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Howard (Latin American and Caribbean history, Univ. of Houston) offers a valuable transnational perspective on one of the most important yet understudied aspects of Cubas economic history: workers.  The author examines the ways Jamaican and Haitian braceros negotiated their relationships to sugar companies and eastern Cuban society more generally amid growing nativism in early 20th-century Cuba.  Many recent studies on Cuban economic history during this period offer heavily structural interpretations that too often neglect workers experiences, but this book charts the ways the revival of the Cuban sugar industry following independence in 1898, and its restructuring after the collapse of sugar prices after 1920, affected workers.  Among the book's most important contributions is the novel interpretation of the impact of Marcus Garveys Pan-African movement.  In contrast to most authors who argue that Garveyism failed to take root among Cubas urban black elite because it conflicted with class-based identities, Howard suggests that braceros embraced it alongside the labor ideology of anarcho-syndicalism as an additional tool with which to forge their ethnic and worker identities.  An excellent starting point for students and scholars of Caribbean cultural and labor history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.

What a great book!  Grove (emer., Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), an archaeologist who has spent his professional career doing fieldwork in Mesoamerica, has produced an eminently readable account of the Olmec, one of the most well-publicized yet least well-known cultures of pre-Hispanic Mexico.  The Olmec culture, known for the production of exquisitely carved stone monuments, existed from ca. 1150 BCE to 400 BCE and extended eastward from the Tuxtla Mountains of southern Veracruz to the humid lowlands of western Tabasco.  Several dozen archaeological sites are known to contain monuments, but the majority are found at only four sites: Laguna de los Cerros, Tres Zapotes, La Venta, and San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán.  The history of the archaeological work carried on at these four centers forms the basis of Groves narrative.  His story makes the decades of backbreaking, painstaking work carried out at the sites by some of the most prominent scholars in Mesoamerican archaeology come to life in a way rarely found.  Readers do not need any prior knowledge of the field in order to become engrossed in Groves story.  This reviewer read it cover to cover and wished for more.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

Over a century of scholarship devoted to Indigenous warfare has produced a multitude of revelations regarding the nature, ubiquity, and antiquity of armed conflict in the American hemisphere.  The past 20 years have produced particularly significant insights for a nuanced understanding of Amerindian conflict that highlights its strategic, political, biological, social, and destructive dimensions.  Drawing on recent theoretical and methodological advances in anthropological archaeology, ethnohistory, and bioarchaeology, Dumbarton Oaks convened a 2011 symposium, Conflict, Conquest, and the Performance of War in Pre-Columbian America.  Scherer and Verano have published the collective results in this compelling and beautifully bound and illustrated volume, which constitutes one of the most formidable presentations of the topic presently available.  It stands as a premier collection of scholarly, albeit eminently readable, papers devoted to Amerindian warfare.  Significantly, this collection follows on the heels of other recent works in seeking to depart from otherwise essentialized perspectives, and thereby redefines the centrality of battlegrounds and the human body in Amerindian conflict narratives.Summing Up: Essential. All academic levels/libraries.

Gibson synthesizes and integrates some of the most important insights from recent historical scholarship on slavery, capitalism, and empire into an accessible survey of over five centuries of Caribbean history.  The Cambridge-educated author combines the careful reflexivity and nuance of a seasoned historian with the verbal dexterity and attention to current events of an accomplished journalist, producing a book that is both readable and thought provoking, regionally specific and globally aware, historical yet exceedingly relevant to todays most pressing issues.  Although the author strays from the traditional argument-driven narrative, she points out that her most pervasive theme is the genius of adaptation to the convergence of worlds and all the violent forces it wrought in the Caribbean: slavery, racism, poverty, disease, tourism.  Gibson's expertise on Cuba in the era of the Haitian Revolution is evident in an excellent synthesis of the way that development set in motion changes in the institution of slavery and the debates and duties of empire for decades afterward.  Although greater variation from the conventional top-down approach would have been welcome, this is an excellent introduction to Caribbean history for non-specialists.Summing Up: Essential. Public and undergraduate collections.

The editors have provided an outstanding history of the effects of WW II in Puerto Rico and of the role of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the wara period that until recently has received relatively little scholarly attention.  Each contribution is clearly written and makes its specific contribution, and the editors and authors did a remarkable job ensuring that the chapters complement one another as well as if this were a single-author monograph.  Military strategy, political relationships both on the island and between Puerto Rico and the US, economics and infrastructure development, life on the island and how the war and the German blockade affected it, even an individual Puerto Rican soldier's experienceall these aspects come together to produce a cohesive vision.  Each chapter can stand on its own, but this truly is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.  Of interest to historians of the war and of the island, as well as to Puerto Rican people who want to know more about this relatively recent period.  A truly outstanding book.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

The eyes of the city that shape Jaguaribes masterful work evoke not only the unforgettable, urbane imagery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but also the social, cultural, and technological processes that have shaped both images and dissemination and the divergent gazes that have read them over time.  Jaguaribe's graceful, compelling essays move smoothly from the 19th- and 20th-century metropolis claiming its place on a world stage through modernism and authoritarian regimes, toward contemporary sprawl and Olympic projections.  Jaguaribe (communications, Federal Univ. of Rio de Janeiro) provides equally insightful analyses whether dealing with architecture and planning, photography, carnival and other celebrations, literary models of the flaneur, or film or other visualizations.  In particular, the author shows herself at home in deconstructing elite modernist visions and revisions and in guiding readers through subaltern readings that emerge from the photograph, the crowd, the beach, and the favela while engaging Brazilian and other global scholarships.  Hence, Jaguaribe complicates visions of the best-known icons of this city through history, social process, aesthetics, and political economics while challenging scholars in humanities and social sciences about how they must rethink urban imaginaries.  A stimulating and important book for all academic audiences.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries.