Based on unprecedented research in Cuba, the direct testimony of scores of Cuban musicians, and the author's unique experience as a prominent jazz musician, Cubano Be, Cubano Bop is destined to take its place among the classics of jazz history. The work pays tribute not only to a distinguished lineage of Cuban jazz musicians and composers, but also to the rich musical exchanges between Cuban and American jazz throughout the twentieth century. The work begins with the first encounters between Cuban music and jazz around the turn of the last century. Acosta writes about the presence of Cuban musicians in New Orleans and the “Spanish tinge” in early jazz from the city, the formation and spread of the first jazz ensembles in Cuba, the big bands of the thirties, and the inception of “Latin jazz.” He explores the evolution of Bebop, Feeling, and Mambo in the forties, leading to the explosion of Cubop or Afro-Cuban jazz and the innovations of the legendary musicians and composers Machito, Mario Bauzá, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chano Pozo. The work concludes with a new generation of Cuban jazz artists, including the Grammy award-winning musicians and composers Chucho Valdés and Paquito D’Rivera.
Based on unprecedented research in Cuba, the direct testimony of scores of Cuban musicians, and the author's unique experience as a prominent jazz musician, Cubano Be, Cubano Bop is destined to take its place among the classics of jazz history. The work pays tribute not only to a distinguished lineage of Cuban jazz musicians and composers, but also to the rich musical exchanges between Cuban and American jazz throughout the twentieth century. The work begins with the first encounters between Cuban music and jazz around the turn of the last century. Acosta writes about the presence of Cuban musicians in New Orleans and the “Spanish tinge” in early jazz from the city, the formation and spread of the first jazz ensembles in Cuba, the big bands of the thirties, and the inception of “Latin jazz.” He explores the evolution of Bebop, Feeling, and Mambo in the forties, leading to the explosion of Cubop or Afro-Cuban jazz and the innovations of the legendary musicians and composers Machito, Mario Bauzá, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chano Pozo. The work concludes with a new generation of Cuban jazz artists, including the Grammy award-winning musicians and composers Chucho Valdés and Paquito D’Rivera.
The life of celebrated Mexican archaeologist Moctezuma tells of a man rising to the challenges of life and a man who has eloquently spoken to the the importance of understanding the roots of civilization.
The history of Latin American journalism is ultimately the story of a people who have been silenced over the centuries, primarily Native Americans, women, peasants, and the urban poor. This book seeks to correct the record propounded by most English-language surveys of Latin American journalism, which tend to neglect pre-Columbian forms of reporting, the ways in which technology has been used as a tool of colonization, and the Latin American conceptual foundations of a free press. Challenging the conventional notion of a free marketplace of ideas in a region plagued with serious problems of poverty, violence, propaganda, political intolerance, poor ethics, journalism education deficiencies, and media concentration in the hands of an elite, Ferreira debunks the myth of a free press in Latin America. The diffusion of colonial presses in the New World resulted in the imposition of a structural censorship with elements that remain to this day. They include ethnic and gender discrimination, technological elitism, state and religious authoritarianism, and ideological controls. Impoverished, afraid of crime and violence, and without access to an effective democracy, ordinary Latin Americans still live silenced by ruling actors that include a dominant and concentrated media. Thus, not only is the press not free in Latin America, but it is also itself an instrument of oppression.
The life of celebrated Mexican archaeologist Moctezuma tells of a man rising to the challenges of life and a man who has eloquently spoken to the the importance of understanding the roots of civilization.
Padura’s Heretics spans and defies literary categories . . . ingenious." —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author, Heretics is Leonardo Padura's greatest detective work yet. In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana’s port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear. Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel’s son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family’s lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana. In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt’s gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura’s novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its center.
