'Some part of me believed I would become a more complete person if I spoke Irish, more in tune with my roots, my identity, my very being.' 'A hugely enjoyable linguistic travelogue that is also a sort of love story: full of passion, lightness, but, also, commitment. McCaughan's engaging prose is a joy to read. Discover the Sex Pistols' connection with Cúil Aodha and many another startling fact about the Irish language. This journey towards a homecoming will touch many hearts.' Joseph O'Con...

In August 2004, the Venezuelan public came out in record numbers to deliver an overwhelming vote of confidence. After many attempts to unseat him, Hugo Chåvez, the former military man who took the country first by coup and then by ballot, again emerged as the people’s choice. It was, in his words, "a victory for the people of Venezuela."Yet despite Chåvez’s successes, having defended his post in six referenda, two elections and against one failed coup, Venezuela—one of the world’s l...

A New York Times Notable Book of the year.Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution.Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the h...

Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, is one of the most popular writers of the last 50 years. Gerald Martin's superb achievement is to reveal the gritty, fascinating, and frequently humorous reality behind the books. While completely immersing himself in García Márquez's world, Martin never loses his critical perspective as he recounts a life that is as gripping and revealing as the writer's powerful journalism, and as complex and...

How Wall Street Created a Nation: The Untold History of the Panama Canal narrates the dramatic and gripping account of the beginnings of the Panama Canal led by a group of Wall Street speculators with the help of Teddy Roosevelt’s government. The result of four years of research, the book offers the real story of how the United States obtained the rights to build the Canal through financial speculation, fraud, and an international conspiracy that brought down a French republic and a Colomb...

The convergence of Cortés and Montezuma is the most emblematic event in the birth of what would come to be called "America."Landing on the Mexican coast on Good Friday, 1519, Hernán Cortés felt himself the bearer of a divine burden to conquer and convert the first advanced civilization Europeans had yet encountered in the West. For Montezuma, leader of the Mexicans, April 21, 1519 (known in their sophisticated astronomical system as 9 Wind Day) was the precise date...

That the people who inhabited the country at the time of the Spanish conquest had a multiplicity of gods there can be no doubt. The primitive form of worship, with time and by the effect of invasions from outside, had disappeared, and been replaced by that of their great men and women, who were deified and had temples raised to their memory, as we see, for example, in the case of Moo, wife and sister of Chaacmol, whose shrine was built on the high mound on the north side of the large squar...

Oak Island Unearthed! Third Canadian Edition by John O. O’BrienThis is a story of the world’s oldest continuous mystery about Oak Island - of supposed treasure left before 1795 by Spanish, French or British pirates, or the Knight’s Templars/Holy Grail, Christopher Columbus, returning British armies after the American War of Independence and a host of other speculations ... all that makes for a great story, many books, and a TV series ... well known here and around the world. But O’...

This handbook addresses words in all their multifarious aspects and brings together scholars from every relevant discipline to do so. The many subjects covered include word frequencies; sounds and sound symbolism; the structure of words; taboo words; lexical borrowing; words in dictionaries and thesauri; word origins and change; place and personal names; nicknames; taxonomies; word acquisition and bilingualism; words in the mind; word disorders; and word games, puns, and puzzles. Words are...

This accessible, state-of-the-art review of Mayan hieroglyphics and cosmology also serves as a tribute to one of the field's most noted pioneers.The core of this book focuses on the current study of Mayan hieroglyphics as inspired by the recently deceased Mayanist Linda Schele. As author or coauthor of more than 200 books or articles on the Maya, Schele served as the chief disseminator of knowledge to the general public about this ancient Mesoamerican culture, simi...

Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar is the ideal reference source for all speakers and learners of Welsh. Focusing on contemporary spoken Welsh, itpresents the complexities of the language in a concise and readable form. Common grammatical patterns and parts of speech are discussed in detail and without jargon and extensive cross references make the book comprehensive and easy to use.Now in its third edition, the Grammar has been thoroughly revised and updated t...

Drawing on previously unknown or unassimilated sources, Donald C. Hodges here presents an entirely new interpretation of the politics and philosophy of Augusto C. Sandino, the intellectual progenitor of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution.The first part of the book investigates the political sources of Sandino's thought in the works of Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Proudhon, Bakunin, Most, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Ricardo Flores Magón, and Lenin—a mixed legacy of pre-Marxist and non-Marx...