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Guatemala draws some half million tourists each year, whose brief visits to the ruins of ancient Maya cities and contemporary highland Maya villages may give them only a partial and folkloric understanding of Guatemalan society. In this vividly written travel narrative, Stephen Connely Benz explores the Guatemala that casual travelers miss, using his encounters with ordinary Guatemalans at the mall, on the streets, at soccer games, and even at the funeral of massacre victims to illuminate the social reality of Guatemala today.

The book opens with an extended section on the capital, Guatemala City, and then moves out to the more remote parts of the country where the Guatemalan Indians predominate. Benz offers us a series of intelligent and sometimes humorous perspectives on Guatemala's political history and the role of the military, the country's environmental degradation, the influence of foreign missionaries, and especially the impact of the United States on Guatemala, from governmental programs to fast food franchises.

• Entries organized by neighborhood
• Maps with easy-to-locate landmarks and mass transit options
• Background on each entry, including the design architect, name and address, description, and other essential information
• Sidebars on additional sites and projects
• A detailed supplemental section with a glossary, selected bibliography, and indexes by architect, building name, and building type

Up-to-date and illustrated with almost four hundred color photos, the Guide to Chicago's Twenty-First-Century Architecture takes travelers and locals on a journey into an ever-changing architectural mecca.

Gulf to Rockies is a chapter in the business and economic history of the American West and the story of two of the most colorful railroad builders of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the 1860s the mineral treasures of Colorado were virtually inaccessible for lack of railroads. Even after a hectic decade of building in the 1870s, the state faced a new sort of isolation: every railroad crossing her borders was controlled by the Union Pacific or the Santa Fe. As a result, the Rocky Mountain region could not hope to compete with the Midwest for the business of the Atlantic seaboard.

To remedy this situation, John Evans, former governor of Colorado, organized in 1881 a railroad to run southward from Denver as the first link in a cheap rail-water route via the Gulf of Mexico to the East. Meanwhile ambitious Fort Worth citizens had incorporated the Fort Worth and Denver City in 1873. Not a rail was laid on either road, however, until General Grenville M. Dodge, famed builder of the Union Pacific and the Texas Pacific, took up the Texas project and joined forces with Evans to create the Gulf-to-Rockies route.

It took seven years for these men and their associates to mobilize funds and complete the Fort Worth–Denver line, and another decade to establish the system’s independence and solve its financial problems in the face of drought, depression, and intense competition.

Gulf to Rockies was written under special agreements with Northwestern University and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, whereby the university relieved Mr. Overton of a part of his duties in order that he might have time for research and writing and the railroad undertook to bear the cost of the research. The Burlington also permitted him free access to all company records and granted him unrestricted freedom to publish his findings.

Stories from survivors of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s epochal weather disaster

 

On July 4, 1999, in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in the region’s history. Originating over the Dakotas, the midsummer windstorm developed amid unusually high heat and water-saturated forests and moved steadily east, bearing down on Fargo, North Dakota, and damaging land as it crossed the Minnesota border. Gunflint Falling tells the story of this devastating storm from the perspectives of those who were on the ground before, during, and after the catastrophic event—from first-time visitors to the north woods to returning paddlers to Forest Service Rangers.

The pre-dawn forecasts from the National Weather Service in Duluth for that Sunday of the holiday weekend predicted the day would be “warm and humid. Partly sunny with a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms.” But as the afternoon and evening settled over the Boundary Waters, the first eyewitness accounts began to tell a dramatic and terrifying story. Five friends camping on Lake Polly watched in wonder as the sky turned green and the winds began to whip. They scrambled to pull canoes on shore and secure tarps when a tree snapped and struck one of them in the head, rendering her unconscious. Three women enjoying their last day of a camping trip near the end of the Gunflint Trail took shelter in their tent as winds increased. Water drenched the nylon walls as trees crashed around them, one flattening the tent and pinning a woman beneath its weight. A family vacationing at their cabin dodged falling trees and strained against straight-line winds as they sprinted from the cabin to the safest place they knew: a crawl space underneath it. They watched in awe as trees snapped and toppled, their twisted root balls torn out of the water-logged earth—as they prayed their cabin would hold.

By the time the storm began to subside, falling trees had injured approximately sixty people, and most needed to be medevacked to safety. Amazingly, no one died. The historic storm laid down timber that would later blaze in the Ham Lake fire of 2007, ultimately reshaping the region’s forests in ways we have yet to fully understand.

For decades, Colombia has contended with a variety of highly publicized conflicts, including the rise of paramilitary groups in response to rebel insurgencies of the 1960s, the expansion of an illegal drug industry that has permeated politics and society since the 1970s, and a faltering economy in the 1990s. An unprecedented analysis of these struggles, Guns, Drugs, and Development in Colombia brings together leading scholars from a variety of fields, blending previously unseen quantitative data with historical analysis for an impressively comprehensive assessment. Culminating in an inspiring plan for peace, based on Four Cornerstones of Pacification, this landmark work is sure to spur new calls for change in this corner of Latin America and beyond.

This is the travel diary of a young German businessman who came to Texas and worked for several years in Houston and the surrounding areas. His diary, originally published in German as Texanisches Tagebuch, gives a fascinating view of life in the Texas republic.

Gutai is the first book in English to examine Japan’s best-known modern art movement, a circle of postwar artists whose avant-garde paintings, performances, and installations foreshadowed many key developments in American and European experimental art.

Working with previously unpublished photographs and archival resources, Ming Tiampo considers Gutai’s pioneering transnational practice, spurred on by mid-century developments in mass media and travel that made the movement’s field of reception and influence global in scope. Using these lines of transmission to claim a place for Gutai among modernist art practices while tracing the impact of Japan on art in Europe and America, Tiampo demonstrates the fundamental transnationality of modernism. Ultimately, Tiampo offers a new conceptual model for writing a global history of art, making Gutai an important and original contribution to modern art history.