Best Surinamese History

This abridgment of the Prices' acclaimed 1988 critical edition is based on Stedman's original, handwritten manuscript, which offers a portrait at considerable variance with the 1796 classic. Richard Price is the author of twelve books, including an earlier work on the Saramaka people, the award-winning First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People .

Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world’s money supply. “Richard Price has had a long and torrential romance with the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, exploring them and himself through a harvest of mythologies that dissolve all boundaries of time and geographical location. With Tooy as guide and mentor, across three centuries of African exile and resettlement in the Americas, we revisit the recent or forgotten spaces of Price’s near forty years of patient, scholarly research. It is an astonishing performance, rendering these treasures of anthropological materials in a narrative style as lucid and cordial as the best contemporary fiction.”. (George Lamming, author of The Pleasures of Exile 2007-07-02). “A tour de force—a tightly argued, incisive contribution to the newly rekindled debate about the role of Africa in the history and social imaginary of African American societies. This work constitutes Price's most complete synthesis of Saramaka worldview to date, and serves as an enduring testament to over 30 years of painstaking, diligent, and innovative research. Price's anthropological imaginaire and his extraordinary eloquence have woven the field notes and transcripts from differing geographic and temporal contexts into an absorbing travelogue."

Resisting this cruelty first in small numbers, then in an ever increasing torrent, slaves began to form outlaw communities until nearly one out of every ten Africans in Suriname was helping to build rebel villages in the jungle. In a unique historical experiment, Richard Price presents this history by weaving together four voices: the vivid historical accounts related by the slaves' descendants, largely those of Alabi's own villagers, the Saramaka; the reports of the often exasperated colonial officials sent to control the slave communities; the otherworldly diaries of the German Moravian missionaries determined to convert the heathen masses; and the historian's own, mediating voice. Among their only zealous converts was Alabi, who stood nearly alone in his attempts to bridge the cultural gap between black and white―defiantly working to lead his people on the path toward harmony with their former enemies. Based on more than 25 years of research, Price uses contrasting accounts of oral testimonies of modern Saramakas, handwritten inscriptions of 18th-century German-Moravian missionaries, and official documents of the Dutch colonial administrators to good effect.

By the New York Times bestselling author of Manson , the comprehensive, authoritative, and tragic story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre—the largest murder-suicide in American history. In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. The level of research and detail in The Road to Jonestown is the best ever, and really lets readers understand not only what happened, but how and why. “Jeff Guinn offers what might be the most complete picture to date of this tragic saga, and of the man who engineered it. The result is a disturbing portrait of evil — and a compassionate memorial to those taken in by Jones’ malign charisma.” (Kevin Canfield The San Francisco Chronicle ). Guinn's exhaustive research, shrewd analysis, and engaging prose illuminate a monstrous yet tragic figure--and the motives of those who lost their souls to him." The book reads like a thriller, each page forcing your attention to the next as the Peoples Temple slowly slides from groundbreaking progressivism toward madness.” (Kevin J. Hamilton Seattle Times ). "A vivid, fascinating revisitation of a time and series of episodes fast receding into history even as their forgotten survivors still walk among us."

While history has recast Bingham as a villain who stole both priceless artifacts and credit for finding the great archeological site, Mark Adams set out to retrace the explorer’s perilous path in search of the truth—except he’d written about adventure far more than he’d actually lived it. “Adams deftly weaves together Inca history, Bingham's story, and his own less heroic escapade....Those favoring a quirkier retelling [of Bingham's exploits] will relish Mr. Adam's wry, revealing romp through the Andes.”— The Wall Street Journal.

