by Peter Hulme (2000)
"In 1877 a US ornithologist stumbled across a small indigenous Caribbean population, the Caribs, still living in a remote part of the small island of Dominica. His account of his stay among the Caribs started a trickle of visitors which grew to a steady stream and is now in the full flood of mass tourism. Remnants of Conquest offers an account and analysis of these visitors' writings as they struggle to understand the way of life of a twentieth-century indigenous community, inhabitants of a postcolonial world." "The visitors who have followed the ornithologist's footsteps include the novelist Jean Rhys, who was fulfilling a childhood ambition, a colonial official who expected to meet Red Indians in warpaint, a British naval officer who bombarded the Reserve with starshells, and an anthropologist who settled on the island with a Carib woman." "Through this close focus on a small place extensively written about, Remnants of Conquest raises crucial questions about postcolonial perceptions of indigeneity."--Jacket.
Linda Jakobson
First as a teacher and then as a Finnish foreign correspondent living in China, author Linda Jakobson describes the changes that have been taking place over the past ten years. A result of hundreds of interviews with Chinese of all ages and of all ranks, this personal, wide-reaching, and intelligent book speaks on several topics with some startling conclusions.
David Thomson
"At once examining and experiencing Nevada, Thomson finds its people, its landscape, and the unexpected questions it inspires equally provocative. He shows us the historical Nevada - a classic Wild West, attracting Spanish missionaries, Mormons, uprooted Native Americans, explorers, and silver miners - and the contemporary influx of cultists, druggies, survivalists, and fortune hunters whose quests lead directly to the gaming table."--BOOK JACKET. "We see Nevada as a place of no-holds-barred experimentation, both social (gambling, prostitution, easy divorce, no taxes) and scientific (nuclear testing and storage of nuclear waste). We see suburbanites rubbing shoulders with sybarites; the natural beauty of Lake Tahoe, shadowed by the financial edifice of tourism; criminals, entertainers, and hotel impresarios sharing dreams of glory (and the memory of Bugsy Siegel and Frank Sinatra)."--BOOK JACKET. "In Nevada is a revelation of the gambler's mix of hope and anxiety, of the isolation and closeness, the beauty and banality, the fact and fancy, at the heart of the state - and the state of mind - of Nevada."--BOOK JACKET.
Robert Smith Bader
An interpretative study of the image of Kansas, focusing primarily on the twentieth-century, and looking at how the national reputation of the state has wavered from being renowned for cultural aggressiveness and societal confidence to being perceived as drab and backward.
Joe C. Truett and Daniel W. Lay
East Texas was once a land rich in woods and wildlife, with contiguous miles of upland forests, prairies, grassy glades, and fertile bottomlands. Beneath the shade of magnolias and white oaks and towering pines, the woods came to life with foxes, deer, raccoons, gray squirrels, wild turkeys.