The Vulnerable
Observer:
Anthropology
That Breaks Your Heart
by Ruth Behar
Published: 1997

In The Vulnerable Observer, Ruth Behar--ethnographer, essayist, editor, poet, and a professor of anthropology--challenges traditional theories and offers a more personal approach to anthropology in which the line between observer and observed is not so easily drawn and the observers themselves are not only visible, but vulnerable to their subjects.

As she writes, "Call it sentimental, call it Victorian and nineteenth century, but I say that anthropology that doesn't break your heart just isn't worth doing anymore." These insightful, often poetic essays weave together memories of childhood as a Cuban Jewish immigrant with accounts of fieldwork in Spain, Cuba, and the United States. Along the way, Behar tirelessly investigates and elegantly communicates the "central dilemma of all aspects of witnessing."

In her own words, "Are there limits--of respect, piety, pathos--that should not be crossed, even to leave a record?" -- (Amazon.com)

She brings anthropology to life.... As an anthropology student ... I found the light at the end of the tunnel when I read the Vulnerable Observer...and as a Cuban in exile, the book broke also my heart... Dr. Behar marvelously demonstrates the humanness of the hands and mind behind the typewriter ... We need more anthropology like this and more anthropologists like her... Reviewer: leo-cubano from Miami, Florida , September 17, 2000

For the
Love of
My Name
by Lakshmi Persaud
Published: 2000

Sastra

by Lakshmi Persaud
Published: 1993

Book Description: The pundit warns Sastra's mother that her daughter's birth signs foretell two possible karmas, one of prosperous security if she keeps to the well-tried path of obedience to tradition, the other of mixed joy and misery if she should attempt to 'fly' and follow her own desires

Set in Trinidad, Sastra is a moving and tender love story, a rich evocation of the village world and a memorable portrayal of a brave young woman who never tries to evade or complain about the consequences of her choice.

Customer Review: This is a beautiful, moving and inspiring novel - It is a mature piece of fiction which is certain to withstand the passage of time or the limitation of setting. Reviewer: A reader, June 4, 1999

Butterfly
in the Wind,
by Lakshmi Persaud
Published: 2001

Lakshmi Persaud's fourth novel, 'Raise the Lanterns High', just recently been published by Black Amber Books in London, has been called "Powerful and poetic" by Time Out and "Hypnotic ... lyrical ... mesmerising" by Memsahib Magazine.

Raise the
Lanterns High
by Lakshmi Persaud

Book Description:On the eve of her wedding, Vasti finds her arranged marriage is to the rapist she saw through a curtain of sugar cane stems twelve years ago. She either speaks out, defies convention and shames her family, or succumbs to tradition and submits to her fate silently. A parallel story runs throughout the novel. Three women are about to climb upon a burning pyre to die with their husbands to fulfil the suttee or widow burning custom practised in India for hundreds of years. This story of female emancipation is as harrowing as it is beautiful.

The Middle
Passage
by V.S. Naipaul
Published: 2002

Book Description: In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions.

In this classic of modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean societies–countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that they can scarcely believe that the Empire is ending.

In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart’s appearance with cries of “That is man!” He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of France’s routes nationales. And throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region’s colonial past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics, and values.

The result is a work of novelistic vividness and dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his powers.

The Writer
and the World:
Essays
by V.S. Naipaul
Published: 2003

V.S. Naipaul is a creature of paradox. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his essay collection, The Writer and the World. These essays, selected and introduced by Pankaj Mishra, range from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. In them, our man travels the world, from his native Trinidad to his ancestral India to America and beyond, always looking with clear eyes at what's right there in front of him. In doing so, he's given us a distinctly Naipaulean journalism: he writes about countries as though they were people. "The politics of a country," he says, "can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships." His writing is, as a result, simultaneously petty and grand. Here, he writes of Belize City:

In the late afternoons Negroes in jackets and ties--famous throughout Central America for their immunity to disease--walk behind the hearses to the cemetery just outside the town, waving white handkerchiefs... It is like a ceremony of bewildered farewell at the limit of the world. But they are only keeping off the mosquitoes and sand flies.

Here is a writer who turns the specific to the universal, seemingly without effort. If Naipaul has a reputation as a grouch, it's only because he never lets go of the specific in favor of the universal. The two always coexist. The pieces contained here--mostly heretofore out of print--are short in length, catholic in interest, and in all a fine introduction to our most cosmopolitan postcolonial writer. --(Amazon.com: Claire Dederer)

Eccentric
Neighborhoods
by Rosario Ferre
Published: 1999

Customer Review: It could have been real! - This is a book I never would have believed to be fiction unless it told me. The characters feel real. There are a lot of people to keep track of and sometimes it goes back and forth in time but there is a useful family tree in the front of the book that I kept referring to.

I got a feel for Costa Rica past and present and I enjoyed the stories of the different characters. I am going to have some of my students read it and I highly recommend it! --Reviewer: A reader from Aurora, CO United States, August 17, 2003

Customer Review: Gee what a wonderful novel - I stumbled on Ms Ferre's work and quickly became addicted to it. The intimations of Puerto Rican history here are subtle and artistically wrought. Comparisons to Garcia Marquez are unfair but probably inevitable. She's not in that league, neither in imagination nor narrative gifts. But she's still one heck of a storyteller and her characters are wonderfully evoked. Unputdownable, especially if you know a bit about Puerto Rico and its history. - Reviewer: A reader from San Antonio, TX USA, May 7, 2000