Cosmic Trails Itinerary

FT. LAUDERDALE

The Rough Guide to Miami & South Florida is the definitive guide to the ever-emerging city of Miami and the hot and happening Southern Florida. The only guide to this region which has a dedicated full-length chapter on Fort Lauderdale, The Rough Guide to Miami & South Florida is fully updated, with expanded listings of restaurants, accommodation, and nightlife for all budgets, and everything from art museums to sun drenched beaches.

Florida: A Short History

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise: Washington Post reporter Grunwald brings the zeal of his profession—and the skill that won him a Society of Environmental Journalists Award in 2003—to this enthralling story of “the river of grass” that starry-eyed social engineers and greedy developers have diverted, drained and exploited for more than a century. In 1838, fewer than 50 white people lived in south Florida, and the Everglades was seen as a vast and useless bog. By the turn of this century, more than seven million people lived there (and 40 million tourists visited annually). Escalating demands of new residents after WWII were sapping the Everglades of its water and decimating the shrinking swamp’s wildlife. But in a remarkable political and environmental turnaround, chronicled here with a Washington insider’s savvy, Republicans and Democrats came together in 2000 to launch the largest ecosystem restoration project in America’s history. This detailed account doesn't shortchange the environmental story — including an account of the senseless fowl hunts that provoked abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1877 broadside “Protect the Birds.” But Grunwald’s emphasis on the role politics played in first despoiling and now reclaiming the Everglades gives this important book remarkable heft.

The New History of Florida: Written to observe the sesquicentennial of statehood, this is a comprehensive history of the state of Florida. The book contains 22 chapters, in which the authors present political, economic, military and religious information, as well as social history and personal experiences.

Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe: When the conquistadors arrived in Florida as many as 350,000 native Americans lived there. Two and a half centuries later, Florida’s Indians were gone. This text focuses on these native peoples and their lives, and attempts to explain what happened to them.
 

THE BAHAMAS

Fodor’s Caribbean 2009

A–Z of Bahamas Heritage: Designed as a lively encyclopedia, this includes all the elements that constitute the heritage of modern Bahamians: historical, geographical, economic, political, social and cultural. Key events, institutions, customs and personalities are not just described but evaluated. Compiled by the premier historian of The Bahamas and four years in the making, this sparkling reference book is the distillation of research and analysis spread over half a century.
 

THE CARIBBEAN

A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and Carib to the Present: Offered as a brief history of a diverse and intriguing region, this work is a veritable sourcebook of information about the Caribbean, ranging from the climate to vegetation to colonial history to politics. The book, in five parts, covers Spanish rule, the northern European influence, the sugar empire, independence, and post-World War I development.

A Continent of Islands: Searching For the Caribbean Destiny: A penetrating analysis of the social, political, sexual, and cultural worlds that exist behind the four-color Caribbean travel posters. Kurlansky, who reports on the Caribbean for The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, etc., has wide-ranging interests. Here, he discusses such diverse (and unexpected) aspects of his subject as the politics of hurricanes — how island leaders and their rivals take advantage of natural disasters to further their aims; the effects of AIDS on sexual practices throughout the region — the sections on Castro’s handling of the AIDS emergency are particularly engrossing; and the impact of American Fundamentalist proselytizing on traditional West Indian religious groups. One of Kurlansky’s major themes is the danger inherent in a tourism-based island economy.
 

ARUBA

Frommer’s Portable Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao

Hunter Travel Guide Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao Alive: A thorough revision — now with color maps and photos throughout — of this comprehensive guide to the popular ABC islands, located just off the Venezuelan coast. Discover the quiet life of Bonaire, gamble away at Aruba’s casino, hit the high-style designer clothing stores in Curaçao, and relax on the glorious white beaches of all three! Here is the ultimate guide to discovering the high life and cool spots of the ABCs, written by authors who have sacrificed their vacations to research this book (poor things!). This Alive Guide focuses on shopping (snatch up some duty-free bargains), hotels and restaurants (colorful local cuisine and fine dining alike), with special attention paid to the cream of the crop. Sightseeing, historical walking tours, wildlife discovery, and watersports are also covered. The activity-oriented Sunup to Sundown sections will fill your day with beaches, deep-sea fishing charters, diving excursions, moped rides and more, while After Dark tells you of the best happy hours, the liveliest clubs and the bars where things really hop! Handy A–Z sections for each island provide all the practical details — airline offices, banking hours and locations, emergency telephone numbers, shopping hours, tourist information booths. Easy-to-read maps and a detailed index complete the picture.

