to paraphrase John Elliott, was no wilderness; the conquest made it that." Page 63.

Bailyn's notes the barbarity of the conquerors did not vary by religious conviction or national origin. "Puritan New England was not different from Mexico or Peru. '"It was a fearful sight,"' the pious gentle Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote of New England's Pequot War (1637), "'to see [the Indians] frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.'" Page 65. Indeed the Dutch and English conquerors read accounts of the Spanish conquistadors and were more than familiar with their techniques. The Dutch, having been subjects of Spain, may have been less frequently cruel in their dealings with native peoples than others, but were capable of exceeding cruelty. For instance, Dutch soldiers in a raid near New Amsterdam cut some of the native children in pieces "before the eyes of their parents, and threw the pieces thrown into the fire or into the water." Pg. 63. Clearly, the Spanish were not the only conquistadors.

I don't mean to give the impression that Bailyn speaks only of the barbarous first or conquest phase, he also does a admirable summary of the colonial phase. Once the domination of indigenous people's was relatively complete, the colonists and those who stayed at home in Europe profited mightily from the slave trade: the labor system that wove together, for instance, the economic lives of New England farmers who sold their agricultural products to the slave masters in the Caribbean, so that they could buy fine lace and fine wine and other items from Europe and so keep maintain the appearance of civility. Labor for the sugar, rice, tobacco and cotton plantations came primarily from West Africa, but was also supplied by the exportation of the many dispossessed, conquered and persecuted people in England, Ireland, Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe. Athouigh Bailyn doesn't say it explicity, the economic imperatives of globalization have been around for a long, long time.

I don't mean to suggest that Bailyn concentrates only on the most barbarous elements of Atlantic history. He offers insight into how certain cultural aspects drove and supported this vast, complex process. Quakers are, for instance, a paramount example of a tightly knit but far-flung commmunity who profited mightily in the chaotic marketplace of that time both because of the bonds of trust forged in their communal worship, and also and because there were Quakers at every entrepot in the system, relaying intelligence on the fluctuating prices of slaves, sugar, rum, tobacco, whale oil, etc. As Bailyn notes, black markets, corruption, bribery existed side by side with "official trade" and so it best served those who could outwit the authorities, or those authorities who could actually enforce their authority. Ideas flowed as well, ideas of liberation, revolt and democracy. Bolivar, son of a wealthy planter, educated in Europe, knew of Montesqieu, Madison, Jefferson and Rousseau -- not unusual for a member of the Atlantic elite.

A marvelous work of tremendous reach and scholarly erudition packed into just a weekend's reading, "Atlantic History" takes stock of this new current of historical research and points presciently toward the new directions it may take.