Central America Books

Reviewer: luismendez@codetel.net.do from DOMINICAN REPUBLIC It is the first book that i have read which is written by an american who knows what he is talking about. very serious and concern treatment of topics. i like specially the part about latin american writers and their changing ideology

LUIS MENDEZ crazzyteacher@hotmail.com

It is the first book that i have read which is written by an american who knows what he is talking about. very serious and concern treatment of topics. i like specially the part about latin american writers and their changing ideology.

LUIS MENDEZ

The author never jumps to conclusions, but slowly, gathering the clues to lay out a history of the Mayan calendar. It is up to you to decide whether his logic is correct, I could not find any flaws. As the book goes you pick up plenty of astronomical, geographical and historical facts. Very engaging.
The book has gone out of print, but is now posted in a digital format on the author's website. Still it is sad that it did not get wider attention.

Vincent Malmstrom has written a wonderfully entertaining book stuffed full of facts on the Mesoamerican systems of calendrical accounting. I had no idea the history of their calendars went so far back, nor that they were so widely used by such a great number of civilizations. His theories fill in where the facts leave off, as most studies on ancient cultures must, and the facts support his hypotheses. Malmstrom's theories on the origin of the calendar are quite different in some aspects than those of scholars before him -- one major difference is that he does not believe the Olmec developed the calendar. I don't want to ruin any surprises for a reader -- and there are some for those who accept the commonly supported theories of the Olmec as the "father" of all subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations -- so I will stop with just one more comment: If you have any interest in Mesoamerica or the cultures of the Zoque, Olmec, Zapotec, Maya, Mixtec, Toltec or Aztec, GET THIS BOOK!

I was raised in Santo domingo and was 11 years old at the time of the revolution. We were also some of those "evacuated" by the U.S. Navy from the hotel. We lived at Avenida Independencia, esquina Wenceslao Alvarez avenue he speaks of in page #207 in the paperback book. We were also there when Trujillo was killed and we spent the following school year in San juan while things settled down. Dad of course stayed with house and business. The names and memories all cascade through my mind. My dad was the Volkswagen and Studebaker dealer in Santo Domingo, and he had to sell the dreaded black VW Beetles the secret police drove, which for a good period of time cost him a lot of business with the locals for obvious reasons. Sadly that same 1965 revolution took my father's life later that year from the stress of remaining in the island to guard house and business, while his wife and four children were away in Puerto Rico. He was only 46 years old. The book is written very well, and do not let him fool you, his spanish had to be good as he described the island and people expertly. It was hard for me to read as you might imagine. After 5-10 pages I would have to stop and let all the memories pass. I was last there three years ago, and much has changed, from the incredibly horrible traffic to the tall sky scrapers that dot the Capital city. One thing has not changed however, and that is the pervasive poverty and same crooked governments who line their and their friends pockets as the country continues to suffer. I have always been asked what it was like to grow there, so I am ordering 4-5 additional copies to give as gifts to those so inclined to read it, I will also send a copy to my extended "family" in Santo Domingo. These are friends I grew up with, and to this day I call them the brothers and sisters that they are to us.

This book is incredible. MacKinnon follows family history in this incredible piece of literary nonfiction. His uncle was a Catholic priest, murdered by police officers in the Dominican Republic in the 60s. The police were immediately shot by an army officer. Forty years later he tries to unravel what actually happened.

The thing that blew me away most was that I could feel him struggle with a foreign language in a different country. I have lived overseas as well, and his writing took me right back to the feeling of pressure inside my head, as I tried to understand. As the book progresses, the pressure diminishes. Truly spectacular writing.

I tried to take it slow, to savour the book, but I finally gave up and tore through it in a day and a half. I am going to reread it this winter.

All our states have wetlands. But the wetlands in the Chihuahuan, Great Basin, Mojave and Sonoran deserts play a much more important role than wetlands in the east. For northern birds and mountain animals migrate down south to these deserts for food, mating and water. They can't count on water from rainfall. The area's so hot rain dries back into the air. That's exactly why they're called deserts. The original word in Latin means abandoned or forsaken. And deserts have been abandoned or forsaken by water.

