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Central and South America
Here are some of our favorite guides and literature on Mexico, Central and South America that we have previously featured on our home page.

The Story of the Night Colm Toibin ( Scribner, paperback, $15.00) When The Story of the Night was published in 1996 Argentine president Carlos Menem's embrace of neo-liberal economic policy was just beginning. The novel is remarkable now, 13 years later, for how convincingly it describes the American covert agents and U.S. oilmen on the ground floor (oil-shares, anybody?) of globalization as it sweeps into Argentina in the late 1980s. But this is only part of the world in which the main character of the novel operates. The narrator's domestic and romantic liaisons, each with its disappointments and missed opportunities, frame the story. More acted upon by history than one of history's actors, he lives in unquestioning acceptance through the brutality of the dictatorship, the Falklands (Malvinas) War, the privatization of the Argentine economy and the onset of the AIDS crisis. Like a Caravaggio painting that suggests upheaval and scheming in a simple scene, Toibin captures human desire at a pivotal moment in a country’s history. - ADD TO CART	The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes On a Latin American Journey Ernesto ( Ocean Books, $14.95) In 1952, out of medical school in Argentina, Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado decide to travel around South America on a motorcycle. The journey, once the motorcycle died, involved more hitchhiking than motorcycling. In his descriptions of bike accidents, generosity, asthma attacks and working with lepers, Che demonstrates a talent for writing. It reads like a slow wakening: his political consciousness is barely a glimmer here. It is in his second trip through South America, recounted in his Back on the Road (Otra Vez) that the political consciousness sharpens and radicalizes. - ADD TO CART
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City Gary Grandin ( Metropolitan Books, hardback, $27.50) With all the elements of a great novel, it is surprising that no one has extensively documented the story of Henry Ford’s Fordlandia until now. Ford’s project, a rubber producing company town located deep in the Brazilian Amazon, was meant to supply parts for Ford automobiles. Henry Ford’s rational, Puritan vision transformed the jungle into a little bit of Dearborn, Michigan, albeit with tree plantations at its heart. The intensive plantings almost destroyed the trees. And Fordlandia's hospitals, golf courses and vocational schools were ill matched against an indigenous population with its own customs and habits. Grandin rescues Fordlandia and Ford's rubber project from its nearly forgotten past. - ADD TO CART	Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World Peter Chapman ( Canongate, $14.00) Of the more than 300 varieties of bananas, the Cavendish variety is the one constant on supermarket shelves. Large and thick skinned, it was the banana of choice on the United Fruit Company's plantations throughout Central America. Unlike salt or cod, subjects covered by Mark Kurlansky, banana distribution and consumption is very much the story of modern global capitalism and empire. Beginning in Costa Rica, the United Fruit Company built the railroads, bribed the politicians and acquired the lands that gave it control over the banana market in the 20th century. Author Peter Chapman's book shows how the banana, once enjoyed only by America's elite, became the world's most popular fruit. He follows the many tentacles of the company in this brutal history. Its native and imported labor from China, Italy and the West Indies was paid in scrip, redeemable at company stores. It encouraged the coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala and participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It did business with Somoza and the powerful families of El Salvador. Now known as Chiquita Brands International, the Company was most recently in the news for successfully suing the European Union over protectionism at the World Trade Organization. The book's title in England, Jungle Capitalists is a fitting description of the bare-knuckled story of the once notorious company. - ADD TO CART
God's Middle Finger:Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre Richard Grant ( Free Press, $15.00) Richard Grant had long been fascinated by the Sierra Madre, a vast land of extremes that lies over much of western Mexico. It is a range marked by barrancas, steep-sided ravines where one can stand on snowy peaks and look down onto the backs of tropical birds flying over rainforest canopy. This forbidding geography provides refuge for outlaws and narcotraficantes as well as bored, drunk rednecks. Grant encounters all of these in his journey, and his fate often depends on their whims. The book opens with the author literally being hunted for sport. Later he finds himself forced to snort cocaine with crooked cops in a dirty cantina. He takes his brushes with danger in stride, turning nerve-wracking experiences into enlightening anecdotes. - ADD TO CART	2666 Roberto Bolaño ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30.00) "Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, including things that haven’t happened yet." The line, spoken by one of the hundreds of characters in Bolaño's wild, exuberant, unruly final novel, refers to Mexico. But he might as well be speaking of the book itself (and probably is). Not since Joyce has any writer attempted to cram so much of the known world, and the barely known dream world, into the covers of a book. Every page bears witness to his unique genius, though it is impossible to convey his combination of dry vernacular observation and surreal lyricism. Stories endlessly spin out of other stories, and all the narrative strands converge on the US/Mexican border (as do all the currents of the global economy) and the unsolved, unavenged murders of hundreds of women. This may sound grim, and in places it is; but ultimately the experience of the book is one of wonder and exhilaration as Bolaño pushes the boundaries of literature in a quest to understand and memorialize all the seekers and victims whose lives (as well as whose deaths) are unsolved mysteries. - ADD TO CART
The Yage Letters: Redux William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg ( City Lights Books, $13.95) This is a great collection of writings sure to interest any Burroughs junky. Written in 1953, the “letters” between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg chronicle the South American journey taken by the former in his search for the shamanic hallucinogen "yage." With a distinctive and raw prose style, Burroughs relates his experiences and reflects upon the profound social and spiritual implications of his insight. Included in the letters is material that would later appear in Naked Lunch, as well as the shorts “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” and “Am I Dying, Meester?” The new edition also includes an introduction by editor Oliver Harris as well as previously unpublished writings by both Burroughs and Ginsberg. Conceived as a literary work and not in fact as real correspondence, the letters give a vivid impression of the immediacy in a reporting-out-of–the-jungle style. In this prose, Burroughs attempts to push outside the confines of normal consciousness and question the presumed authority of the individual ego. The result is a fascinating account of this search for the ultimate fix- the quest for understanding, for “God’s Own Medicine”. - ADD TO CART

Bonsai
Alejandro Zambra
( Melville House, paperback, $13.00)

This brief work by a very young writer won the Chilean National Critics prize for best novel when it was published in Spanish, and offers us a glimpse of the future of Latin American literature. A bonsai is both the tree and the container; it is life sculpted and trimmed to the confines of the most exacting art. The tree is a simple love story, told in nuanced, delicate and unpretentious prose. The container is the shaping of the story, as the author trims back the tangents and secondary characters who threaten to run away with the story. Zambra delineates, without mockery, the fantasies and deceptions that both sustain and undermine a relationship. The book can be read in one sitting; but like the bonsai that its protagonist tends, it rewards lengthy contemplation, growing in depth and emotive power long after the last page has been turned.
- ADD TO CART