Book picks similar to
Epic Mexico: A History from Its Earliest Times by Terry Rugeley


latin-american-history
mexico-history
collections-development

Into the Suffering City


Bill LeFurgy - 2020
    The city is jumping with danger and excitement. New thrills are everywhere: cars, cocaine, ragtime music, moving pictures. Old troubles also thrive, including murder, corruption, and the painful divisions of gender, class, and race.Dr. Sarah Kennecott is on the autism spectrum—a trait that is unidentified and unappreciated at the time. Her passion is justice for murder victims, and after getting fired for looking too closely into the killing of a showgirl, she refuses to back down from the investigation. Sarah forms an unlikely bond with Jack Harden, a tormented, down-on-his-luck private detective. Jack pushes the case into Baltimore’s seedy underworld, a vitally corrupt realm of saloons, brothels, and burlesque theaters. When Sarah and Jack pull the pieces together, they discover a stunning pair of secrets, each of which is worth killing to keep. "Into the Suffering City" is a fast-paced, emotionally immersive story that combines originality and historical detail to explore the lives of people living in Baltimore during the early 1900s.

Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770


James H. Sweet - 2003
    Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came--Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others--Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time.Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism.Sweet's analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil's slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.

Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean


Peter Winn - 2005
    From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, and from Cuba to Trinidad and Tobago, Americas examines the historical, demographic, political, social, cultural, religious, and economic trends in the region. For this new edition Peter Winn has provided a new preface and made revisions throughout to include the most up-to-date information on changes and developments in Latin America since the last revised edition of 1999.

White Seed: The Untold Story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke


Paul Clayton - 1995
    Among them: Maggie Hagger, indentured Irish serving girl, a victim of rape and intimidation, driven to desperate action against a tyrant when all around her have lost hope; Manteo, the Croatoan interpreter for the English, an inhabitant of two worlds, belonging to neither, who longs for love and acceptance and finally finds it in Maggie's arms; John White, ineffective Governor, painter and dreamer, drawn to the brink of insanity and back in his efforts to rescue his people; Captain Stafford, a brave, disciplined, but cruel soldier, with the seeds of class hatred imbedded in his soul years earlier' and Powhatan, the shrewd Tidewater warlord who wages a stealthy jihad against the colonists, waiting to ensure they have truly been abandoned before launching his final assault.

The Lost Empire of Atlantis: History's Greatest Mystery Revealed


Gavin Menzies - 2011
    This guy has done history like you would not believe.”—Glenn BeckThe secrets of history’s most enduring mystery are finally revealed in The Lost Empire of Atlantis. Through impeccable research and intelligent speculation, Gavin Menzies, the New York Times bestselling author of 1421, uncovers the truth behind the mysterious “lost” city of Atlantis—making the startling claim that the “Atlanteans” discovered America 4,000 years ago and ruled a vast Mediterranean empire that was violently destroyed in 1,500 BC. Forget everything you’ve ever thought about the Atlantis legend—Gavin Menzies will make you a believer!

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City


Greg Grandin - 2009
    state of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained.

Salvador


Joan Didion - 1983
    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.

Angels With Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina


Jonathan Wilson - 2016
    Argentina is responsible for some of the greatest footballers on the planet. Their rich, volatile history is made up of both the sublime and the ruthlessly pragmatic.Argentina is a nation obsessed with football, and Jonathan Wilson, having lived there on and off during the last decade, is ideally placed to chart the five phases of Argentinian football: the appropriation of the British game; the golden age of la nuestra, the exuberant style of playing that developed as Juan Perón led the country into isolation; a hardening into the brutal methods of anti-fútbol; the fusing of beauty and efficacy under César Luis Menotti; and the ludicrous (albeit underachieving) creative talent of recent times.More than any other nation Argentina lives and breathes football, its theories and myths. The subject is fiercely debated on street corners and in cafes. It has even preoccupied the country's greatest writers and philosophers.ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES is the definitive history of a great footballing nation and its paradoxes.

