Ben Corbett

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

An Outlaw Culture Survives

With personal stories that depict a people torn between following the directives of their government and finding a way to better their lot, journalist Ben Corbett gives readers the daily life of many considered outlaws by Castro's regime.

This Is Cuba

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David McFadden

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Further Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters

WithAn Innocent in Ireland(1995), David McFadden began his eccentric journeys to the heart of some of the world’s most unique island nations. Now McFadden rambles through the highs and lows of Cuba, home to cigars, Guantanamera, and of course Castro. The beautiful Caribbean landscape, along with Cuba’s rich history, culture, and uncertain future, lend themselves to the quirky eye and wry witticisms of our innocent Canadian guide. Poking into the nation’s many corners, McFadden offers a series of vignettes of the people, cities,villages, roads, and countryside of the island the author refers to as “the most famous little country in the world.” Warm and colourful,An Innocent in Cubais a musical, sensuous, flirtatious, joyful tribute to the Cuban spirit in all its incarnations.

An Innocent in Cuba

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Christopher Baker

Motorcycling Through Castro's Cuba

The author recounts his three-month, seven-thousand-mile odyssey through Cuba, discussing Cuba's troubled history and politics and offering profiles of the colorful people he encountered along the way.

Mi Moto Fidel

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Alan Ryan

The Reader's Companion to Cuba offers nearly two dozen captivating eye-witness "reports" from visitors to Cuba's shores, among them Anais Nin's introduction to the "Fairyland" of Havana, Langston Hughes's surprising rumba party, an excursion around town with Fidel behind the wheel, Tommy Lasorda's baseball interview with pistol presiding, and Thomas Merton's pilgrimage to Our Lady of Cobre - a trip "nine-tenths vacation and one-tenth pilgrimage." From Arnold Samuelson's intimate portrait of Hemingway to Frank Ragano's recollections of the Mafia in Havana, The Reader's Companion to Cuba offers an infinitely more revealing and personal time-lapse "tour" of this complex country than could possibly be offered by any standard guidebook.

The Reader's Companion to Cuba

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Graham Greene

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

An entertainment

Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman, was short of money. His daughter had reached an expensive age - so he accepted Hawthorne's offer of $300-plus a month and became Agent 59200/5, M16's man in Havana. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true ...

Our Man in Havana

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Alma Guillermoprieto

A Memoir of the Revolution

In 1970 a young dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios (it was considered more revolutionary); her poorly trained but ardent students worked without them but dreamt of greatness. Yet in the midst of chronic shortages and revolutionary upheaval, Guillermoprieto found in Cuba a people whose sense of purpose touched her forever. In this electrifying memoir, Guillermoprieto–now an award-winning journalist and arguably one of our finest writers on Latin America– resurrects a time when dancers and revolutionaries seemed to occupy the same historical stage and even a floor exercise could be a profoundly political act. Exuberant and elegiac, tender and unsparing, Dancing with Cuba is a triumph of memory and feeling.

Dancing with Cuba

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Julia Cooke

Life in the New Cuba

Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today. Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.

The Other Side of Paradise

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Aviva Chomsky

History, Culture, Politics

Cuba is often perceived in starkly black and white terms--either as the site of one of Latin America's most successful revolutions or as the bastion of the world's last communist regime. The Cuba Reader multiplies perspectives on the nation many times over, presenting more than one hundred selections about Cuba's history, culture, and politics. Beginning with the first written account of the island, penned by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the selections assembled here track Cuban history from the colonial period through the ascendancy of Fidel Castro to the present.

The Cuba Reader combines songs, paintings, photographs, poems, short stories, speeches, cartoons, government reports and proclamations, and pieces by historians, journalists, and others. Most of these are by Cubans, and many appear for the first time in English. The writings and speeches of José Martí, Fernando Ortiz, Fidel Castro, Alejo Carpentier, Che Guevera, and Reinaldo Arenas appear alongside the testimonies of slaves, prostitutes, doctors, travelers, and activists. Some selections examine health, education, Catholicism, and santería; others celebrate Cuba's vibrant dance, music, film, and literary cultures. The pieces are grouped into chronological sections. Each section and individual selection is preceded by a brief introduction by the editors.

