!Te Toca!


Book Description

""Languages are best learned when real-world information becomes the focus of students' activities. In this respect, !Te Toca! definitely encourages advanced learners to focus on exchanging real-life information about the world around them. Moreover, since the topics and issues presented in the book are controversial in nature, they seem especially appealing to college students."" Dr Maria Jesus Amores, University of West Virginia !Te Toca! is a thoroughly innovative approach to advanced language learning. Imaginative, exciting and fun, it uses language simulations to take students into a virtual Spanish-speaking world where they adopt a new Spanish or Latin-American identity. Creating a learning environment in which they need to use Spanish to solve a problem or engage in debate, the language simulations draw and expand on students' linguistic, communication, and information-gathering skills. Covering a variety of engaging topics, the simulations literally put the students centre-stage, requiring them to think on their feet and speak exclusively in Spanish. The topics revolve around contentious issues and each chapter includes a simulation exercise with all its associated documents, as well as a lead text, comprehension questions, a guide to relevant points of functional grammar, associated exercises, a glossary of terms, and suggestions for written work.










Redeemers


Book Description

In Redeemers, acclaimed historian Enrique Krauze presents the major ideas that have formed the modern Latin American political mind during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and looks closely at how these ideas were expressed in the lives of influential revolutionaries, thinkers, poets, and novelists. Here are the Cuban José Martí; the Argentines Che Guevara and Evita Perón; political thinkers like Mexico’s José Vasconcelos; and the writers José Enrique Rodó, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel García Márquez. Redeemers also highlights Mexico’s Samuel Ruiz and Subcomandante Marcos, as well as Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez, and their influence on contemporary Latin America. In his brilliant, deeply researched history, Enrique Krauze uses the range of these extraordinary lives to illuminate the struggle that has defined Latin American history: an ever-precarious balance between the ideal of democracy and the temptation of political messianism.




Dispositio


Book Description




Cuba and Its Neighbours


Book Description

In this groundbreaking book, Arnold August explores Cuba's unique form of democracy, presenting a detailed and balanced analysis of Cuba's electoral process and the state's functioning between elections. By comparing them with practices in the U.S., Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, August shows that people's participation in politics and society is not limited to a singular, U.S.- centric understanding of democracy. Through this deft analysis, August illustrates how the process of democratization in Cuba is continually in motion and argues that a greater understanding of different political systems teaches us to not be satisfied with either blanket condemnations or idealistic political illusions.