"Episodes from the young life of Annie John, aged 10 to 17, as she grows up on the Caribbean island of Antigua. This is a magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie's far from naive awareness of the world around her. Death, illness, and poverty intrude on the narrator's perceptive sensilibity from time to time, but even these experiences instruct her and expand her understanding of life and its shifting reality. Although Annie leaves Antigua at the end of the novel for a new role as a student in England, the hollowness she feels at her departure is balanced by the new self that awaits her as she begins the search for her own identity. A poetic and intensely moving work from the author of At the Bottom of the River. (Reviewed April 1, 1985)"--Booklist Review.

Twenty-five celebrated Latino writers delight and move us with their recollections of Christmas in this splendid holiday extravaganza. From Julia Alvarez's tale of how Santicl� delivered a beloved uncle from political oppression to Junot D�az's story of his own uneasy assimilation on his first Christmas in America, to Sandra Cisneros's poignant memories of her late father's holiday dinners, Las Christmas gives us true stories from writers of many traditions--memories of Christmas and Hanukkah that vividly capture the pride and pain, joy and heartbreak, that so often accompany the holidays in the Americas. Richly illustrated and embellished with songs and poems, along with recipes for an unforgettable Christmas dinner--from traditional sweet tamales to Puerto Rican asopao (stew) and coquito (coconut eggnog)--this is an enduring treasury of Latino writing to read again and again. A heartwarming holiday gift.

This is a fascinating portrait of Miami's Cuban population, the most successful group of immigrants to settle in the United States since the Jews of the nineteenth century. David Rieff has provided an engrossing look at a group exiled from its homeland, showing how America has affected these immigrants, and what it means to become an American in the late twentieth century.

"[Ernest Gellner] began the association with Morocco and the Berbers of the Central High Atlas that resulted in Saints of the Atlas. It was a study of how holy men kept a fragile and broken peace among the shepherds who moved each spring from the plains of the ante-Atlas into the high pastures, and back again each autumn: a hundred thousand people, a million or so sheep traversing the bottle-necks of the mountain passes twice each year. It was an ideal opportunity for theft and rustling, and the Saints were there to maintain the peace without establishing any acceptable claim to political control. His book, criticised by scholars who have worked in Moroccan archives, remains important reading because it analyses so clearly the ways in which pastoral peoples, who had been in contact with states for a couple of millennia, maintained an ideology of total rejection of the Moroccan state, and a determination not to make anything of the kind themselves. Their practice was more often than not in accord with the ideology."--Http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner/JDavisObit.html (Feb. 23, 2011.).