Central America Books

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.

I have had the good fortune to meet Ms. Loeffler, to hear her speak on this subject, to be involved in designing embassies, studying embassies, and also in reading this spectacular history. Although it was written a few years prior to 9/11/01, and so does not cover the current Embassy building program, her history is very complete in covering the development an American building type.

Although all countries have embassies, a United States Embassy is a special kind of building. Ms. Loeffler takes us all around the world and across over a century of time exploring how the US Embassies have developed and evolved over the years. The most interesting portions of the book are in the post World War II period to the early 1960's.

The reader is introduced to the important people in FBO (now called OBO) at the State Department. We read of the growth of the embassy program and the contribution of important American architects. We learn of the endeavors of FBO to create a world class image for America through our embassies. We learn of the challenges of designing for terrorism.

I hope Ms. Loeffler will get a chance to add chapters to this history to follow the current developments as this building type continues to develop in these post 9/11 years.

Good Book.

Gregory Knoop
Oudens + Knoop Architects

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.

Mr. Robert Potash was born at Boston Massachusetts in 1921; he obtained a BA in History in 1942; entered the USA army and retired in 1946. He returned to Harvard where he first obtained a MA in 1947 and PhD in 1953. He has devoted more than 35 years to study Argentina's Military and their relations with the Political power.

He has written three wonderful volumes, this is the first one, covering the period 1928 to 1945.
This book has had an enormous editorial success in Argentina.

Why? Well, there are many good reasons for it.
He had researched in depth the subject of his investigation. In this slippery ground he has maintained a true scientific vision, avoiding taking sides with any of the numerous factions involved. This that is so simple to state is very difficult to accomplish in a country like mine, where political passions normally blind people of every condition, class or profession.
Mr. Potash has consulted an enormous amount of documents ranging from newspapers articles to secret diplomatic telegrams. He has personally interviewed key witnesses, who have accepted to talk of the issues known by them, only with Mr. Potash. Military and Politics; Trade Union and Religious Leaders all had contributed to his research.
One big asset to his success is his very straightforward approach, his solid common sense and a basic "bona fide" attitude.

This book is of outstanding value for any scholar or student interested in Latin-American issues, mostly centered in political and military affairs. Also for any curious reader that want to understand a dramatic period of Argentina.
I strongly recommend this volume and the next two!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.

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.