But that's in terms of rain water. In fact, these deserts have water. The water's found in areas called wetlands. Wetland water comes from three sources. One's mountain snow melting in spring and fall. Much of that water stays in mountain bogs, lakes and ponds dammed by beavers. But some always trickles into the deserts during the summer. Another's the underground water table. That's becoming a problem. More cattle-grazing also means more cows drinking water. More people working, playing and living in the areas means more Americans using water.

The last source is area rivers, such as the Rio Grande and the San Pedro, San Juan, Escalante and Colorado rivers. All the great area rivers start out as source number 1. For they trace back to melted snow of the Cascade, Rocky, San Juan and Sierra Nevada mountains. River water's also becoming a problem. More cattle tanks, dams, reservoirs and stock ponds change river water levels and routes. Changed water levels and routes will change living conditions for area plants, bugs, birds and animals.

Specifically, two main types of plant communities grow up along southwest rivers. One's a mixed broadleaf of willow, walnut, sycamore, cottonwood, ash and alder. That's usually found along rocky streams. The other's a forest of cottonwoods and willows. That's usually found on flooded sand, gravel and clay plains. But non-native Russian olive in the north and tamarisk in the south are giving native cottonwoods and willows a beating. White pelicans and sandhill cranes see native trees as familiar landmarks of desert wetland homes. In fact, cottonwoods and willows are homes to more breeding birds than anywhere else in North America. Breeding birds and their babies find the healthest foods, full of proteins and vegetables, in cottonwood and willow leaves full of insects.

Desert wetlands make up only 3.5% of total U.S. lands. But after tropical rainforests, they're the world's second largest supporters of plant, bug, bird and animal life. Also, they're homes to 50% of all our endangered animals. It all comes down to link after link between native plants, bugs, birds and animals built up over time in one area.

Photographer Lucien Niemeyer and writer Thomas Lowe Fleischner have come up with an impressive book. The writing's clearly organized. The photographs are stunning. The examples are to-the-point. The last chapter's followed by a list of all plants and animals covered by the book. The book ends with a helpful set of notes and a current bibliography.

Without drama and with supported facts, this team has given us what we need to know about that problem area where people and nature are closing in on each other. It's what Virginia Tech master gardening calls the wildlands-urban interface between people and nature. That's the big concern nowadays. And it's not going to go away.

Lucien Niemeyer and Thomas Lowe Fleischner's Desert Wetlands is a 'must' for any collection focused on ecology and desert environments. 'Desert wetlands' may seem an inconsistent term, but there are indeed wetlands in the desert, as photographer Lucian Niemeyer and environmental scientist Thomas Fleischner demonstrate. While Niemeyer photographs such wetlands in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, among other states, naturalist Fleischner provides stories about water and his encounters with desert wetlands during his field research in the southwest.

This book will be useful to students of immigration, history, and political science. Tichenor shows us the complex set of connections between political institutions, interest groups, and political actors that combined to produce policy outcomes.

One of his most interesting findings regards the unusual fact that while most Americans favor tighter restrictions on immigration, politicians nowadays rarely enact such laws. Instead they usually increase immigration levels despite broad public opposition. Tichenor argues that this is because a "policy regime" has been structured over time, encompassing the immigration committees in both houses of Congress, and including the preferences of strong pro-immigration interest groups, that pushes for liberalization of immigration laws.

Only rarely in American history do restrictionists succeed in limiting immigration, most notably from the 1920's until the landmark 1964 law that set off the wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia we still experience today. Tichenor's work is easily accessible, well-written, and thought provoking.

My friends at CHIRLA gave me this book and at 300 pages of small print it looked intimidating so I put off reading it for a few weeks. When I finally picked it up I found it to be well organized, informative and a compelling read.

Tichenor tells the history of immigration politics in the America by showing the shifting alliances of groups and their interest in the level of immigration and the rights that should be given to immigrants. He uses a simple two by two grid throughout the book to illustrate this changing alliance. For instance the labor movement went from pro-immigrant around 1890 to anti-immigrant for most of the 20th century and became pro-immigrant again in the 1980's.

Dividing Lines also shows difference in the politics of legislation versus enforcement and between what the public says they want and what the politicians actually enact. For instance the book shows why we have laws mandating employer sanctions and yet we have almost no enforcement of those laws by the executive branch.

