Showing titles in Central America

The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control.

The building of the Panama Canal was one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. A tale of exploration, conquest, money, politics, and medicine, Panama Fever charts the challenges that marked the long, labyrinthine road to the building of the canal. Drawing on a wealth of new materials and sources, Matthew Parker brings to life the men who recognized the impact a canal would have on global politics and economics.

If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this book for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, which relies more heavily than most works of this kind on first-person accounts, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

On April 6, 1940, explorer and future World War II spy Theodore Morde (who would one day attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler), anxious about the perilous journey that lay ahead of him, struggled to fall asleep at the Paris Hotel in La Ceiba, Honduras. Nearly seventy years later, in the same hotel, acclaimed journalist Christopher S. Stewart wonders what he's gotten himself into.

Winner of the National Book Award for history, The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale.

Six Minutes to Freedom is the remarkable tale of Kurt Muse's arrest and harrowing months of imprisonment; his eyewitness accounts of torture; and the plight of his family as they fled for their lives. It is also the heart-pounding account of the only American civilian ever rescued by the elite Delta Force. Timelier than ever, this is a thrilling and highly personal narrative about one man's courage and dedication to his beliefs.

When A Beauty That Hurts first appeared in 1995, Guatemala was one of the world’s most flagrant violators of human rights. An accord brokered by the United Nations brought a measure of peace after three decades of civil war, but the country’s troubles are far from over. W. George Lovell revisits Guatemala to grapple once again with the terror inflicted on its Maya peoples by a military-dominated state.

Noted Mexican American journalist Alfredo Corchado refuses to shrink from reporting on government corruption, murders in Juarez, or the ruthless drug cartels of Mexico. One night, Corchado received a tip that he could be the next target of the Zetas, a violent paramilitary group - and that he had 24 hours to find out if the threat was true. Midnight in Mexico is the story of one man's quest to report the truth of his country - as he races to save his own life.

The Spanish Conquest: What really happened? If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this audiobook for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

Esmeralda Santiago era una niña en el seno de una familia numerosa en una zona rural de Puerto Rico. En aquel entonces, la vida estaba en orden. Pero cuando su hermano menor sufre un accidente y los padres se separan, la madre se lleva a Esmeralda, de trece años, y sus seis hermanos menores a Estados Unidos. Se van en busca de un tratamiento médico para el chico accidentado y de una mejor vida.

In 1839 rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would rewrite the West's understanding of human history.

México bizarro 2 es un viaje alucinante por distintas épocas y personajes de nuestro país. Julio Patán y Alejandro Rosas te cuentan qué hay detrás de la fortuna de un pepenador millonario, un portero secuestrador y un poeta caníbal. O aquella vez que vino Queen y odiaron tanto la burocracia mexa que juraron nunca volver. Pero eso sí, fuimos fans de Tohuí hasta el punto de cantar con enjundia «Osito panda, que aún no andas...». Ya entrados en gastos, ¿un taquito de manatí o un pozolito humano? Ambos: platillos del menú bizarro de nuestra historia.

Written by a prize-winning NPR veteran who spent years covering Latin America, this blend of biography, history, and political reporting details the events that lead to the American invasion of Panama.

Whichever belief system was in play for the major industrial nations of Central and South America, a constant bombardment of foreign influence pushed the people of states such as Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and others toward overthrow. Few examples remain as memorable as the conflict in Nicaragua, where the Frente Sandinista de Liberation Nacional (FSLN), a left-wing revolutionary party, seized power in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua in July 1979, toppling four decades of dictatorial rule perpetrated by the Somoza dynasty.

If you're looking for a captivating collection of Inca myths, then pay attention.... This audiobook includes four captivating manuscripts: Maya Mythology, Aztec Mythology, Inca Mythology, and Central American Mythology.

Este libro es el resultado de la extraordinaria investigación y rescate de más de un centenar de recetarios de todos los tiempos. Después del éxito de La comida en la historia argentina, Daniel Balmaceda continuó rastreando e indagando sobre las costumbres desconocidas de la cocina y la mesa de los argentinos. ¿Cómo comíamos antes de la industrialización de los alimentos?

In the decade before the onset of the Civil War, groups of Americans engaged in a series of longshot - and illegal - forays into Mexico, Cuba, and other Central American countries in hopes of taking them over. These efforts became known as filibustering, and their goal was to seize territory to create new independent fiefdoms, which would ultimately be annexed by the still-growing United States. Most failed miserably. William Walker was the outlier. Soft-spoken with no military background, in 1856 he managed to install himself as president of Nicaragua.

This narrative about the creation and early growth of the United Fruit Company comes across like an adventure novel. The author whisks the listener to Central America to experience the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a group of visionaries who carved a commercial empire out of virtually uninhabited Central American tropical jungles. These American businessmen and the people who worked for them were the early pioneers. They overcame tropical disease, financial problems, weather, and other obstacles by innovation and sheer grit.

The History of Panama is a gripping account of the stories behind the incredible cast of characters that make up the history of this country, and in this guide, we are going to touch on most of them and how they built up the country we know today. Those who are willing to dig a little bit deeper into the story of Panama will be rewarded.