The exclusive, official story of the survival, faith, and family of Chile's thirty-three trapped miners. “Weaving together the drama of the miners' harrowing ordeal below ground with the anguish of families and rescuers on the surface, Tobar delivers a masterful account of exile and human longing, of triumph in the face of all odds. Taut with suspense and moments of tenderness and replete with a cast of unforgettable characters, Deep Down Dark ranks with the best of adventure literature. As Tobar works his way through each miner's recovery, the TV headlines recede from our memory, and a more delicate series of portraits emerges.” ― Noah Gallagher Shannon, The Washington Post. Whether the story is completely new to you, or if you were one of the millions glued to the news reports and wondering, will they make it--physically, emotionally, spiritually--you'll be greatly rewarded to learn how they did.” ― Mac McClelland, The New York Times Book Review. A novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, [Tobar] combines a historian's eye for context with a gifted storyteller's ear for minor-key character traits . “If Dante's Inferno was a real place, it would look and feel like the subterranean fever dream Héctor Tobar describes in Deep Down Dark . Taking us into the post-apocalyptic landscape of Chile's Atacama Desert and guiding us through the labyrinthine hell of the world's most famous mine accident, Tobar's taut narrative plumbs the depths not only of the mine itself, but of the 33 trapped miners' hearts and souls as they fight for life, and reconcile themselves--first, to death, and then to the far more challenging task of surviving. “Héctor Tobar takes us so far down into the story and lives of the Chilean miners that his reconstruction of a workplace disaster becomes a riveting meditation on universal human themes. “In this masterful dissection of the 2010's dramatic sixty-nine day ordeal by thirty-three trapped Chilean miners, Héctor Tobar weaves a suspenseful narrative that moves back and forth between the waking nightmares of the buried men, and those of their families on the earth's surface. “It's almost hard to believe that Héctor Tobar wasn't himself one of the trapped Chilean miners, so vivid, immediate, terrifying, emotional, and convincing is his Homeric narration of this extraordinary incident. Deep Down Dark is a literary masterpiece of narrative journalism, surgical in its reconstruction, novelistic in its explorations of human personality and nuance. In a manner that feels spiritual, Tobar puts himself at the service of his story, and his fidelity to and unquenchable curiosity about every fact and detail generates unforgettable wonderment and awe.” ― Francisco Goldman. I know 2014 still has three months left to go, but I don’t expect to find anything I liked better than Héctor Tobar’s Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free. You know the story – 33 men were buried in a spectacular mine collapse, stayed underground for two months, and then were rescued, all of them unharmed.

Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. The beauty of this story is not just that Roosevelt’s rich history could spawn a thousand adventure stories, but that Millard’s experience with National Geographic is evident in her beautiful scenic descriptions and grisly depictions of the Amazon’s man-eating catfish, ferocious piranhas, white-water rapids, and prospect of starvation.

This thrilling and mysterious account of Fawcett’s ten years of travels in deadly jungles and forests in search of a secret city was compiled by his younger son, Fawcett's companion on his journeys, from manuscripts, letters, and logbooks. This is a stirring and sensitive record, well written by a true explorer whose trail ended in jungle asterisks―a book to live in, if one has old Fawcett's heart.

Alternating between reportage, personal vignettes, interviews, travelogues, and folklore, and richly conveyed with anger, sadness, irony, and occasional humor, Galeano pays loving tribute to the courage and determination of those who continued to believe in, and fight for, a more human existence. "'Days and Nights succeeds not only because of its socio-political authenticity and lyrical style but because of its anger and tenderness, elation and sorrow.'.

Can forests think? The semiotics in this well-wrought book are technical, worked, demanding, tuned to form and modality, alert to emergent properties, multinaturally and ethnographically precise. Besides all that, this book is a powerfully good read, one that changed my dreams and reworked my settled habits of interpretation, even the multispecies ones.” -- Donna Haraway, UC Santa Cruz. “I can only call this thought-leaping in the most creative sense. “A remarkable aspect of [this book] is the complex – and often beautifully written – intermingling of subtle theoretical propositions with an even subtler ethnography.” — Philippe Descola, Collège de France.

It shows how, despite incredible dangers and obstacles, one humble man and a tribe of primitive, violent Indians by joining together in simple obedience have been transformed forever by the sovereign will of god. Bruce Olson, born in Minnesota and now a citizen of Colombia, is a linguist and graduate of sociology from a South American university.

This book not only tells of the escape of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and others of the Third Reich; it includes photographs, files from the FBI, CIA and OSS that show the US knew they escaped, interviews and much more.

Forgotten Peace examines Colombian society’s attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere’s worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. In a vivid narrative that traces the interactions of local actors, intellectuals, and the Colombian state, Karl provides an entirely new explanation for the emergence of the FARC guerrillas from an ambivalent and fragmented peace process.”—Nancy P. Appelbaum, author of Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia.

The Chaco War was massive territorial war between Bolivia and Paraguay, which cost almost a 100,000 lives. - Scott Van Aken, Modelling Madness "Throughout the book are a superb collection of period photos and illustrations.