Best Ecuadoran History Books
Here you will get Best Ecuadoran History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Bolivar: American Liberator
Author: by Marie Arana
Published at: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (April 8, 2014)
ISBN: 978-1439110201
A brilliant biography that reads like a wonderful novel but is researched like a masterwork of history (Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs), this is the epic story of the famous South American general and statesman Simn Bolvar. SIMN BOL VAR El Libertadorfreed six countries from Spanish rule and is still the most revered figure in South America today.
He traveled from Amazon jungles to the Andes mountains, engaged in endless battles and forged fragile coalitions of competing forces and races. He lived an epic life filled with heroism, tragedy (his only wife died young), and legend (he was saved from an assassination attempt by one of his mistresses).
In Bolvar, Marie Arana has written a sweeping biography that is as bold and as passionate as its subject. Drawing on a wealth of primary documents, Arana vividly captures the early nineteenth-century South America that made Bolvar the man he became: fearless general, brilliant strategist, consummate diplomat, dedicated abolitionist, gifted writer, and flawed politician.
2. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
Author: by Eduardo Kohn
Published at: University of California Press; First edition (August 10, 2013)
ISBN: 978-0520276116
Can forests think?Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be humanand thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems.
Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down.
How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself.
3. Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America
Author: by Michael Reid
Published at: Yale University Press; New edition (November 14, 2017)
ISBN: 978-0300224658
A newly updated edition of the best-selling primer on the social, political, and economic challenges facing Central and South America Ten years after its first publication, Michael Reid’s best-selling survey of the state of contemporary Latin America has been wholly updated to reflect the new realities of the Forgotten Continent.
The former Americas editor for the Economist, Reid suggests that much of Central and South America, though less poor, less unequal, and better educated than before, faces harder economic times now that the commodities boom of the 2000s is over.
His revised, in-depth account of the region reveals dynamic societies more concerned about corruption and climate change, the uncertainties of a Donald Trump-led United States, and a political cycle that, in many cases, is turning from left-wing populism to center-right governments.
This essential new edition provides important insights into the sweeping changes that have occurred in Latin America in recent years and indicates priorities for the future.
4. Bolívar: Libertador de América / Bolivar: American Liberator (Biografías y Memorias) (Spanish Edition)
Author: by Marie Arana
Published at: Debate; 001 edition (May 19, 2020)
ISBN: 978-8417636456
Un relato biogrfico vibrante que captura la pica historia de Simn Bolvar, El Libertador. Simn Bolvar se gan el sobrenombre de El Libertador tras poner fin al dominio espaol sobre seis pases. Su vida fue heroica, trgica y legendaria: viaj del Amazonas a los Andes, libr eternas batallas, forj alianzas entre razas rivales…
Partiendo de un gran abanico de fuentes, Marie Arana captura un vvido retrato de la Suramrica de inicios del siglo XIX, la que forj a Bolvar y lo convirti en un valeroso general, un estratega brillante, un escritor portentoso y un poltico sin parangn; en definitiva, uno de los personajes ms admirados de Latinoamrica.
Bolvar es una biografa trepidante en la que el lector hallar la imagen de una vida trgica capturada en todo su esplendor y un conmovedor manifiesto de la verdadera esencia del pueblo latinoamericano. ENGLISH DESCRIPTIONA sweeping narrative worthy of a Hollywood epic, this is the authoritative biography of the warrior-statesman who was the greatest figure in Latin American history.
5. The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures (Palgrave Essential Histories Series)
Author: by Marshall C. Eakin
Published at: St. Martin's Griffin; First edition (June 12, 2007)
ISBN: 978-1403980816
This narrative history of Latin America surveys five centuries in less than five hundred pages. The first third of the book moves from the Americas before Columbus to the wars for independence in the early nineteenth century. The construction of new nations and peoples in the nineteenth century forms the middle third, and the final section analyzes economic development, rising political participation, and the search of identity over the last century.
The collision of peoples and cultures-Native Americans, Europeans, Africans-that defines Latin America, and gives it both its unity and diversity, provides the central theme of this concise, synthetic history.
6. Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Radical Américas)
Author: by Thea Riofrancos
Published at: Duke University Press Books (August 7, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1478008484
In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the twenty-first-century socialist government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism.
In Resource Radicals, Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration’s resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government’s disregard for nature and indigenous communities.
In this archival and ethnographic study, Riofrancos expands the study of resource politics by decentering state resource policy and locating it in a field of political struggle populated by actors with conflicting visions of resource extraction. She demonstrates how Ecuador’s commodity-dependent economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism.
7. Conquistador Voices: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas as Recounted Largely by the Participants
Author: by Kevin H Siepel
Published at: Spruce Tree Press; 1st edition (October 12, 2015)
ISBN: 978-0978646639
The Spanish Conquest: What Really Happened? If you’re a person who likes to learn the messy details of events likely sanitized in your schoolbooks, Conquistador Voices may be for you. You’re likely to find this book not only informative but easy to read, because Conquistador Voices is built around first-person narrativesthe kind of thing that usually holds our attention.
Think of it as a film documentary in written form, one that tells an important story in 500-year-old sound bites and narrative, and that does so in a way that informs without moralizing. In this two-volume set you’ll find neither a defense of the conquistadors nor a politically correct polemic against them.
What you will find is a one-stop, five-part layman’s summary of the Conquest, one that delves dispassionately into persons and events we still talk about today. To see who’s covered in each volume, click on the volume’s cover image and then Look Inside.
If you like what you see, order a copy for yourself or other history buff today.
8. Mysteries of the Tayos Caves: The Lost Civilizations Where the Andes Meet the Amazon
Author: by Alex Chionetti
Published at: Bear & Company; Illustrated edition (December 10, 2019)
ISBN: 978-1591433569
A detailed examination of the controversial expeditions to the Tayos Cave complex in Ecuador and the treasures glimpsed in its depths Reconstructs the expeditions from the 1960s and ’70s, including the Mormon Church’s search for lost tablets, Stanley Hall’s quest with Neil Armstrong, and sightings of a metal library, books of gold, copper plates, and a quartz sarcophagus Includes photos from the author’s own dangerous expeditions to the Tayos Caves Explores connections to Atlantis, Ancient Astronauts, and the Hollow Earth theory and the possibility of tunnel networks that extend from the Rocky Mountains to Patagonia The Cuevas de los Tayos is a cavern complex in the Amazon rain forest of Ecuador.
Named for the tayos, the oil birds that reside within them, these caves have countless enigmas connected with them, from the discovery of inexplicable architectural details, to claims of curses and treasures, to dangerous encounters with the indigenous people, the Shuar, for whom the caves are sacred.
9. God in the Rainforest: A Tale of Martyrdom and Redemption in Amazonian Ecuador
Author: by Kathryn T. Long
Published at: Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (February 26, 2019)
ISBN: 978-0190608989
In January of 1956, five young evangelical missionaries were speared to death by a band of the Waorani people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Two years later, two missionary women-the widow of one of the slain men and the sister of another-with the help of a Wao woman were able to establish peaceful relations with the same people who had killed their loved ones.
The highly publicized deaths of the five men and the subsequent efforts to Christianize the Waorani quickly became the defining missionary narrative for American evangelicals during the second half of the twentieth century. God in the Rainforest traces the formation of this story and shows how Protestant missionary work among the Waorani came to be one of the missions most celebrated by Evangelicals and most severely criticized by anthropologists and others who accused missionaries of destroying the indigenous culture.Kathryn T.
Long offers a study of the complexities of world Christianity at the ground level for indigenous peoples and for missionaries, anthropologists, environmentalists, and other outsiders. For the first time, Long brings together these competing actors and agendas to reveal one example of an indigenous people caught in the cross-hairs of globalization.
10. Birth of the Chess Queen: A History
Author: by Marilyn Yalom
Published at: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 26, 2005)
ISBN: 978-0060090654
Marilyn Yalom has written the rare book that illuminates something that always has been dimly perceived but never articulated, in this case that that the power of the chess queen reflects the evolution of female power in the western world.