This book is an excellent read about the politics of immigration and should be considered by everyone who wants to understand the current state of immigration politics.

A hot topic covered by someone who really knows the business. Tells the whole story, including the challenges. The complex topic of privitization is detailed and thought provoking. Takes the topic of international business to new depths.

I enjoyed Miller's book because it examines privatization from a business perspective rather than the usual view of government agencies and multilateral organizations. He clearly describes the relative risks and rewards of dealing with former government owned firms and the strategies that produce the best results.

This is a fun and interesting book! It's stuffed with pictures and tells the story of Everett from the first canon fire to the riots to the mills... An informative read, easy to get into and very entertaining. Perfect for someone looking back on the history of Everett, or for schools and homeschoolers, or even just to get to know a place you didn't know before.

Not large, but chock full of great historic photos of Everett Washington. The writer has a witty, occasionally snarky, and always entertaining way of telling the story of town's rise from muddy lumber town to thriving port with all the oddities, foibles and horrors that came along the way. Remarkably fun and informative. Keep your eyes peeled for the "Delicate Underlovlies!" A terrific volume for the photos alone.

For physicists, this book makes engaging reading. Feynman diagrams are now well established, and have been so for decades. They give crucial understanding to some very intricate equations in high energy physics.

Kaiser has performed some indepth historical research on the early postwar years. When Feynman had his seminal insights into how these graphical techniques could simplify a tangle of equations. Today, with a pervasive web and instantaneous email between researchers across the globe, it is a very different environment. Then, a compelling idea still primarily had to be transmitted by the traditional method of inperson presentations, like seminars and conferences and actual letters.

The book is as much about the sociology of science as it is about the physics devised by Feynman. Granted, key sections may be intelligible only to physicists. These delve into the physics and equations of propagators and Hamiltonians in quantum mechanics. But most of the book can be gainfully read by non-physicists, who might want more details about Richard Feynman's life.

Storied names of 20th century physicists are also generously scattered throughout the book. Bethe [Feynman's PhD advisor], Dyson, Gell-Mann, Salam and others.

This is a very engaging book on at least two different levels: as a book about history, and as a book about physics.

The book is an early adopter of a couple of new and intriguing techniques in history of science. Instead of trying to identify theories or paradigms, it focuses on physicists' "paper tools" --the techniques they used for calculations. Also, it emphasizes the importance of pedagogy -- a subject's transmission through textbooks, clusters of professors/postdocs/grad students and, importantly in this case, informal contact.

Feynman introduced his diagrams at a small, private conference in spring 1948. He didn't publish about them until September 1949; but by then they were already widely used in studying quantum electrodynamics, albeit not well-understood. Kaiser traces the roles of Freeman Dyson and a cadre of postdocs from Princeton's IAS in spreading the diagrams on both sides of the Atlantic. As each researcher pieced together his (or occasionally her) own understanding of the diagrams, he transmitted it -- together with many idiosyncrasies -- to his students. A neat figure in the book compares the styles of diagram used by professors and students at major universities. Students tended to follow their teachers, but no two institutions had the same style. (Kaiser also traces the spread of the diagrams in Japan and Russia, two physics communities that were largely isolated from Western researchers.)

The result was a Balkanization of styles and interpretations of the diagrams. This had already begun with Dyson's first articles in February 1949. Feynman had viewed the diagrams as intuitively depicting the behavior of particles in spacetime. Kaiser connects the diagrams' enduring appeal to their similarity to particle tracks in bubble-chamber photos, which makes a viewer feel that the diagrams are a realistic picture of what's going on. Dyson, on the other hand, regarded them as a geometric algorithm for keeping track of terms in a perturbative expansion in QED; he was also the first to promote viewing them in an abstract, topological way.

These centrifugal tendencies became elaborated and diversified in the 1950s and 1960s. All sorts of new diagrams sprung up, with different kinds of lines, arrows, geometries and "blobs" -- but eventually all were called "Feynman diagrams". The uses of the diagrams also diverged, from being a tool of quantum field theory to being a tool for its (attempted) overthrow. Among many other fascinating stories, Kaiser describes the UC Berkeley "particle democracy" movement, which used geometrical permutations of the diagrams to make a case that the distinction between "elementary" and "composite" particles is false. (By similar means, the school of Lev Landau came to regard diagrams as more fundamental than field theory.)