Paradise Overseas: The Dutch Caribbean — Colonialism and its Transatlantic Legacies: Paradise Overseas presents a tour around the main themes of Dutch Caribbean history and its contemporary legacies. Drawing on wide expertise in Caribbean and Latin American studies, Gert Oostindie strongly posits a refreshing analysis of the Dutch Caribbean in a comparative framework which will be of interest to historians, anthropologists and political scientists alike. Rather than aiming at a comprehensive narrative, he offers a thematic discussion of topics such as the contrasts between Dutch colonization in the Americas and Asia; African slavery, Asian indentured labour and the shaping of plural societies in the Dutch Caribbean; the major contrasts between and within the six Antillean islands and Suriname; the different trajectories of decolonisation and their subsequent costs and benefits; and the changing significance of ethnicity and national identity both in the Dutch Caribbean and its diaspora.

Birds of the West Indies
 

CURAÇAO

Frommer’s Portable Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao

Hunter Travel Guide Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao Alive: A thorough revision — now with color maps and photos throughout — of this comprehensive guide to the popular ABC islands, located just off the Venezuelan coast. Discover the quiet life of Bonaire, gamble away at Aruba’s casino, hit the high-style designer clothing stores in Curaçao, and relax on the glorious white beaches of all three! Here is the ultimate guide to discovering the high life and cool spots of the ABCs, written by authors who have sacrificed their vacations to research this book (poor things!). This Alive Guide focuses on shopping (snatch up some duty-free bargains), hotels and restaurants (colorful local cuisine and fine dining alike), with special attention paid to the cream of the crop. Sightseeing, historical walking tours, wildlife discovery, and watersports are also covered. The activity-oriented Sunup to Sundown sections will fill your day with beaches, deep-sea fishing charters, diving excursions, moped rides and more, while After Dark tells you of the best happy hours, the liveliest clubs and the bars where things really hop! Handy A–Z sections for each island provide all the practical details — airline offices, banking hours and locations, emergency telephone numbers, shopping hours, tourist information booths. Easy-to-read maps and a detailed index complete the picture.

Paradise Overseas: The Dutch Caribbean — Colonialism and its Transatlantic Legacies: Paradise Overseas presents a tour around the main themes of Dutch Caribbean history and its contemporary legacies. Drawing on wide expertise in Caribbean and Latin American studies, Gert Oostindie strongly posits a refreshing analysis of the Dutch Caribbean in a comparative framework which will be of interest to historians, anthropologists and political scientists alike. Rather than aiming at a comprehensive narrative, he offers a thematic discussion of topics such as the contrasts between Dutch colonization in the Americas and Asia; African slavery, Asian indentured labour and the shaping of plural societies in the Dutch Caribbean; the major contrasts between and within the six Antillean islands and Suriname; the different trajectories of decolonisation and their subsequent costs and benefits; and the changing significance of ethnicity and national identity both in the Dutch Caribbean and its diaspora.

Birds of the West Indies
 

PANAMA

National Geographic Traveler: Panama: In Panama, the new Traveler guide takes the visitor beyond the famous canal to the Darien, a biological Eden teeming with wildlife, to the homelands of indigenous cultures that predate the conquistadores to Bocas del Toro, synonymous with a funky lifestyle to the steamy cosmopolitan capital, Panama City. Each guidebook in this series details how to get around and what not to miss ... the most gracious hotels and recommended restaurants ... the best spots for festivals, wildlife watching, water sports, and moreÑall presented with the reliable reporting and magnificent photos and maps that are the hallmarks of National Geographic.

Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time — the Building of the Panama Canal: Parker begins this engrossing narrative of the construction of what Theodore Roosevelt called one of the great works of the world well before the 20th century: everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Goethe was interested in a trans-isthmus canal, and one of the most arresting sections of the book chronicles the failed French efforts, in the late 1800s, to build one. Roosevelt then called for the building of a canal in his first address to Congress. The project faced countless challenges, but Parker is especially deft when addressing the racism that magnified already appalling working conditions. Those in charge didn’t want to hire white American workers, who were too expensive and too unionized (though later, whites were hired), and the discussions about workers became racialized. The native Isthmian was too indolent, but black workers from the British West Indies were viewed as cheap and expendable. U.S. authorities discriminated racially, paying workers unequally and trying, in general, to prevent the intermingling of the races. This is not a narrow history of mechanical engineering but a well-researched and satisfying account of imperial vision and social inequity.

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914: On December 31, 1999, after nearly a century of rule, the United States officially ceded ownership of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama. That nation did not exist when, in the mid-19th century, Europeans first began to explore the possibilities of creating a link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the narrow but mountainous isthmus; Panama was then a remote and overlooked part of Colombia. All that changed, writes David McCullough in his magisterial history of the Canal, in 1848, when prospectors struck gold in California. A wave of fortune seekers descended on Panama from Europe and the eastern United States, seeking quick passage on California-bound ships in the Pacific, and the Panama Railroad, built to serve that traffic, was soon the highest-priced stock listed on the New York Exchange. To build a 51-mile-long ship canal to replace that railroad seemed an easy matter to some investors. But, as McCullough notes, the construction project came to involve the efforts of thousands of workers from many nations over four decades; eventually those workers, laboring in oppressive heat in a vast malarial swamp, removed enough soil and rock to build a pyramid a mile high. In the early years, they toiled under the direction of French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, who went bankrupt while pursuing his dream of extending France’s empire in the Americas. The United States then entered the picture, with President Theodore Roosevelt orchestrating the purchase of the canal — but not before helping foment a revolution that removed Panama from Colombian rule and placed it squarely in the American camp. The story of the Panama Canal is complex, full of heroes, villains, and victims. McCullough’s long, richly detailed, and eminently literate book pays homage to an immense undertaking.