The volume presents a number of pieces about twentieth-century Cuba, including the events leading up to and following Castro's January 1959 announcement of revolution. It provides a look at Cuba in relation to the rest of the world: the effect of its revolution on Latin America and the Caribbean, its alliance with the Soviet Union from the 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, and its tumultuous relationship with the United States. The Cuba Reader also describes life in the periodo especial following the cutoff of Soviet aid and the tightening of the U.S. embargo.

For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.

The Cuba Reader

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no ISBN inside; see photos. I believe this is a first edition. 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,  the first novel by a United States-born Hispanic to win this prize. Winner of the 1990 National Book Award. 
A great read - fiery, spicy novel illustrating ethnic life in NYC and music as life. The author's detailed character descriptions lend richness to an evocative story, lilting with mambo rhythm. 

A novel

the mambo kings play songs of love

Brunonia Barry

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

Having left her hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, fifteen years ago under troubling circumstances, psychic Towner Whitney reluctantly returns after her eighty-five-year-old great-aunt Eva suddenly disappears and joins local cop John Rafferty in his investigation into the mystery. 250,000 first printing.

The Lace Reader

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Paul Theroux

previous owner name inside, otherwise excellent condition 

By Train Through the Americas

Theroux's travels by train from Boston to Patagonia--a journey of selfdiscovery and uncommon encounters marked by startling contrasts in culture, climate, landscape, altitude, and attitude--are recounted

The Old Patagonian Express

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The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux.
Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.
'Stunning. . . exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful' Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times
'An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a black mudbank of horror' Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian
'Magnificently stimulating and exciting' Anthony Burgess
American travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels and collected short stories, My Other Life, The Collected Stories, My Secret History, The Lower River, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, A Dead Hand, Millroy the Magician, The Elephanta Suite, Saint Jack, The Consul's File, The Family Arsenal, and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin.


The Mosquito Coast

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Ronald Wright

pencil underlining, otherwise excellent condition 

Travels in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico

The Maya created one of the world's most brilliant civilizations, famous for its art, astronomy, and deep fascination with the mystery of time. Despite collapse in the ninth century, Spanish invasion in the sixteenth, and civil war in the twentieth, eight million people in Guatemala, Belize, and southern Mexico speak Mayan languages and maintain their resilient culture to this day. Traveling through Central America's jungles and mountains, Ronald Wright explores the ancient roots of the Maya, their recent troubles, and prospects for survival. Embracing history, anthropology, politics, and literature, Time Among the Maya is a riveting journey through past magnificence and the study of an enduring civilization with much to teach the present. "Wright's unpretentious narrative blends anthropology, archaeology, history, and politics with his own entertaining excursions and encounters." -- The New Yorker; "Time Among the Maya shows Wright to be far more than a mere storyteller or descriptive writer. He is an historical philosopher with a profound understanding of other cultures." -- Jan Morris, The Independent (London).

Time among the Maya

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Robert D. Kaplan

Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus

Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan's first book to focus on a single region since his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, introduces readers to an explosive and little-known part of the world destined to become a tinderbox of the future. Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West. He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia. The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come.

Eastward to Tartary

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Cara Black

bought at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, see title page 

Tension runs high in this working-class neighborhood as a hunger strike to protest strict immigration laws escalates among the Algerian immigrants. Aimee barely escapes death in a car bombing in this tale of terrorism and greed in the shadows of Paris.

Murder in Belleville

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Paula McLain

Follows the life of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, as she navigates 1920s Paris.

The Paris Wife

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Tilar J. Mazzeo

Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris





Set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of World War II, The Hôtel on Place Vendôme is the captivating history of Paris's world-famous Hôtel Ritz--a breathtaking tale of glamour, opulence, and celebrity; dangerous liaisons, espionage, and resistance--from Tilar J. Manzeo, the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot and The Secret of Chanel No. 5

When France fell to the Germans in June 1940, the legendary Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme--an icon of Paris frequented by film stars and celebrity writers, American heiresses and risqué flappers, playboys, and princes--was the only luxury hotel of its kind allowed in the occupied city by order of Adolf Hitler.

Tilar J. Mazzeo traces the history of this cultural landmark from its opening in fin de siècle Paris. At its center, The Hotel on Place Vendôme is an extraordinary chronicle of life at the Ritz during wartime, when the Hôtel was simultaneously headquarters to the highest-ranking German officers, such as Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, and home to exclusive patrons, including Coco Chanel. Mazzeo takes us into the grand palace's suites, bars, dining rooms, and wine cellars, revealing a hotbed of illicit affairs and deadly intrigue, as well as stunning acts of defiance and treachery.