This handsomely illustrated book offers a panoramic view of ancient Mexico, beginning more than thirty thousand years ago and ending with European occupation in the sixteenth century. Drawing on archaeological and ethnohistorical sources, the book is one of the first to offer a unified vision of Mexico's precolonial past. Typical histories of Mexico focus on the prosperity and accomplishments of Mesoamerica, located in the southern half of Mexico, due to the wealth of records about the glorious past of this region. Mesoamerica was only one of three cultural superareas of ancient Mexico, however, all interlinked by complex economic and social relationships. Tracing the large social transformations that took place from the earliest hunter-gatherer times to the Postclassic states, the authors describe the ties between the three superareas of ancient Mexico, which stretched from present-day Costa Rica to what is now the southwestern United States. According to the authors, these superareas–Mesoamerica, Aridamerica, and Oasisamerica–cannot be viewed as independent entities. Instead, they must be considered as a whole to understand the complex reality of Mexico's past and possible visions of Mexico's future.
A gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader. The story revolves around Iván Cárdenas Maturell, who in his youth was the great hope of modern Cuban literature—until he dared to write a story that was deemed counterrevolutionary. When we meet him years later in Havana, Iván is a loser: a humbled and defeated man with a quiet, unremarkable life who earns his modest living as a proofreader at a veterinary magazine. One afternoon, he meets a mysterious foreigner in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. This is "the man who loved dogs," and as the pair grow closer, Iván begins to understand that his new friend is hiding a terrible secret. Moving seamlessly between Iván's life in Cuba, Ramón's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, The Man Who Loved Dogs is Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet. This is a story about political ideals tested and characters broken, a multilayered epic that effortlessly weaves together three different plot threads— Trotsky in exile, Ramón in pursuit, Iván in frustrated stasis—to bring emotional truth to historical fact. A novel whose reach is matched only by its astonishing successes on the page, The Man Who LovedDogs lays bare the human cost of abstract ideals and the insidious, corrosive effects of life under a repressive political regime.
Prof Leopoldo Garcia-Colin will become 80 years old in 2010, therefore we are interested in the publication of a Festschrift (book) to honor him. Prof Garcia-Colin has worked in many different fields of statistical physics, and has applied it to biological physics, solid state physics, relativity and cosmology. We are planning a 500 pages book with original and peer-reviewed articles from his friends and former students. We may buy about 100 copies of it.
From Leonardo Padura—whose crime novels featuring Detective Mario Conde form the basis of Netflix’s Four Seasons in Havana—The Transparency of Time sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery spanning centuries of occult history. Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution are being swept away in favor of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money. Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant practitioner of Santería appears on the scene to engage Conde to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla—a black Madonna. This sets Conde on a quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the distant past, as he delves as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to uncover the true provenance of the statue. Through vignettes from the life of a Catalan peasant named Antoni Barral, who appears throughout history in different guises—as a shepherd during the Spanish Civil War, as vassal to a feudal lord—we trace the Madonna to present-day Cuba. With Barral serving as Conde’s alter ego, unstuck in time, and Conde serving as the author’s, we are treated to a panorama of history, and reminded of the impossibility of ever remaining on its sidelines, no matter how obscure we may think our places in the action. Equal parts The Name of the Rose and The Maltese Falcon, The Transparency of Time cements Leonardo Padura’s position as the preeminent literary crime writer of our time.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred let me sow love, Where there is injury, pardon . . . For it is in giving that we receive, It is in pardoning that we are pardoned And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life". This famous prayer, traditionally attributed to Saint Francis, has traveled the world, winning hearts and inspiring minds with its simple and persuasive witness to the power of unconditional love. As Leonardo Boff shows in his moving reflections, this love not only brings each person the promise of eternal salvation, but also provides the basis for social peace, redeems the world, and constitutes the hidden meaning of the universe.
At the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, Leonardo Boff offers a telling assessment of the impact and future prospects of Christianity. The anniversary has prompted intense soul-searching, especially in Latin America. While church conservatives have called triumphalistically for a "new evangelization" of the continent, others-remembering the ongoing toll among native peoples, blacks, and the poor-have called on the church to free itself from vestiges of its colonial past. In New Evangelization Boff cuts to the heart of tensions in the church today. In his first extensive treatment of Christian mission from a liberation theology perspective he deals with such topics as inculturation and the trinitarian basis of mission. He offers an extensive reflection on the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe as model of a new, liberating evangelization. The gospel arrived in the Americas under the sign of domination. Boff argues that a new evangelization, rooted in the culture of the oppressed, must occur under the sign of liberation. Book jacket.
