Central America Books

Dr. Alexander Skutch passed away in 2004 just short of his 100th birthday.
He was an acclaimed biologist and had published a multitude of studies, articles and books on tropical botany, nature and ornithology.

In this book he describes his early days in Costa Rica just after concluding his work with the banana producing companies in the 1930's. In 1941 he purchased a farm in the rich San Isidro Valley in the South Central part of the country and named it Los Cosingos after the Fiery-billed Aracari, a species of Toucan that was common in the area. Skutch then devoted his time to studying the birds and plants of the area and worked to save some of the forests and preserves of the country. He along with Dan Janzen were two of the most influencial biologists that helped Costa Rica shape a system of national parks that may be the best of any country in the world.

In this book Skutch writes of the early days on the farm, what the area was like before the main rush of settlers and how it changed into an agricultural center. His farm, or better called his sanctuary is the last forest left in the area and still shelters many of the birds, animals and plants once found in the valley before it changed to cropland.
He describes journeys across the Cerro Muerte before the road when it was just a horse trail and travelers would sometimes freeze on its heights here in the tropics. He describes fantastic natural phenomena such as migrations of irridescent winged butterflys that stretched from horizon to horizon that sadly dwindled with time and are no more.

I had noticed that no one had reviewed this book which I imagine is an indicator of the present interest in this book. This is very unfortunate as it is an excellent read and will illuminate aspects of tropical life that have all but disappeared in Central America.

Presents a compilation of information from a worldwide pool of experts on their practical experiences in telecommunications sector reform.

This study compiles a wealth of information from a worldwide pool of experts on their practical experiences in telecommunications sector reform. It provides an up-to-date account of approaches to the major policy and structural issues and describes developments in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. The study also examines issues related to investment, regulation, and implementation.

While each of the eight parts centers on a particular aspect of telecommunications sector reform, the study highlights several recurring themes and looks at a number of country experiences from the perspective of policymakers, regulators, investors, operators, the international development community, and other industry specialists.

This volume provides valuable information on how to implement telecommunications reforms, offers insights into the effectiveness of these reforms, and identifies critical areas in which further discussion of related policy and implementation issues in this increasingly important economic sector.

The young author gives up his boring job in a bank to head off to the jungles of Bolivia in search of a tree turkey that was supposed to have been extinct for several decades. It's a crazy thing to do, and Oliver sometimes wonders about the sanity of undertaking such an adventure.

He is part of a team, who do succeed in tracking down the elusive Unicorn Bird of the title. For those who are interested, ornithologists would know the bird as the Horned Curassow (Pauxi unicornis). The discovery and census of this bird is only the beginning of the author's adventures in South America. He links up with a novice priest, Dennis, and travels around several other countries on a voyage of discovery like no previous explorer ever enjoyed.

To tell you what he got up to would spoil your read, but I can tell you that he had a lot of fun along the way, and his account will make you laugh out loud.

It takes two minutes to read the first chapter. You should do that and then decide whether it is worth reading the rest. If you take my advice, I am positive that you will want to read on to the end of the book

Joe Crespino's _In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution_ is concerned with understanding two phenomena--white southern resistance to the civil rights movement (as manifested in the state of Mississippi) and the resurgence of conservatism in the last two decades of the twentieth century--and the ways the two phenomena are linked. Existing scholarship has studied each of these issues, as Crespnio notes, and has offered hypotheses to explain the role of white conservative Mississippians in the national Republican triumphs of the 1980s, for instance. One such explanation (the southern strategy thesis) has held, to put it simply, that terms like "states' rights" became coded ways of invoking "segregation today...segregation tomorrow...segregation forever." But such a thesis ignores the complex ways that southerners earnestly initiated a suspicious stance toward a big federal government fueled by taxation and overinvolved in the lives of individuals.

Such suspicion was intimately linked, for instance, to "schools founded by Christian parents trying to provide a holistic religious orientation for their child's education" (13). It's not that religious schools didn't serve the purpose of segregating wealthier white kids from poorer black kids, but they did serve the purpose of educating white conservative children in a Christian context, a purpose white conservatives believed in and espoused whether they gave thought to the segregationist purposes or not. The point is not to defend conservative whites against racism, however, nor even to evaluate their motivations--but rather to understand the motivations in all their nuances. To ignore the conviction of these white conservatives is to simplify both the reality of conservative history and to limit the ways one might imagine addressing racist education policies.

Indeed, the importance of Crespino's intervention is to complicate scholarship on the conservative white South so that we don't continue thinking of places like Mississippi as singularly egregious in their racism and conservatism--a habit of thinking that would have us overlook the more invidious and subtle forms of national racism and conservatism. And just why should we care about Mississippi? Precisely, Crespino says, because historians and social scientists have traditionally considered it non-representative of the nation--which, Crespino shows, isn't quite the case. Indeed, Mississippi's more overtly hateful politics is, in an important sense, simply the flip side of what Crespino calls American conservatives' ambivalence "about the principle of equality in modern politics" (10)--that is, the flip side of what have become legitimate forms of exclusion and enforced inequality.

In the end, Crespino's book offers copious and convincing evidence in support of his argument. Not only that, it does so with elegant prose. This is an important contribution to scholarship on the history of race and politics, and one suspects it will become necessary reading for those who expect to advance this disciplinary conversation.