Rich in detail, illustrated with black-and-white photos, The Hotel on Place Vendôme is a remarkable look at this extraordinary crucible where the future of post-war France--and all of post-war Europe--was transformed. 

The Hotel on Place Vendome

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Nicholas Griffin

In the wake of warriors

The Caucasus is a jagged land. Sandwiched between the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, Turkey to the west, Iran to the south and Russia to the north, if the Caucasus didn't already possess the highest mountain range in Europe, the massive political pressure exerted from all sides would have forced the land to crack and rise anyway. Conquered in its time by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Peter the Great, Hitler and Stalin, its history is eventful to say the least. Noah's Ark lies, apparently, on the borders of Armenia; the Garden of Eden can be found in the south of Azerbaijan; and Prometheus was, for his sins, bound and pecked on the peak of a mountain in Georgia. Here, the author combines history with travelogue as he explores the Caucasus in search of the legacy of Imam Shamil, 19th century freedom fighter and guru of the modern Chechen resistance.

Caucasus

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Jason Goodwin

A History of the Ottoman Empire

For six hundred years, the Ottoman Empire swelled and declined. Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, it advanced in three centuries from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at its height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched the empire's aid. In its last three hundred years the empire seemed ready to collapse, a prodigy of survival and decay. In this dazzling evocation of the empire's power, Jason Goodwin explores how the Ottomans rose and how, against all odds, they lingered on. In doing so, he also offers a long look back to the origins of problems that plague present-day Kosovars and Serbs.

Lords of the Horizons

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Orhan Pamuk

Memories and the City

From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a portrait of Istanbul by its foremost writer, revealing the melancholy that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.  

"Delightful, profound, marvelously origina.... Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." --The Washington Post Book World

A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy--or hüzün--that all Istanbullus share.

With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters--both Turkish and foreign--who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce's Dublin and Borges' Buenos Aires, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

Istanbul

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A Walk to Istanbul

On Foot to the Golden Horn recounts Jason Goodwin's breathtaking journey with two companions through Eastern Europe from the dikes and marshes of Poland's Baltic coast across to the Golden Horn in Istanbul. Along the way, they sleep in haystacks, drink with Gypsies, and play with Ceaucescu's orphans, meeting with blatant hostility and overwhelming hospitality as an older Europe tries to settle with itself, and a new one struggles to be born. It is the story of three friends' walk through some of the world's most beautiful and tragic places, and of their encounters with a varied and vivid cast of characters.


On Foot to the Golden Horn

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Virginia Morell

Ethiopia's River of Magic and Mystery

The author was invited by the National Geographic Society to join its 1999 expedition, which hoped to be the first to descend the Blue Nile in a single, uninterrupted trip from its source to the Sudan border and its join with the White Nile.

Blue Nile

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Gilles Peress

Eric Stover

Richard J. Goldstone

some pencil underlining 
WARNING - photos and text with war crimes /evidence 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Forensic Efforts at Srebrenica and Vukovar

This book is based on research conducted in Bosnia and Croatia from 1992 to 1997. Some of the name of individuals in the book have been changed to protect them from possible retaliations and further hardship.

Browse by categories

Ben Corbett

This Is Cuba

David McFadden

An Innocent in Cuba

Christopher Baker

Mi Moto Fidel

Alan Ryan, Ed.

The Reader's Companion to Cuba

Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana

Alma Guillermoprieto

Dancing with Cuba

Julia Cooke

The Other Side of Paradise

Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, Eds.

The Cuba Reader

Oscar Hijuelos

the mambo kings play songs of love

Brunonia Barry

The Lace Reader

Paul Theroux

The Old Patagonian Express

Paul Theroux

The Mosquito Coast

Ronald Wright

Time among the Maya

Robert D. Kaplan

Eastward to Tartary

Cara Black

Murder in Belleville

Paula McLain

The Paris Wife

Tilar J. Mazzeo

The Hotel on Place Vendome

Nicholas Griffin

Caucasus

Jason Goodwin

Lords of the Horizons

Orhan Pamuk

Istanbul

Jason Goodwin

On Foot to the Golden Horn

Virginia Morell

Blue Nile

Gilles Peress; Eric Stover; Richard J. Goldstone

The Graves

Harald Salfellner

Franz Kafka and Prague

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