A Continent of Islands:
Searching for the
Caribbean Destiny
Author: Mark Kurlansky
Published: 1993

Engaging Overview: This is not your scholarly tome, an arid recitation of events and facts. For such a fascinating part of the world, the Caribbean has generated very few readable histories that keep a reader's interest. Kurlansky includes a modicum of facts, but the real power of this book is the sweep, and the themes that tie different islands and eras together.

I would recommend this book without hesitation to anyone who wants to know something about the Caribbean - or even someone just looking for an entertaining piece of non-fiction. And ... I would have no hesitation using this book in an introductory class on Caribbean culture. - Reviewer: Richard Wilk from Bloomington, IN, September 20, 2002

This is Cuba:
An Outlaw
Culture Survives
Author: Ben Corbett
Published: 2002

Book Description: In This first-person account of his years living on the fringes of Castro's Cuba, Corbett takes the reader on a colorful and bumpy ride to explore the contradictory stew of Cuban character.

Beyond the throngs of tourists streaming through Central Havana's broad Prado Avenue, and outside the yoke of Castro's 43-year-old Revolutionary program, there exists a parallel Cuba - a separate evolution of a people struggling to survive. With personal stories that depict a people torn between following the directives of their government and finding a way to better their lot, journalist Ben Corbett gives us the daily life of many considered outlaws by Castro's regime. But are they outlaws or rather ingenious survivors of what many Cubans consider to be a forty-year mistake, a tangle of contradictions that have led to a stable instability?

At a time when Cuba precariously walks on the ledge between socialism and capitalism, This is Cuba gets to the heart of this so-called outlaw culture, bringing readers into the living rooms, rooftops, parks, and city streets to listen to stories of frustration, hope, and survival.

Cuba
On the Verge:
An Island in Transition
Editor: Terry McCoy, Intro: William Kennedy, Arthur Miller
Published: 2003

Book Description: This riveting analogy showcases the work of leading Cuban and American writers and photographers and offers unprecedented insight into life in the island nation today.

While the world ponders Cuba's future, and the United States weighs the effects of the trade embargo imposed more than 40 years ago, Cubans go about their everyday lives overcoming obstacles with a mixture of about their everyday lifes overcoming obstacles with a mixture of ingenuity, intelligence, perseverance, and above all else, a sense of humor. How does this transitional moment in the island's history find expression in the lives of the Cuban people? What do the social, cultural, and personal landscapes of Cuba look and feel like today? CUBA ON THE VERGE is an honest and balanced portrayal of the complex realities of modern Cuban life.

Critically acclaimed novelist Ruseell Banks recalls his dream as a young man of joining the Revolution--and climbs the Sierra Maestra in an attempt to come to terms with that vision of long ago; Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban, writes about the experience of exile and the adaptations it engenders; New Yorker correspondent Jon Lee Anderson writes about the New Middle Class in Cuba; and Antonio Jose Ponte, one of the most talented of the current generation of Cuban writers, meditates on the unique sense of time on the island.

Essays and portfolios of images are linked to central themes, incuding Afro-Cuban culture, traditional music versus the cutting edge, architecture, sexuality, Santeria, rural life, exile, and the role of women in Cuban society.

The First Rasta:
Leonard Howell
and the Rise of
Rastafarianism
Author: Helene Lee,
Translator: Lily Davis
Editor: Stephen David , Hilhne Lee, Hélène Lee
Published: 2003

Book Description: Going far beyond the standard imagery of Rasta-ganja, reggae, dreadlocks -- this book offers an uncensored vision of a movement with complex roots, and the exceptional journey of a man who taught an enslaved people how to be proud and impose their culture on the world.

In the 1920s a handful of Jamaicans had a revelation concerning the divinity of Haile Selassie, king of Ethiopia, and founded the most popular mystical movement of the 20th century.

This is the astonishing tale of Leonard Percival Howell and the first Rastas. Although jailed, ridiculed, and treated as insane, Howell, also known as the Gong, established a Rasta community of 4,500 members, the first agro-industrial enterprise devoted to producing marijuana.