Kaiser does a great job of providing the historical context of what problems each group was trying to address, including adapting the diagrams to studying QED in condensed matter as well as other QFTs, such as the strong interaction. Along the way, you'll learn a little about Regge theory, pomerons, the Mandelstam representation, the analytical S-matrix, and other approaches to QFT that still surface today in corners of the arXiv. You won't find these developments described in other histories of the period, such as Schweber's "QED" or Pais's ultra-terse "Inward Bound". Kaiser's book is indispensible for understanding diagrams in the physics literature from the 1950s and 1960s and perhaps later. (And since it's much shorter than Schweber and less oracular than Schwinger, it's a good introduction to the second half of the Dover collection of QED papers, which Schwinger edited and introduced.)

Readers more interested in QFT than in history might be put off by Kaiser's at times dry style, and especially by the critical theory-tinged first chapter (influenced by the science studies ramblings of Bruno Latour et al.) But don't be put off. While much of the history Kaiser describes has been forgotten, it survives in the eclectic style of "Feynman diagrams" you'll find in many textbooks today -- e.g., Itzykson & Zuber, Ryder, Mattuck, and A. Zee's recent "Nutshell", which mixes diagrammatic styles with an especially breezy abandon. In all of these, turn a few pages past the dutiful description of the 1949 Feynman-Dyson rules and you'll start seeing diagrams about QCD, or diagrams with blobs or double-arrows or other innovations, most of which won't be explained systematically. Kaiser's book will help you to decipher some of these diagrammatic puzzles. Even better, it may make you sensitive to some of the uses, interpretations, and ambiguities of diagrams that you might never have considered otherwise.

I bought this book expecting it to be mostly about the eight steamboats but found it to be several stories in one.

The typical Great Lakes book focuses on the boats (ships if they were on saltwater) or things like storms on the lakes etc. This book focuses on the crew, their personalities, eccentricities, their labor (working in the kitchen on a tour boat, painting, scraping, hosing off the decks of freighters, loading and unloading), their idle time on and off the boat (drinking, exploring the ports, trying to find girls) and to a large part the author's life, feelings and struggles. This is not to say that there are not any descriptions of the boats. However the emphasis is on where the crew works and lives (the bunk rooms, engine rooms and galleys as opposed to what you see when a ship passes by).

The author tells his story of a bright kid from a blue-collar family working on the boats to pay his way thorough Monteith College (part of Wayne State). He relates the background of Motown music, the Bob-Lo Island amusement park, the Detroit riots and the draft. On shore we hear about his friends that have been sent to Viet Nam, others in college trying to avoid being sent there.

In spite of the subtitle on the front cover--Sailing Though the Sixties-I thought that this was going to be mostly about sailing on the great lakes. At first I found the discussion of the draft, Viet Nam, such as the authors coming of age etc to be an intrusion on the usual sailing book, but later felt that this was a very good story in itself.

This is the author's first book. It is a very well told and personal story. I would recommend it to those who are interested in Great Lakes shipping and particularly those interested in how it feels to be working on a ship. He gives a very good account of what it was like to be coming of age in the 1960's. Each chapter makes you want to read the next. Its approximately 300 pages went by quickly

This book reads as a memoir. Anyone who came of age during the sixties, relates to the uncertainty of that period or would like to learn more will enjoy this adventure.
The author pulls you into his volatile world, as the youngest child in a family of eight he is as confused and free as the time he is growing up in. He seeks to escape the political and economic turmoil in Detroit, Michigan and hops aboard a freighter.
He chronicles the adventures he has both on-shore and off-shore and in the end it is the odd characters he meets along the way that steer him back to shore to grow up like a normal young man.
Livingston's book is filled with the naivety of a young person trying to find their way. In the end you will be happy that he does.

Love it love it love it. I like how the author describe Central America and Zamorano. It might need some more extra editing, but not critical.

This book contains fascinating history of Central America, Honduras, & Zamorano. Of interest even if you were not a graduate of this institution. Not well known in the US, but its history and reputation in Latin America are legendary. Very worthwhile read.