The Heart That Bleeds
by Alma Guillermoprieto | 
Open Veins of Latin America
by Eduardo Galeano | 
The Library at Night
by Alberto Manguel |
Practicing History
by Barbara W. Tuchman | 
An Informal History of the Hugos
by Jo Walton | 
Who Owns History?
by Eric Foner | 
Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
by Matthew Restall | 
Choice Cuts
by Mark Kurlansky |
Ambivalent Conquests
by Inga Clendinnen |
Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs
by Buddy Levy | 
The Conquest of America
by Tzvetan Todorov | 
Dancing with Cuba
by Alma Guillermoprieto | 
Up in the Old Hotel
by Joseph Mitchell | 
The White Album
by Joan Didion | 
The Control of Nature
by John McPhee | 
The American Spirit
by David McCullough | 
1 Dead in Attic
by Chris Rose | 
The Unsettling of America
by Wendell Berry | 
Oranges
by John McPhee | 
Russian Thinkers
by Isaiah Berlin |
From the esteemed New Yorker correspondent comes an incisive volume of essays and reportage that vividly illuminates Latin America's recent history. Only Alma Guillermoprieto, the most highly regarded writer on the region, could unravel the complex threads of Colombia's cocaine wars or assess the combination of despotism, charm, and political jiu-jitsu that has kept Fidel Castro in power for more than 40 years. And no one else can write with such acumen and sympathy about statesmen and campesinos, leftist revolutionaries and right-wing militias, and political figures from Evita Peron to Mexico's irrepressible president, Vicente Fox.