Central America Books

This powerful book is an indictment of U.S. intervention in Central America. Unlike the numerous accounts of the CIA involvement in the wars against democracy, however, Porpora focuses on American public's reaction - or non-reaction - to the genocidal policies of our "allies" in Central America. He draws strong parallels between the US in the 1980-90's and Germany in the 1920-30's and demonstrates that it is the moral indifference of the general public that allows evil to flourish, and that ultimately it is the general public that is responsible.

This very acute work tells two tales, that of the Holocaust, and of the imperialism of the United States in Central America. Although some might disagree with the author's Holocaust interpretation it is well reasoned and documented. But his basic point is unsettling: We say 'never again' to the Holocaust, yet we barely register what has happened in Guatemala, El Salvador in the past generation. If we wonder at the reason Germans were passive during the era of Hitler, we should find an example in our own behavior.

My third graders like this book very much and it sparks a lot of discussion about America and freedom. It's about a family that must flee a Caribbean island because of political persecution. They escape in a crowded boat, where they face hunger and fear. On their trip they are even robbed and shot at. Finally, they reach a friendly shore where they are welcomed and invited to share a feast, for it is Thanksgiving Day in America. They agree there is much to be thankful for. The text is very simple and the illustrations convey the mood of fear and uncertainty. This little book may bring tears to your eyes, and will definitely make you proud to be an American.

Eve Bunting has managed to describe at a child's level the fear, anticipation and exhaustion that often accompanied many of our ancestors as they came to America. This book is a reminder of the people who both came before us and those that still come with hope to America.

It is a beautiful, meaningful and heartwarming book to share with elementary students and families either during the Thanksgiving season or while studying history and immigration.

This is perhaps the most original book written about Val Lewton's famous horror movies in decades. Nemerov looks at four images from Lewton's movies, images that center on little-known character actors Nemerov then shows how these tie into Lewton's Russian background, Lewton's career as a novelist, and American pop culture during World War II.

Rarely have I seen Lewton's films subjected to this kind of close analysis. While I might have wished that Nemerov focused on something from "The Seventh Victim" or "The Body Snatcher," I have to say that what he said made very good sense and placed Lewton in a broader context. (As opposed to the common idea that Lewton was such a genius that his films stand apart from everything else in the horror genre.) This is the rare book of which it can be said that I wish it were longer. Nemerov's enthusiasm for Lewton shines through, but he also has balanced judgment on Lewton's limitations as well. Strongly recommended for anyone interested in horror films or films of the Forties.

"Icons of Grief" is a fascinating critical study of producer Val Lewton's RKO horror films within a World War II context. Historian Alexander Nemerov examines the subtle power of Lewton's low-budget chillers (notably "Cat People," "I Walked With a Zombie" and "The Ghost Ship") and the cultural reflection upon wartime America. By providing new insights on Lewton and his work, Nemerov encourages the reader to seek out these remarkable films.

One of the most fascinating artifacts arising in the midst of the turbulent 1960s was the creation and promulgation of a new subculture in the shadow of the mainstream material culture, one that had quite different aspects to its lifestyle, including a different set of predominating social, economic and political perspectives, experiences, and perspectives. In the main the thrust of the counterculture, as it came to be known, was a rabid rejection of the ethos, perspectives, and behaviors of the mainstream culture, including its meaningless materialism, its warlike nature, and its xenophobia about anyone different. In this terrific book edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, we are presented with fourteen wonderful essays written by scholarly eyewitnesses to the phenomenon.

These are arranged into several sections according to chapters dealing with popular culture, the media, the use of drugs to free oneself of predominating cultural baggage, social and cultural politics, and race, sex, and communal issues. Each of the sections is prefaced with a brief but integrating essay that helps immeasurably to both connect the subject of each chapter to the rest of the welter of considerations concerning the counterculture, and to help to explain various aspects concerning themes with the subject itself. The editors aid the overall effort by stitching together such important elements as the predominating "geist' or worldview of the members of the counterculture that helps to better locate them both historically and culturally within the particular and relatively brief moment in time that enveloped the counterculture itself. Yet another scholarly aspect of the book that makes it worthwhile is its extensive footnoting, which provocatively slows the reader down to enjoy the depth of the ride as well as to invite the reader in the direction of further reading and cogitation.

The opening section of the book is comprised of a wonderful essay that both locates the fourteen other essays in terms of the popular philosophy that so actively fueled the movement away from the predominating mainstream material culture, and points out how beneficial further historical analysis would be to further explicate the ways in which the sudden explosion of the counterculture onto the social scene in the late 1960s actively changed the society and continue to influence it today. This is a we'll-written and entertaining read that helps the reader to understand what other authors have simply explained away as being nothing more than "Sex, drugs, and rock and roll". For those of us who lived through it, it was so much more, and this book gives one a glimpse of everything the counterculture was, and all that it aspired unsuccessfully to become. Enjoy!

