Central America Books

Graham was a distinguished historian and political scientist at Vanderbilt and UC Santa Barbara. Sadly, he died just as it was time to go do a book tour in promotion of Collision Course, so the book got little publicity. As an expert on Congress and the workings of the federal bureaucracy, he is able to recreate just how we managed to stumble unintentionally into the current, highly contradictory, immigration and affirmative action systems. At a time when the nation was finally intending to help African-Americans, why did it suddenly import tens of millions of low wage workers to drive blacks from many workplaces? And if affirmative action was intended as compensation for slavery and Jim Crow, why was it extended to new immigrants, even illegal ones? And what does this portend for the future, when the "racial ratio" of beneficiaries from quotas compared to those who must shoulder the burden mounts ever higher?

It is clear from the preface that Robert Drexler loves Colombia. To that end, this allows the author the license to speak of the many wrongs in Colombia with absolute honesty. Drexler is a decent American...he correctly points out the grave mistakes in U.S. drug policy in Colombia. However, the interesting quality of this book is the insider information, the first hand accounts of history from someone serving in the American Embassy during the start of the war on drugs in the 1970's. Drexler is an outstanding diplomat. Additionally, his book is superbly written and extremely engaging.

Hats off to author Lois Markham, "Colombia: The Gateway to South America," is the best source of information on Colombia for students in grades 4-7. Markham is a clean, succinct writer who has written numerous books for children, including biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison and Helen Keller. However, Colombia is an extremely complex country and difficult to quantify.

Consequently, the author takes special care to present information in an accurate and objective fashion. Credit must also be given to Linda-Anne Rebhun, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University who contributed an expert review of the manuscript. Markham touches all the bases in this small compact (64 pages) book. She explains the geography of the four Colombias; mountains, coast, plains and tropical rain forest. She details the two main Indan groups in Colombia; the Chibcha in the plateaus near Bogota and the Tairona on the Coast.

Markham also describes how Spanish explorers found Colombia in 1499 and how early Conquistador's sought riches and not the development of a nation. The Spanish controlled Colombia for three centuries until the first independance in July 20, 1810 and the final defeat of the Spanish by Simon Bolivar on August 7, 1819. Still and all, this book is much more than geography and history information.

The author does an outstanding job reporting intimate details of the people of Colombia, of the family life, festivals and food. She also researches education and recreation inside Colombia as well as provide brief biographical essays of the great Colombian artists; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Botero, Jorge Isaacs, Jose Eustasio Rivera and Alejandro Obregon. This book also contains beautiful photos of the Colombian landscape and people, a one-page country map, a two-page synopsis of country facts, a glossary, suggestions for further reading and an index. Highly recommended.

Bert Ruiz

Well researched, well written. A fascinating read and reference if you're into colonial history.

Wow, what a find for home schooling families and history teachers!

This reprint of a 1901 source reader in American history is the first in a series of four chronological readers that provide readings by the people of that time peoiod.

In Colonial Children you will read articles by Christopher Columbus, Two Italien Gentlemen, Governor John White, Captian John Smith, Anne Bradstreet, Colonel William Byrd, John Fontaine, Cotton Mather, Govenor William Bradford, Ben Franklin and others. These prominent people have left us with their impressions of Colonial America's discovery, wilderness,the natives, its growth, its children and its schools from their own journals, books and news articles.

The book is annotated to include pertinant historical data about who the writers were or where they lived. The writings were from 1000 AD to about 1790. The series also has a book about the Revolution and the Civil war.

Ms. Schlick is the uncontested expert on native American basketry of the Columbia Plateau (eastern Washington and Oregon) and she knows and has the admiration of many--perhaps all--of the current weavers. Her book finally puts a face and name on the creators of the baskets and sees them as individual artists. I can't believe this book has been allowed to go out of print--get it while you can.

To my knowledge, this is the most rigorous biography of Columbus so far. It is basically an unknown story, since what they teach us in school is almost all of it lies and myths, for example that Queen Elizabeth sold her jewells to finance the first trip, or that everybody in Columbus' time believed the Earth was flat. By any standard, Columbus was a bit of a lunatic who probably also suffered from what todat we call bipolar disease (for example, he thought that God spoke to him directly). He seems to have been given to theatricality and emotional blackmail, but undoubtedly he was also very intelligent and a great navigator. He also had an urge for social climbing, and he longed for glory and fame more than for money. He was obsessed with finding a way to China, India and Japan by sailing West, which suited the Western European powers's commercial interests. As said before, in his time the great debate among learned people was not over the flatness or roundness of the Earth, but about its size. Columbus, by grossly underestimating it, became convinced that the voyage to Asia was within reach. Had there been no American continent, he would have been murdered or starved to death. But he was also a very courageous and brave man, and so he made possible what seemed impossible. He was a very bad politician, and his emotional diseases made him quarrel with soon former friends, which of course marred his leadership abilities. His life, very well written by Fernandez-Armesto, is a glorious, tragic and incredible epic which reads like the best adventure novels.

Huyghe begins by reviewing the growing evidence for early settlement of the Americas which is becoming the new paradigm. This establishes that civilization that had a longer time to advance than previously thought, but as Huyghe reminds us, the many differences among "native" populations suggest "the impact of transoceanic latecomers."

Readers will be fascinated by the possibility of Chinese surveyors Ta-Chang and Shu-Hai exploring America over 4000 years ago as recorded in the Chinese Shan Hai Ching texts. This isn't the voyage detailed in Gavin Menzies' book 1421: The year China Discovered America. As he does elsewhere, Huyghe usually doesn't shy away from controversy, here noting the problems with dating and difficulties with matching the text with real locales. The text does reveal locations and peoples that could very well be on this side of the Pacific.

Northeast of Toronto in Peterbourgh is an inscription attributed to early Norse traders 3500 years ago. Such voyages would explain where all of the tons of copper mined from the Lake Superior region went to: Bronze Age Europe. The author then reviews a large sampling of inscriptions found around the Western Hemisphere attributed to Celts, Libyans and others.

He includes more intriguing Chinese voyages, to possible Roman contacts to Polynesians who seem to have left their mark. Plant life found in countries other than their origin. Architecture and artifacts nearly identical to that of foreign lands. One begins to wonder why more scholars don't take such early voyages seriously. And of course, no book like this would be complete without the voyage of Irish monk St. Brendan.

If any voyage should be taken seriously, perhaps Brendan's is it. We know monks fled Ireland from the Vikings and traveled throughout the Atlantic. We know the Vikings found monks in Greenland. And Viking sagas detail Irish found in North America. We made the mistake of not trusting the Norse sagas once before.

This is only a sampling of the voyages of pre-Columbus explorations that Huyghe surveys in his book. This compendium is a must for those interested in America's prehistory. Hopefully the author will produce an updated edition, but until then this book remains an "indispensable history."

This book encompasses a a variety of short attention-grabbing and motivating short coming of age stories. The book is slpit up into 4 categories each of which contain about 4-5 stories. Those include "Fitting In" , "Family Matters", "Affairs of The Heart", and "Crisis." My personal favorite has to be A Bag of Oranges. It is worth it just to buy the book for that story! The book not only includes this but 20 more coming of age short stories. This book really stands out from the rest! Armed with this knowledge, I would say making the decision to buy this book is a no-brainer. Buy the book and an extra copy to give to a friend! That friend will thank you!

I really like this book a lot! It has a great deal of information on Oxford and Dudley, as well as explanations as to how a small community went from a farming town into a mill town. Great buy!