Cleveland Plain DealerEveryone knows that the queen is the most dominant piece in chess, but few people know that the game existed for five hundred years without her. It wasn’t until chess became a popular pastime for European royals during the Middle Ages that the queen was born and was gradually empowered to become the king’s fierce warrior and protector.
Birth of the Chess Queen examines the five centuries between the chess queen’s timid emergence in the early days of the Holy Roman Empire to her elevation during the reign of Isabel of Castile. Marilyn Yalom, inspired by a handful of surviving medieval chess queens, traces their origin and spread from Spain, Italy, and Germany to France, England, Scandinavia, and Russia.
In a lively and engaging historical investigation, Yalom draws parallels between the rise of the chess queen and the ascent of female sovereigns in Europe, presenting a layered, fascinating history of medieval courts and internal struggles for power.
11. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910
Author: by Brooke Larson
Published at: Cambridge University Press (January 19, 2004)
ISBN: 978-0521567305
Brooke Larson’s interpretive analysis of the history of Andean peasants reveals the challenges of nation making in the republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the volatile nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more turbulent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew deep and where the “Indian problem” seemed so discouraging to liberalizing states.
The analysis raises broader issues about the interplay of liberalism, racism, and ethnicity in the formation of exclusionary “republics without citizens” over the nineteenth century.
12
Wines of South America: The Essential Guide
Author: by Evan Goldstein
Published at: University of California Press; First edition (August 29, 2014)
ISBN: 978-0520273931
The most comprehensive guide to the wines of the entire continent, Wines of South America introduces readers to the astounding quality and variety of wines that until recently have been enjoyed, for the most part, only locally. Master Sommelier Evan Goldstein leads wine enthusiasts on an exciting geographical journey across ten countries, describing the wines, grapes, and regions of each.
Goldstein begins the tour with a continental overview, discussing the arrival of the vine and wine culture, surveying the range of grapes planted and cultivated, and summarizing the development of modernday viticulture and winemaking. He explores the two giants of the continent, Argentina and Chile, in expansive chapters that cover their unique histories, wine regions, wine styles, prominent grapes, and leading producers.
Goldstein covers the evolving industries of Brazil and Uruguay and discusses the modern-day activities in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. Up-to-date maps, several engaging photos, and pertinent statistics support each section, which also feature lively profiles of key individuals and wineries that have influenced the development of the craft.
13. The Incas (Peoples of America)
Author: by Terence N. D'Altroy
Published at: Wiley-Blackwell; 2nd edition (May 27, 2014)
ISBN: 978-1444331158
The Incas is a captivating exploration of one of the greatest civilizations ever seen. Seamlessly drawing on history, archaeology, and ethnography, this thoroughly updated new edition integrates advances made in hundreds of new studies conducted over the last decade. Written by one of the world’s leading experts on Inca civilization Covers Inca history, politics, economy, ideology, society, and military organization Explores advances in research that include pre-imperial Inca society; the royal capital of Cuzco; the sacred landscape; royal estates; Machu Picchu; provincial relations; the khipu information-recording technology; languages, time frames, gender relations, effects on human biology, and daily life Explicitly examines how the Inca world view and philosophy affected the character of the empire Illustrated with over 90 maps, figures, and photographs
14. Ecuador – Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture (56)
Author: by Russell Maddicks
Published at: Kuperard (December 1, 2014)
ISBN: 978-1857336832
Squeezed between Colombia in the north and Peru in the south, Ecuador is named for its location on the Equator and has a landscape so varied that it has been described as a microcosm of every microclimate found in South America.
This diversity makes it a magnet for tourists, mountain trekkers, volunteers, and increasing numbers of US retirees looking for a warm, culturally interesting, economical, and safe place to spend much of their time. The country is booming, thanks to high oil prices and investment in tourism, and a massive infrastructure program and the poverty-reduction measures launched by President Rafael Correa have endeared him to the poorest in society.
Ecuador’s multiethnic population reflects a unique blend of cultures, from traditionally dressed mountain peoples, whose ancestors inhabited their highland villages before the arrival of the Incas, to the Afro-Ecuadorians of Esmeraldas and the Chota Valley and the tribal peoples of the Amazonian rainforest.
