Responding to pressure from the United States, the Colombian government in 1996 intensified aerial fumigation of coca plantations in the western Amazon region. This crackdown on illicit drug cultivation sparked an uprising among the region’s cocaleros, small-scale coca producers and harvest workers. More than 200,000 campesinos marched that summer to protest the heightened threat to their livelihoods. Between the Guerrillas and the State is an ethnographic analysis of the...

Neanderthals are at the center of this compelling narrative by Europe's leading anthropologist, not because they were our ancestors but because they were not. Members of a parallel humanity that evolved in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, they were in direct competition with Cro-Magnons -- modern humans. The way Neanderthals lived and the reasons why they disappeared 50,000 years ago offer a surprising mirror in which we can examine and learn more about ourselves. Illustrated, co...

The Colombian activist Juan Gregorio Palechor (1923–1992) dedicated his life to championing indigenous rights in Cauca, a department in the southwest of Colombia, where he helped found the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca. Recounting his life story in collaboration with the Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno, Palechor traces his political awakening, his experiences in national politics, the disillusionment that resulted, and his turn to a more radical activism aimed at confronting ...

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction “with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller”(The New York Times) that unravels the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century—the story of the legendary British explorer who ventured into the Amazon jungle in search of a fabled civilization and never returned."[Grann is] one of the preeminen...

The groundbreaking, "seminal work" (Time) on intelligent design that dares to ask, was Darwin wrong?In 1996, Darwin's Black Box helped to launch the intelligent design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. It sparked a national debate on evolution, which continues to intensify across the country. From one end of the spectrum to the other, Darwin's Black Box has established itself as t...

Why do humans differ from other primates? What do those differences tell us about human evolution? Elaine Morgan gives a revolutionary hypothesis that explains our anatomic anomalies: why we walk on two legs, why we are covered in fat, why we can control our rate of breathing? The answers point to one conclusion: millions of years ago our ancestors were trapped in a semi-aquatic environment. In presenting her case Elaine Morgan forces scientists to question accepted theories of human evolu...

Written In Stone is the first book to tell the story of the fossils that mapped out evolutionary history. 150 years after Darwin's Origin was published, scientists are beginning to understand how whales walked into the sea, how horses stood up on their tip-toes, how feathered dinosaurs took to the air, and how our ancestors came down from the trees.

The inside story of the thirty-three Chilean miners trapped 2,300 feet underground that captivated the worldOn August 5, 2010, a tunnel in the gold and copper mine in the Atacama Desert in Chile collapsed, with all of its miners trapped underground. For days, the families waited breathlessly as percussion drills searched out signs of life. Finally, a note came back from below--the miners were alive and safe. Now the rescue crew needed to burrow through 2300 feet of ...

Experts believe that Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country and its seventh largest economy, will be one of the most important global powers by the year 2030. Yet far more attention has been paid to the other rising behemoths Russia, India, and China. Often ignored and underappreciated, Brazil, according to renowned, award-winning journalist Michael Reid, has finally begun to live up to its potential, but faces important challenges before it becomes a nation of substantial global sign...

Why do we age? How do we age? These questions have baffled scientists for centuries and remain unresolved. The answer to the "how" question is critical to our ability to successfully prevent and treat age-related diseases like cancer and heart disease that now cause the majority of all deaths in the developed world. Because of major difficulties in experimentally determining causes of aging, the answer to the "why" question is critical to guiding research efforts directed toward identifyin...

Revised and updated: the definitive primary-source history of US involvement in General Pinochet's Chilean coup—"the evidence is overwhelming" ( The New Yorker).Published to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet's infamous September 11, 1973, military coup in Chile, this updated edition of The Pinochet File reveals the shocking, formerly secret record of the US government's complicity with atrocity in a foreign country. ...

In 1820, a sperm whale attacked and sunk the Whaleship Essex. 2000 miles off the coast of South America, the crew knew it would be a true feat to survive and make it to shore--any shore.It’s story became legendary; Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about it; Edgar Allen Poe incorporated details of it in his only novel; and, most notoriously of them all, it served as the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.This account retraces the history of one of the most famous shipwrecks ...