When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe


Maureen Quilligan - 2021
    Instead, showing how the queens engendered a culture of mutual respect, When Women Ruled the World focuses on the gift-giving by which they aimed to ensure female bonds of friendship and alliance. Detailing the artistic and political creativity that  flourished in the pockets of peace created by these queens, Quilligan’s lavishly illustrated work offers a new perspective on the glory of the Renaissance and the women who helped to create it.

Travels with Rachel: In Search of South America


George Mahood - 2017
     Join George and Rachel on their hilarious journey through the wilds of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, as they climb volcanoes, fish for piranhas, trek through the Amazon rainforest, take death-defying bus rides, sample some of the continent’s strangest delicacies, and try to get to Machu Picchu. Armed only with a basic knowledge of Spanish, small backpacks, and bags of enthusiasm, they set off together on what promised to be a life-changing adventure.

Entangled


A.R. Capetta - 2013
    It was the root of all her chords.Seventeen-year-old Cade is a fierce survivor, solo in the universe with her cherry-red guitar. Or so she thought. Her world shakes apart when a hologram named Mr. Niven tells her she was created in a lab in the year 3112, then entangled at a subatomic level with a boy named Xan.    Cade’s quest to locate Xan joins her with an array of outlaws—her first friends—on a galaxy-spanning adventure. And once Cade discovers the wild joy of real connection, there’s no turning back.

Anticipation


Melodie Winawer - 2021
    So when Alexander proposes a trip to Greece—somewhere he's always dreamed of visiting—Helen quickly agrees. After spending several days exploring the tourist-filled streets, they stumble upon the ancient city of Mystras and are instantly drawn to it. Its only resident is Elias, a mysterious tour guide living on the city’s edges…both physically and temporally. In 1237, Elias’s mother promised his eternal service to the Profitis Ilias in Mystras in exchange for surviving a terrible illness. But during his 800 years of labor, he’s had one common enemy: the noble Lusignan family. The Lusignan line is cursed by a deadly disease that worsens with each generation, and a prophecy hints that Elias’s blood is their only hope for a cure. He has managed to survive throughout the centuries, but the line has dwindled down to the last Lusignan and he is desperate to avert his family’s destiny. When Elias runs into Helen, he meets his match for the first time—but he unwittingly puts both her and her young son in danger as a result. With time running out and an enemy after them, Elias and Helen are forced to choose between the city they love, and each other. Blending the historical romance of Diana Gabaldon, the rich detail of Philippa Gregory’s novels, and Dan Brown’s fast-paced suspense, Anticipation is a thrilling and satisfying read like no other.

Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia's War on Globalization


William Powers - 2006
    CNN and the New York Times have shown images of Aymara women in bowler hats standing down tanks; citizen protests have ousted multinationals and two pro-globalization presidents. In Whispering in the Giant's Ear, Powers brings alive the recent struggles of the Bolivian people. When he arrives in the rainforest, he meets an extraordinary Chiquitano Indian named Salvador who is fighting the extinction of his people. At the same time, the clock ticks for three multinational energy companies forced to curb the global warming. Both goals depend upon the survival of a stretch of pristine jungle. But as Indians and oil giants join to launch the world's largest Kyoto project - using forests to absorb dangerous planetary greenhouse gasses - Salvador's life is threatened by loggers collaborating with a racist Bolivian oligarchy. The quest for a single rainforest is subsumed in a movement of national liberation. Whispering in the Giant's Ear goes beneath the headlines, gracefully weaving memoir, travel, history, and reportage into an unforgettable chronicle of a "poor little rich country" attempting to engage the world without losing its soul.

The Sibylline Oracle


Delia J. Colvin - 2012
    But Alex knows the terrifying truth...time is running out! And unless they can discover the source of an ancient curse, fate will take her life...again. Greek Mythology and modern romance intertwine in this addictive trilogy.THE SIBYLLINE TRILOGY - a love more enduring than life...than death...than destiny.

Mixed Feelings: Poems and Stories


Avan Jogia - 2019
    Drawing on the author's own life story as well as interviews he's conducted with friends and strangers, Mixed Feelings serves as a dialogue starter for difficult topics that now, more than ever, need to be discussed.