A Guide to the Birds of Panama

The History of Panama: As the narrowest stretch of land in the Central American isthmus, Panama’s geographical location has for millenia made it the crossroads for traders, travelers, European pirates, and world superpowers. Panamanian history is replete with explicit or tacit domination by others. In the post-Columbus period, Panama was first a Spanich colony, then a province of Colombia, and then finally a quasi-territory of the United States during the 20th century. Suffering invasion by the United States in 1989 to oust dictator Manuel Noriega and then receiving full ownership of the Panama Canal at the end of 1999, Panama has rebuilt itself into a strong, if contentious democracy. This work chronicles and highlights the key events and figures in the country’s past 500 years of history, from Columbus to current day. It begins with Panama’s colonial period, demonstrating how even in its early day, the isthmus was seen by the Spanish as merely a transshipment point. It then examines the post-Spanish period when the Colombian province of Panama became a forgotten backwater until European powers began vying for canal rights, leading to an ill-fated French effort. The main portion of the book details the events, figures, and intricacies of the Panama-U.S. relationship, which dominated Panama’s history for the entire 20th century. It closes with an examination of the gains and challenges the country has faced in the post-U.S. invasion years.
 

COSTA RICA

Fodor’s Costa Rica

Travellers’ Wildlife Guides Costa Rica: The Travellers’ Wildlife Guides are aimed at environmentally conscious travellers for whom some of the best parts of any trip are glimpses of wildlife in natural settings. With stunning color illustrations and photographs of amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds, this series is unique in that it aims to aid the visitor in identifying all types of vertebrate land animals while providing current information on the conservation statuses of the animals. Most travellers to Costa Rica want to experience its lush tropical forests and catch glimpses of exotic wildlife; toucans and parrots, hummingbirds and hawks, monkeys and big cats, frogs and toads, crocodiles, and (yes) snakes. Here is all the information you will need to find, identify and learn about Costa Rica’s magnificent wildlife.

The Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide: “Graced with bounteous natural beauty, a stable democratic government, and friendly citizens, Costa Rica has become a popular destination for travelers from all over the world. Birds play a prominent role in attracting visitors, too. The shimmering quetzals, gaudy macaws, and comical toucans only begin to hint at the impressive avian diversity to be found throughout this small country” (from the Introduction). This is the one field guide the novice or experienced birder needs to identify birds in the field in the diverse habitats found in Costa Rica. It features descriptions and illustrations of more than 820 resident and neotropical migrant species found in Costa Rica, all in a compact, portable, user-friendly design. The detailed full-color illustrations show identifying features — including plumage differences among males, females, and juveniles — and views of birds in flight wherever pertinent.

Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion has been compiled in an attempt to provide tourists with a different perspective on the country. Each of the twenty-six remarkable stories in this collection has been selected to reflect the geographical area in which it is set. (Though Costa Rica is only about half the size of Ireland, it is wonderfully diverse.) Story settings range from the high valleys of the central plateau to the flatlands of the Caribbean coast to the plains of Guanacaste. A typical guidebook will instruct visitors on the politics, history, culture, economy, and ethnicity of a country, but only fiction can portray its soul. After reading the stories contained in this literary companion, travelers to Costa Rica will no doubt view this Central American nation with whole new eyes.

The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politic: This essential introduction to Costa Rica includes more than fifty texts related to the country’s history, culture, politics, and natural environment. Most of these newspaper accounts, histories, petitions, memoirs, poems, and essays are written by Costa Ricans. Many appear here in English for the first time. The authors are men and women, young and old, scholars, farmers, workers, and activists. The Costa Rica Reader presents a panoply of voices: eloquent working-class raconteurs from San José’s poorest barrios, English-speaking Afro-Antilleans of the Lim—n province, Nicaraguan immigrants, factory workers, dissident members of the intelligentsia, and indigenous people struggling to preserve their culture. With more than forty images, the collection showcases sculptures, photographs, maps, cartoons, and fliers. From the time before the arrival of the Spanish, through the rise of the coffee plantations and the Civil War of 1948, up to participation in today’s globalized world, Costa Rica’s remarkable history comes alive. The Costa Rica Reader is a necessary resource for scholars, students, and travelers alike.