Central America Books

After looking through a variety of books at a bookstore in Marfa, TX a few years back I settled in on this one as a reference for our week long visit to the Big Bend area of Texas. I was not disappointed back then and have yet to come across and better book that offers information about the area at large. There are certainly better books for detailed hiking routes, camping etc within the park...but for an overall reference to the whole area this is a great book.

This is an excellent book for students who are in, or who plan to enter AP US History. It's also excellent for History lovers.

I really thought this book was great. Sur eI'm only twenty years old but it was just awesome to involve myself in such a important piece of Brazilian HIstory since I am not from the area. Please pick this one up!

Robert Wuthnow is the most prolific and most interesting contemporary sociologist of religion, delving again into the ambiguous heart of American spirituality. This study is certainly the most accessible, popular analysis of religious trends since the 1950s, with a startlingly convincing interpretation of how attitudes about religion and spirituality have changed in the post-modern era. Read this and await his next study. Wuthnow's done a great service to our understanding of what sometimes seems to be a most perplexing trend from domestic religion to a kind of amorphous, inauthentic spirituality of seeking.

This is the second book I bought from Bitsy Kemper's "Out and About" series of children's books. The author continues her winning streak with this terrific book that sets out to demystify (sometimes very scary) dentist offices and gently help children understand exactly what is going on in there. Talk about scary, the tooth + cola experiment at the end of the book is enough to give any parent pause before allowing a child to drink a soda. Another A+ effort!

Alaska's National Wildlife Refuges is an eye-catching collage of fascinating facts, gorgeous color photographs of nature and animals, the history and current challenges confronting Alaska's wildlife refuges, and much, much more. An absorbing, well-researched, and deftly presented read, Alaska's National Wildlife Refuges is highly recommended for Alaskan Wildlife and Wildlife Conservation reading lists and reference collections.

This book by Robert Wuthnow, professor of social sciences and Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, draws upon extensive research, including interviews with more than 400 people involved in a diverse number of worship settings across the country. In this study, Wuthnow documented a strong connection between interest in the arts and interest in spiritual growth.

Americans are fundamentally a religious, spiritual people. 'Spirituality is deeply significant to most Americans. Despite the materialism that surrounds us, the quest to know God and to experience the sacred has not diminished,' according to Wuthnow. However, this quest does not always happen within the confines of the institutional church - increasingly, people are looking for other ways of making connections with God.

Music and art are part of this quest, but often overlooked, save in the most formal of ways. There is an undercurrent of Protestant/Puritan mistrust of images, many kinds of artwork, and many types of music. One would think in this media-saturated culture that people would not lack for images, sounds, and words to experience, but this is part of the problem, according to Wuthnow. 'Although mass media make it easy for Americans to explore the arts, the results of such explorations are often disappointing. Media-fed spirituality suffers from superficiality, while momentary inspiration fails to illumine the dark night of the soul.'

Wuthnow explores the overall religious identity of the United States, looking at statistical studies and trends since the post-World War II period. He shows growth in different ways (more people identifying themselves as conservative and as liberal religiously, more interest in spirituality vs. historic religious institutions, etc.) but also asks questions regarding the basis of these trends. Wuthnow shows that the arts play a great deal of importance in spirituality trends, including music, television, film, theatre, museum and formal 'arts' shows, and publishing. Wuthnow argues in this book 'that the vitality of America's churches may depend significantly on the public's growing interest in artistic activities.' Wuthnow admits that some may find this argument a stretch, but in his subsequent chapters, he does give interesting argument for support.

Wuthnow's text deals with issues in art, spirituality, imagination, liturgy and worship, problems of conflict between the arts and the churches, and the awakening of the artistic soul in every person. We live in a consumer society, and this approach is often found with regard to understanding the arts, too. 'Because it is easier to be consumers of art than to create it, it is all the more important to emphasise that art is a strong form of personal discipline.' As Wuthnow states, it is not that Americans are averse to work (indeed, quite the opposite), but that the arts have always been relegated to that arena of life that is a hobby, a value-added-extra not actually required, save for those very few who are professional artists.

Wuthnow gives advice to congregational leaders to be sensitive to the various issues in art, particularly the way in which people have become accustomed to different ways of seeing and knowing, and the values of democracy and individuality that the arts tend to support. The arts are important in ways that need to be carefully considered, and Wuthnow's book is a very good way of exploring these issues.

As a midwesterner, it is fascinating to read about how things might have been for those who lived here and roamed these hills long before. The author sure knows how to bring the reader into a different time smoothly; I've read the four other titles in her midwest chronology, and they are all books you'd like to curl up and read nonstop, but are so interwoven and interesting that you will savor them over many reading sessions. Also see The Red Heart, by James Thom.

As a transplant from NY to Alliance, Ohio I shortly realized what I missed most was a sense of history with my new surroundings. This book was so interesting and informative about our new hometown.

This superb book explains how well-to-do New Yorkers were reluctant to move into apartment buildings, and how that resistance was overcome through clever design and marketing tactics. Cromley begins by discussing early Parisian apartment buildings and the earliest tenements in New York City. These two historic strands came together in the 1870s, when apartment buildings for the affluent, known as 'French flats,' appeared as a new building type for New York. Cromley highlights the social history of the era - what life was really like for the people (especially the women) who lived there, as distinct from their counterparts in single-family houses. Among the still-extant classic buildings discussed are the Dakota (1884), the Osborne (1885), and the Ansonia (1902). In all, the book covers the mid-1800s to 1911; there is nothing here about the 1920s building boom following WWI. The book is generously illustrated with about 30 floor plans and about 50 engravings.