by David Yetman (1998)
"From the very first, Teachive captivated me," David Yetman writes in this ethnography of a Mayo Indian peasant village in Sonora, Mexico. Over the centuries, the Mayos have evolved a profound union between the monte, or thornscrub forest, and their cultural life. With the assistance of resident Vicente Tajia and others, Yetman describes the region's plant and animal life and recounts the stories and traditions that animate the monte for the Mayos. That folk culture, so critical to their identity, is under assault by the global economic revolution. A passionate observer and chronicler, Yetman analyzes how galloping capitalism is destroying the monte and thus eroding traditional Mayo society. Listing Indian, Spanish, and scientific terms, an appendix glosses plants used by the Mayos in the Teachive area.
Marc Edelman and Joanne Kenen
Contains primary source material. "The wide range of materials in this volume includes many original contributions, essays by Costa Ricans published for the first time in English, and secret memos by Oliver North's operatives. These readings provide a full, perceptive, and otherwise unavailable perspective of this diminutive but important Central American democracy."--Back cover.
Bill Hosokawa
"This history of the Japanese American Citizens League was written not only for its thirty thousand members but also to answer JACL's critics, notably the Sansei--third-generation Japanese Americans--many of whom believe their fathers should have resisted the Evacuation during World War ll. Did JACL chart a wise course of cooperation with the federal government, or did it betray American principles and its own constituents by urging them to accept evacuation to U.S. Army-operated concentration camps? One of the most important purposes of the book is to take the Sansei back to those tragic, controversial years and show them exactly what their fathers confronted. Not only did they meet that crisis in what seemed the only way feasible at the time, but JACL has fought for full rights of citizenship for Japanese Americans ever since the war with remarkable success--an extraordinary record of accomplishment despite limited resources and membership. This book is for everyone concerned about ways in which Congress and the Supreme Court can fail to uphold the Constitution, and for those who will appreciate the story of one minority group's total--and nonviolent--victory over discrimination."--Dust jacket.
David Halberstam
The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse
For over a century now, America has dominated global politics and the global imagination. Yet as the dollar declines, inequality increases, rates of consumption are unprecedented and American unilateralism comes under fire, such hegemony is increasingly unsustainable. In this provocative new book, leading sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse asks whether it?s possible for America to chart a different course.