This book took me weeks to read, not because it was dull but because the copious footnotes at the end of each of the 14 excellent essays demanded investigation. The essays complement one another to present a more complete and cogent view of the antecedents and realities of the counterculture than any other volume I have yet seen on the subject.

Counterculture names, say Braunstein and Doyle, "...hippies, freaks, Flower Children, urban guerillas, orphans of Amerikka - underscores the degree to which Sixties cultural radicals had a revolving-door approach to identity, appropriating and shedding roles and personas at a dizzying pace." In these pages, the roles and personas in cultural politics, race, sex, the media (especially music, film and fashion), drugs, feminism, environmentalism and alternative visions of community and technology are thoroughly investigated.

"Unlike subcultures," says Marilyn Young in the foreword, "...a contraculture aspires to transform values and mores of its host culture. If it is successful...it BECOMES the dominant culture." I don't believe anyone would maintain that the counterculture of the '60s has become dominant, but its influence on our present culture is more vast and all-encompassing than much of the media would have us believe.

"The Sixties were centrally about the recognition on the part of an ever-growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they lived - peaceful, generous, honorable - did not exist and never had." The society they found themselves in was instead, "...morally bankrupt, racist, militaristic, and culturally stultifying."

Against the climate of the VietNam war and race riots in the South, these essays note that the era was one of post-scarcity abundance. Intentional poverty was adopted consciously by a generation that was appalled by the waste of human and material resources. They wanted to figure out how to "...live a completely new life as far outside the boundaries of the State and commercial marketplace as they could get." Dropouts could live on the leftovers of this affluent society.

The San Francisco Diggers' motto was "create the condition you describe." Says Doyle, "For the Diggers, the word "free" was as much an imperative as it was an adjective. They realized it with free housing, legal services, a medical clinic, film screenings, concerts, free [open]churches, and free stores with food, clothes and household utensils - all donated and gathered from the surrounding community. The Mime Troupe and other street theater groups drew people in to create "happenings," freaking freely on the streets and in public parks, de-legitimizing violence and racism, while the White Panthers staged a "total assault on the culture." Peacefully.

"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable," said JFK, and his words reverberate across cultural boundaries today. But hippies didn't WANT to become the next coercive power structure in some kind of psychedelic fascism. They wanted a "free frame of reference."

Braunstein observes that the post-scarcity abundance of the era fueled a new drive toward leisure and play. Against a system of "...lifelong competitiveness, materialism and avarice"...LSD and other mind-expanding drugs "...incapacitated the discriminating faculties of the brain that placed objects and images in hierachcies of value." David Farber adds that LSD and other hallucinogens were used as "...an agent in the production of cultural reorientation...a new set of cultural coordinates."

My only beef with the book is in Philip Deloria's "Counterculture Indians and the New Age" and it's not even a criticism of the essay (which I found among the most brilliant and absorbing) but of scholarly research in general. From personal knowledge, I know that there are egregious errors in what Deloria's sources reported about New Buffalo and Lorian. Scholarly research breaks down when such sources are trusted, and Deloria gives an excellent example of this in the much-repeated death speech of Chief Seattle - who never uttered it. It was written by a white screenwriter from Texas for a 1972 TV script on pollution. Hippies and New Agers reinvented Indians without careful reference to the source. And of course the image became marketable.

"Playing Indian," says Deloria, "...had a tendency to lead one into, rather than out of, contradiction and irony" and "...people are simultaneously granted a platform and rendered voiceless."

In his excellent essay on communes, Timothy Miller notes that they were "...enormously, endlessly diverse." "The ultimate culprit, perhaps, was that sacred American icon, individualism. The time had come, communitarians believed, to give up the endless pursuit of self-interest and begin thinking about the common good. They wanted the country to start moving from I to we. It all added up to a vision of nothing less than a new society. The new communitarians were out to save the world and made no bones about it."

Miller's essay segues nicely into the last - on alternative technolgy, environment and the counterculture by Andrew Kirk. Buckminster Fuller's geodescic domes were used extensively in the Drop City commune in Colorado as well as "...composting toilets, afforadble greenhouses, and organic gardening techniques along with alternative energy technologies." And don't forget that the first computer hackers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were longhairs who smoked grass.

It's not that there were no mistakes, ineptitudes and downright stupidities in this deliberately unorganized "happening" of the '60s and '70s, but that what was good about it is still good. We're still out there. Here. Hippies didn't disappear and they didn't become corporate CEO's either. Instead, nearly all became teachers, health care workers, artists, organic farmers, social works and the like. "Cultural creatives" of the present, for instance, are either hippies of yesteryear or their heirs in some way.