One out of every five Latin Americans or around 130 million people have never known anything but poverty, subsisting on less than US$4-a-day throughout their lives. These are the region ́s chronically poor, who have remained so despite unprecedented inroads against poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean since the turn of the century. Left Behind: Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean takes a closer look at the region’s entrenched poor, who and where they are, and how existing policies need to change in order to effectively assist them. The book shows significant variations of rates of chronic poverty both across and within countries. Within a single country, some regions show incidence rates up to eight times higher than the lowest. Despite the higher rates of chronic poverty in rural areas, chronic poverty is as much an urban as a rural issue. In fact, considering absolute numbers, urban areas in many countries, including Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, have more chronic poor than rural areas. Undoubtedly the region has come a long way during the decade in terms of poverty reduction, guided by a mix of sustained growth and increased levels in amounts and quality of public spending and programs targeted directly or indirectly to the chronic poor. While improving endowments and the context where the chronic poor live is a necessary condition going forward, the decade’s experience suggests that it may not be enough to reach the chronic poor. The book posits that refinements to the existing policy toolkit †“ as opposed to more programs †“ may come a long way in helping the remaining poor. These refinements include intensifying efforts to improve coordination between different social and economic programs, which can boost the income generation process and deal with the intergenerational transmission of chronic poverty by investing in early childhood development. Equally important though, there is an urgent need to adapt programs to directly address the psychological toll of chronic poverty on people’s mindset and aspirations, which currently undermines the effectiveness of the existing policy efforts.
The book deals with the environmentally friendly cleaning materials functionalized with TiO2, a widely known semiconductor giving rise to redox reactions under artificial or solar irradiation. The role of Titanium dioxide in the worldwide community is introduced first. The fundamental working principles of heterogeneous photocatalysis follow and a critical section on the semiconductor bulk and surface properties open the way to the differences between TiO2 blend features with respect to analogous thin film layouts. Then follows the main section of the book which deals with the techniques applied to manufactured commercial devices, ranging from glasses to textiles and from concrete and other construction materials to paintings. Also road asphalt and other devices, such as photocatalytic air conditioning machines are outlined. Last generation materials, not yet commercialized, and the deposition techniques applied to prepare them are also widely discussed. The final part of the book covers the difficult and modern topic of standardization and comparison of performance of photocatalytic processes and in particular the guidelines proposed by various worldwide organizations for standardization are discussed. The book covers the general matters as well as the practical applications with the supporting methods discussed in detail. This book brings together a team of highly experienced and well-published experts in the field, providing a comprehensive view of the applications of supported titanium dioxide.
This book evaluates democratic innovations to allow a full analysis of the different practices that have emerged recently in Latin America. These innovations, often viewed in a positive light by a large section of democratic theorists, engendered the idea that all innovations are democratic and all democratic innovations are able to foster citizenship – a view challenged by this work. The book also evaluates the expansion of innovation to the field of judicial institutions. It will benefit democratic theorists by presenting a realistic analysis of the positive and negative aspects of democratic innovation.
Machine generated contents note: -- Preface -- Chapter 1 - Exile and Post-Exile in Analytical Perspective -- Chapter 2 - Escape, Deportation and Exile: The Contours of Institutionalized Exclusion -- Chapter 3 - Exile and Diaspora Politics: Mobilizing to Undo Exclusion -- Chapter 4 - Diaspora and Home Country Initiatives, Transnational Networks and State Policies -- Chapter 5 - Surviving Authoritarianism, Contributing to the Agenda of Democratization -- Chapter 6 - Undoing Exile? Remembering, Imagining, Envisioning -- Chapter 7 - The Transformational Role of Culture and Education: Impacting the Future -- Chapter 8 - Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship -- Conclusions -- About the Authors -- Index
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.