The Costa Rican Dream


Book Description

Costa Rica's lush tropical rainforests, peaceful reputation, and mild Latin flavor have lured many tourists to venture outside their bubbles and pursue a pseudoadventurous vacation. For these travelers, a visit to Costa Rica most often includes a cloud forest-haze-induced daydream of giving it up all back home and relocating to the "Switzerland of Central America" as an expatriate, semiretired entrepreneur. Such is the case for three thirtysomething small-town Germans who dream of a life in Costa Rica after their first visit and decide to invest in a jungle lodge. When the plans for the new lodge begin to go sour, they decide to move to Costa Rica, recover their investment, and jump right into the dream they concocted amid a cold south German winter. The reality, however, is nothing as pleasant as they imagined. Low on money, they fight to open a lodge in a foreign jungle. The intense tropical conditions, along with a complicated legal system and labor force, will test their personal limits and friendship.




The Costa Rica Reader


Book Description

Long characterized as an exceptional country within Latin America, Costa Rica has been hailed as a democratic oasis in a continent scorched by dictatorship and revolution; the ecological mecca of a biosphere laid waste by deforestation and urban blight; and an egalitarian, middle-class society blissfully immune to the violent class and racial conflicts that have haunted the region. Arguing that conceptions of Costa Rica as a happy anomaly downplay its rich heritage and diverse population, The Costa Rica Reader brings together texts and artwork that reveal the complexity of the country’s past and present. It characterizes Costa Rica as a site of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region’s history and challenge the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble. 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 Limón 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.




The Italian Dream


Book Description

For more than three years, Aline Coquelle, the well-known globe-trotting photographer, and Count Gelasio Gaetani d’Aragona Lovatelli, a member of one of the oldest aristocratic Italian families, have followed the map of Italy’s best wines. Guided by Gelasio, readers are introduced to a tribe of artistic and wine-loving amici who share their passion for their country’s heritage and bounty. The Italian Dream: Wine, Heritage, Soul is an escape into the effortlessly elegant Italian lifestyle, savoring wine behind the private gates of family castles and vineyards, from the foothills of the Alps to the hill towns of Tuscany to the relaxed southern seasides.




Spark Your Dream


Book Description

Best-seller at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. Today, 100,000 books are sold and her 14th edition is successfully selling, inspiring many to realize their dreams. A true story of personal inspiration where Candelaria and Herman Zapp get on a 1928 car with the dream of arriving in Alaska and the surprises of the road change their plans.




West Indians of Costa Rica


Book Description

Harpelle (history, Lakehead U.) examines the migration of Caribbean people of African descent to the Hispanic-dominated, "white-settler" society of Costa Rica from 1900 to 1950, and the gradual ethnic transformation of this group into Afro-Costa Ricans. Coverage includes the expansion of the Costa Rican banana industry and the rise of the West Indian labor force; the emergence of the young Jamaican activist, Marcus Garvey; the post-WWI period of heightened unrest; attempts by Costa Rican governments, organizations and individuals to destroy the West Indian community; the eventual integration of West Indians into Costa Rican society in the 1940s and early-1950s; and the eventual formation of the Afro-Costa Rican identity. Distributed in the US by Cornell University Services. c. Book News Inc.




Two Weeks in Costa Rica


Book Description

A combination travelogue and guidebook that tells the humorous tale of the authors' vacation in Costa Rica while also giving valuable travel tips.




Finding Your Costa Rica


Book Description

Timothy A. Laskis, Ph.D. delivers a powerful yet easy to understand program for taking control of your life. His creative style will capture you and teach you how to make real changes. Timothy's use of examples, simple exercises, question and answer sessions and chapter overviews make it a memorable read. Dreaming about being happy, wealthy or living in paradise can get old. Timothy Laskis provides you with incredible strategies for making all your dreams come true, no matter your life circumstances. His five steps will assist you in every area of your life whether it's personally, professionally or financially. This isn't a book you read once and retire to the shelf. It's a guide that acts as your personal coach and you'll want to refer to it again and again. Take a walk through the pages and discover how easy it is to find success.




Migrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers in Latin America


Book Description

This volume focuses on Jewish, Arab, non-Latin European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and their experiences in their “new” homes. Rejecting exceptionalist and homogenizing tendencies within immigration history, contributors advocate instead an approach that emphasizes the locally- and nationally-embedded nature of ethnic identification.




Cold War Paradise


Book Description

In the wake of the Cold War, a diverse group of U.S. immigrants flocked to Costa Rica, distancing themselves from undesirable U.S. policies at home and abroad. Enchanted with Costa Rica’s natural beauty and lured by the prospect of cheap land, these expatriates—former government employees, businessmen and privileged bourgeois, dissident Quakers and self-seeking hippies, farmers and ecologists—sought a new life in a country that was often dubbed the Switzerland of Central America. Cold War Paradise is a social and cultural history of this little-studied immigration flow. Based on extensive oral histories of these immigrants and their diverse writings, ranging from women’s club cookbooks to personal letters, Atalia Shragai examines the motivations for immigration, patterns of movement, settlements, and processes of identity-making among U.S. Americans in Costa Rica from post–World War II to the late 1970s. Exploring such diverse themes as gender, nature, and material culture, this study provides a fresh perspective on inter-American relations from the point of view of ordinary U.S. emigrants and settlers. Shragai traces the formation and evolution of a wide range of identifications among U.S. expats and the varied ways they reconstructed and represented their individual and collective histories within the broader scheme of the U.S. presence in Cold War Central America.




Contemporary Costa Rican Poetry


Book Description

This is the first Spanish/English bilingual anthology of contemporary Costa Rican poetry ever published. It contains a careful selection of poetry published since 1990, and includes Costa Rica's finest poets and most representative current trends. Although not well known outside Costa Rica, this is outstanding poetry due not only to its thematic and stylistic variety, but also to its integration of the main tendencies of contemporary Spanish-language poetry. Victor S. Drescher's painstaking work translating the cultural, linguistic and stylistic features of the originals has made it possible for the English reader to recreate the essential aspects of the world-view that these poems reflect and represent. This anthology makes a substantial contribution to the world of letters by enabling English readers to become familiar with a representative sample of Costa Rican poetry in particular, and with Latin American poetry in general.




Recent Books