In the late 1950s the community was dispersed, disseminating Rasta teachings throughout the ghettos of the island. A young singer named Bob Marley adopted Howell's message, and through Marley's visions, reggae was ready to explode.

Wake the Town
and Tell the People:
Dancehall Culture
in Jamaica
by Norman C. Stolzoff
Published: 2000

Customer Review: Comprehensive Dancehall Reference! - This is an excellent book, written by a genuinely knowledgeable scholar of dancehall music and Jamaican popular culture. Dr. Stolzoff has done an incredible amount of research for this book and puts it altogether with Wake The Town. A must for all reggae and dancehall afficionados. This book will be a classic for a long time. - Reviewer: Kelly Maurice from Boulder, CO, August 27, 2003

Customer Review: The Definitive Book on Dancehall Music - This book is too incredible to believe. For those of us who are into dancehall, when we are in the midst of it, study and academia seem so far away. I never thought it was something that someone could record on paper and carry the true vibes of the whole thing. Stolzoff has not only captured the vibes of the dancehall itself, but also the vibes of life for the dancehall community, the economy, and the realities of Jamaica today.

For anyone who ever wanted to get away from the tourist fakeries of what you think Jamaica and reggae music are all about, this book is for you. Of course there is nothing like the true experience of the dancehall itself, but outside of that, this book is the next best thing. Buy this book, you won't regret it. Even most of us Jamaicans, can learn a thing or two from it. And for my anthropologists out there, this book is the most gripping, meaningful ethnography since Bourgois' "In Search of Respect : Selling Crack in El Barrio". - Reviewer: Julian Smothers from Gainesville, FL US, September 25, 2000

Healing Cultures:
Art and Religion
As Curative Practices
in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora
Editors: Margarite Fernandez Olmos, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Margarite Fernandez Olmos
Published: 2001

Creole
Religions of
the Caribbean:
An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria, to Obeah and Espiritismo
(Religion, Race, and Ethnicity)
by Margarite Fernandez Olmos, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Margarite Fernandez Olmos
Published: 2003

Book Description: Creolization—the coming together of diverse beliefs and practices to form new beliefs and practices--is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history. Brought together in the crucible of the sugar plantation, Caribbean peoples drew on the variants of Christianity brought by European colonizers, as well as on African religious and healing traditions and the remnants of Amerindian practices, to fashion new systems of belief.

Creole Religions of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions that have developed in the region. From Vodou, Santería, Regla de Palo, the Abakuá Secret Society, and Obeah to Quimbois and Espiritismo, the volume traces the historical-cultural origins of the major Creole religions, as well as the newer traditions such as Pocomania and Rastafarianism.

Chapters devoted to specific traditions trace their history, their pantheons and major rituals, and their current-day expressions in the Caribbean and in the diaspora. The volume also provides a general historical background of the Caribbean region.

Creole Religions of the Caribbean is the first text to provide a study of the Creole religions of the Caribbean and will be an indispensable guide to the development of these rich religious traditions and practices.

Puerto Rican
Cultural Identity
and the Work of Luis Rafael Sanchez
(North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages
and Literatures, No 268)
by John Dimitri Perivolaris
Published: 2001

Book Description: This book undertakes the most comprehensive and theoretically rigorous examination to date of Luis Rafael Sánchez's work in the context of cultural politics in Puerto Rico, and of the international and regional dimensions of Sánchez's work in relation to the unique status of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth and colony. It explores Sánchez's ambivalent position as a member of an intellectual elite, a spokesman for el pueblo, and a Puerto Rican mulatto whose working-class background allows him to highlight unprecedented possibilities for political agency within popular and mass culture.

Through analyses of Sánchez's theater, prose, and essays, John Perivolaris examines continuing struggles to define Puerto Rican cultural identity. His detailed readings illuminate Sánchez's ironically humorous deployment of traditionally conservative paradigms of national and individual identity in his postcolonial critique of racialization, gender, sexuality, and Hispanism in the colony. This study fills a long-standing need for an introduction to the work of a major Caribbean and Latin American writer.