This is a more interesting book than you might think from the usual superlatives on the back cover. Because the U.S. government supported a rightwing dictatorship against Marxist guerrillas in the 1980s, and tens of thousands of civilians died in massacres, North American scholarship on Guatemala tends to suffer from political correctness. Complexities often drop out of the picture. But these did not get left out of In Search of Providence, whose author Patricia Foxen follows K'iche' Mayas from their paranoia-inducing home town in Quiché Department to their paranoia-inducing existence in Providence, Rhode Island.
The town of Xinxuc (a pseudonym) is the kind of place that the army struck preemptively, killing off Catholic catechists and their families as suspected subversives before the guerrillas could make inroads. Xinxucians began reaching Providence in the mid-1980s, after most of the army killing had ended, but rife with traumatic memories of what they had done to each other at the army's command. Ironically, the first to make it to Providence were not the most direct victims of army persecution--such people were already dead or too repressed to have the money needed to go north. Instead, the first to arrive were in large part the agents of army repression--the local civil patrol leaders who had helped the army do all that killing.
One of the first Xinxucians to reach Providence was an ex-civil patrol leader named Cipriano. He offers hospitality to newcomers in order to charge them exorbitant prices and reputedly combines pastoring an evangelical church with witchcraft, with the result that Xinxucians are still afraid of him, not just at home but in the supposed safety of Rhode Island. In both locations, Foxen stresses, victims and victimizers have continued to live side by side. Illegal migration to the U.S. has become a common project for both, with non-judgementalism as a requirement for their precarious moral community. Unfortunately, their history of fratricide and their illegal status also require lives of subterfuge that are highly vulnerable to extortion. Meanwhile, back home enormous expectations and neglected family responsibilities feed what Foxen calls a "vicious transnational rumor mill." Still, in Providence the Xinxucians have found a city that welcomes cheap foreign labor. They desire a sixty to eighty hour work week and are viewed as respectful, hardworking employees. Despite anti-immigrant backlashes at the national level, U.S. institutions have offered them far more social services than they would receive in Guatemala. So Providence has delivered on some of its promises.
Like many anthropologists, Foxen is preoccupied with the problem of identity, which I doubt is how Xinxucians describe their problems, but she uses it to pull together important issues. One is that the K'iche's of Providence tend to be very ambivalent about their hometown, switching back and forth between nostalgia, traumatic memories, and shame over their indigenous origins, which they are completely disinterested in advertising in Providence, let alone deploying for political purposes. They have little interest in the Maya movement, one reason being that most of them don't identify as Mayas. Youth in particular are more focused on what they hope to find in Providence than on revitalizing K'iche' culture, which many of them seem to view as cruel and harmful, not least because of the way the army forced neighbors to betray each other during the violence. As for the violence, the first thing that most Xinxucians say about it is that they don't want to talk about it and many have little interest in the peace process or human rights groups.
Foxen has a keen ear for the contradictions of Guatemalan existence. If you know anyone who is heading to Guatemala with her head full of human rights and Mayan culture, this book would make an excellent choice, along with Daniel Wilkinson's Silence on the Mountain.

This book shares the light, color, and poetry of Mexico with its readers. The photographer's passion for his subjects comes through with every photo. It is also an interesting view into the unique Mexican history of fiestas; the context of the traditions within daily life is very intriguing. I would highly recommend this book to those interested in either Mexico or color photography. It is a beautiful and sensitive work.

This is a wonderful book of photographs of the flora, fauna, people and places that make these parts of Central America some of the most beautiful places on earth. From the smallest of the Mayan children to the massive volcanic mountains and the magnificent scenery of Lake Atitlan - you will want to visit them through these photos again and again

In the Land of the Jaguar: South America and Its People is an amazing tour of the history, geography, people, and culture of South America for young adult readers. Featuring colorful art by award-winning illustrator Andrej Krystoforski on almost every page, In the Land of the Jaguar is divided an introductory chapter plus eleven more chapters each devoted to a different South American nation, from Argentina to Venezuela. Written in a tone that is reader-friendly without being patronizing, In the Land of the Jaguar is a welcome educational addition to grade school and children's libraries. Highly recommended.

Castañeda's study goes well beyond the common anthropological focus on the "impact" of tourism on Mayan communities, instead focusing on the complicated, historical relationships between Maya actors, anthropologists, and tourists at the well know archaeological site of Chichén Itzá, and the nearby - but not so well known - Maya community of Pisté. Castañeda's study weaves together the history of anthropology in Yucatan (with a particular focus on the works of Redfield and Steggarda), tourism (including a fascinating analysis of New Age spiritualists and Aztec revivalists during the equinox at Chichén Itzá), and local Maya actors (through an analysis of their engagement with anthropologists, tourists, and the Mexican state).

This book is groundbreaking. It collects several of Hymes' articles in one place. Important articles like Breakthrough into Performance are present and expanded. Anyone interested in the poetry of Native American verbal art should read this book. Hymes is at pains to show that a close (linguistically motivated) analysis of Native American verbal art reveals much of that poetry (whether it be the structuring of intitial particles or the uses of sound symbolism). However, for all that is important about Hymes' commentary, the most important feature is the the stories he presents. Vicoria Howard's 'Seal and Her Younger Brother Lived There' (in Chapter 8) is a modern classic. This is an important book for linguists, Native Americanists, anthropologists, and folklorists and is widely influential. It is a pity that it is currently out of print. Shame on the University of Pennsylvania Press.