"They are still out there, well into a third generation, coming together by the tens of thousands once a year at the Rainbow Gatherings. The hallucinogenic age, while tamed in some respects, has survived and mutated and reproduced."

This is the closest thing to the WHOLE STORY" that I've seen yet. Put it on your reference book shelf. ...

I have not yet read this book, I have only just ordered it, but I am so excited to read it because currently I am the coordinator of the Hollenback Community Garden in Brooklyn New York. Our garden is on the former site of the Hollenback Mansion where Amelia grew up, which burned down in 1979.

Compiled, edited and Annotated by Mary J. Straw Cook, Immortal Summer: A Victorian Woman's Travels In The Southwest is a collection of letters and black-and-white photographs by Amelia Hollenback, a Victorian woman who had the opportunity to see 1897 America with her own eyes. With extensive contextual annotation, Immortal Summer is a vivid, superbly organized and presented primary source which takes in what American life, land and people were really like more than a century ago. One curious note: Author and historian Mary Cook lives in Santa Fe in the very house that Amelia Hollenback commissioned John Gaw Meem to build in 1932!

This is a great book about the Haitian Revolution it is different essay about this revolution impact on other nations in the Atlantic World. It not only gives various historians thoughts and ideas but a more rounder view of what this revolution really did for the atlantic world.

Like most of the recent work of David Geggus, this book provides a good frame work and introduction for a much-needed academic study of the Haitian Revolution and it's world-wide impact.

We came across this book at the local library and loved it because it incorporated some Spanish words within the stories! My daughter looks for it everytime we go to the library! She loves it and loves to practice filling in the Spanish word when we read the story together... she is only 3 right now! I highly recommend this book for some great short stories with an introduction to bilingualism!

These three simple stories are beautifully written glimpses into the day to day life of a little Mexican girl named Rosa. Magical things happen in her world and the paintings that accompany the text bring that magic to life and give it texture. Oh sure, the book teaches about responsibility and sharing, the importance of helping others and telling the truth, but it doesn't preach. It is a lovely book that my 3 year old never tires of. As a bonus, there are about 20 simple spanish words to enhance the experience. A first-rate keeper and a first-rate gift!

People from other states should settle for something thin, like Scenic Driving Oregon, but for natives who are looking to explore deeper, who have wondered what's up that pigpath, this is the very best. Too bad he didn't do Eastern Oregon in the same manner.

Ralph Friedman hitchhiked his way to Oregon in 1933 as a 16-year-old. He spent the next six decades or so lovingly chronicling the unique people and places of his adopted state.

"In Search of Western Oregon" is really a culmination of his life's work. Yes, it's structured as a travel guide; but it's also much more. Friedman covers the well-known sites and history, but his clear emphasis is on the forgotten faces and places that are such an essential part of the Beaver State. Many of the photographs in this book are by Friedman's wife, Phoebe, his partner in both life and work.

Friedman's earlier "Oregon For The Curious," also still in print, offers a similar, but less comprehensive, treatment of both halves of the state. Separately, or together, they provide a unique overview of this diverse, beautiful, often still wild state, and the people who have attempted to find a life in harmony with it. It's wonderful for the armchair traveler and invaluable for anyone who has the desire and opportunity to travel off the beaten path.

This book gives a beautiful and rarely seen perspective of Puerto Rican life and its people. It is a good addition to any library(...)

This family oriented historical is set in Puerto Rico amongst 4th grade girlfriends. A well read perspective on cliques, class division and affluent society in another country! An excellent book and will be of interest to the 5th through the 8th grades, including parents and teachers. Highly recommended reading.

Carol Schimke's Incredible Inns Of Central America: Lodging In The Bed & Breakfast Tradition is a superbly researched and presented guide for anyone seeking a unique and memorable travel experience while touring or doing business in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, or Nicaragua. Based upon her own personal visits, Schimke provides detailed and honest descriptions of each lodging (including interior and exterior photos); a wide-range of style choices and price levels; lists all amenities, services, rates, payment methods, and contact information; includes helpful tips on making reservations and specific inquiries; as well as website and on-line registration addresses (where applicable). If you are anticipating traveling in these Central American states and looking for the adventure of a life time, begin your travel plans with a careful reading of Schimke's Incredible Inns Of Central America.

From Planeta Journal - This is the first comprehensive collection to the region's small inns which offer lodging in the "Bed and Breakfast" tradition. Brilliantly executed, the book showcases accommodations in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua which offer something distinctly different from traditional hotels. While Central America may not be home to a thriving "B&B Culture," it does have quite a few unique inns. Author Shimke describes the best, providing information on amenities, services, location and the time it took to receive a response via email! Black and white photos compliment the text. Highly recommended!