For over a hundred years, Venezuelans have referred to themselves as a café con leche (coffee with milk) people. This colorful expression well describes the racial composition of Venezuelan society, in which European, African, and Indian peoples have intermingled to produce a population in which almost everyone is of mixed blood. It also expresses a popular belief that within their blended society Venezuelans have achieved a racial democracy in which people of all races live free ...

During the nineteenth century, British-owned railways grew under the protection of an Argentine ruling elite that considered railways both instruments and symbols of progress. Under this program of support for foreign enterprise, Argentina had by 1914 built the largest railway network in Latin America.During the first decades of the twentieth century, the railways were successful in following a policy of calculated disregard for Argentine interests in general. However, following th...

The masterpiece of travel writing that revolutionized the genre and made its author famous overnightAn exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land, Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite account of his journey through Patagonia teems with evocative descriptions, remarkable bits of history, and unforgettable anecdotes. Fueled by an unmistakable lust for life and adventure and a singular gift for storytelling, Chatwin treks through...

On an August night in 1994 French counterespionage officers seized the world's most wanted terrorist from a villa in the Sudan. After more than two decades on the run, Carlos "the Jackal" had finally been caged. For years he had murdered and bombed his way to notoriety, evading capture thanks to powerful backers and the blunders of Western secret services. Jackal is the definitive biography of this self-proclaimed "professional revolutionary," ladies man, and cold-blooded killer. Setting h...

A passionate argument for the geopolitical autonomy of Latin America, Carlos Fuentes's 1984 CBC Massey lectures trace the region's unique historical and cultural tensions and call upon foreign powers to cease interference in a sphere of influence they rarely fully understand.Fuentes sees the turbulence in Latin America ending not with political solutions, but economic ones. Foreshadowing the end of the Cold War, the signing and expansion of NAFTA, and the Mexican peso crisis of 199...

On the fortieth anniversary of revolution and rebellion in Chile, a searching history of the rise and fall of the world's first and only democratically elected Marxist president.On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile was deposed in a violent coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The coup had been in the works for months, even years. Shortly after giving a farewell speech to his people, Allende died of gunshot wounds-whether inflicted by his own ...

Establishing Francisco Pizarro firmly as a man of his time, Stuart Stirling shows that there was little difference in moral terms between Elizabeth I's political expediency in ordering Mary Queen of Scots's execution and Pizarro's killing of the Inca Atahualpa - a deed for which his name has been regarded with infamy.

No nation is as closely identified with the game of soccer as Brazil. For over a century, Brazil's people, politicians, and poets have found in soccer the finest expression of the nation's collective potential. Since the team's dazzling performance in 1938 at the World Cup in France, Brazilian soccer has been revered as an otherworldly blend of the effective and the aesthetic.Futebol Nation is an extraordinary chronicle of a nation that has won the World Cup five times and...

Rio de Janeiro’s is a lush, complex history that spans five centuries, and Marvelous City is the first full length retelling of that history written in English. From the beach life of the Ipanema and Copacabana to the struggles of the Rio’s infamous favelas, this is a story of contrast and contradiction. We are offered a glimpse into Rio’s high society and rich culture and are shown the endemic violence, corruption, and social disparity with which it struggles to this day. With its populist p...

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not ab...

For almost a hundred years, a nation of fugitive Africans, Indians, whites, and mixed races fought off the world’s most powerful empires in a struggle to survive in freedom.Over the span of the 17th century, the Quilombo dos Palmares melded several cultures to form its own language, religion, government, values, and way of life. Its population may have exceeded 20,000. Its last king is believed to have been an educated descendant of slaves. He took the name Zumbi—Lord of War—and bu...

After joining the Australian Merchant Navy at the age of sixteen, Dick Jolly trained as an engineer before joining the Australian National Line as a cadet. After a four-year apprenticeship, he gradually gained promotion while travelling around the Australian coast. Fascinated by the world of commercial deep-sea tugs and salvage, his first real break came in Portsmouth in 1963 when he landed a job on RFA Typhoon. Relocating to Singapore and with a Foreign Going tugmaster's qualification und...