Ecuador Books

The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon

Robert Whitaker

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> South America -> Ecuador

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Doesn't live up to expectations 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed The Mapmaker's Wife, but felt that it was more a history book about the region than the romantic story it claimed to be. Therefore I was disappointed with it. I hoped to read it for recreation, but ended up feeling I was back in school.
Diana Banat

Editorial Review:

A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon

The year is 1735. A decade-long expedition to South America is launched by a team of French scientists racing to measure the circumference of the earth and to reveal the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery and knowledge. From this extraordinary journey arose an unlikely love between one scientist and a beautiful Peruvian noblewoman. Victims of a tangled web of international politics, Jean Godin and Isabel Gramesón’s destiny would ultimately unfold in the Amazon’s unforgiving jungles, and it would be Isabel’s quest to reunite with Jean after a calamitous twenty-year separation that would capture the imagination of all of eighteenth-century Europe. A remarkable testament to human endurance, female resourcefulness, and enduring love, Isabel Gramesón’s survival remains unprecedented in the annals of Amazon exploration.

In Focus Ecuador: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture (Ecuador (in Focus))

Wilma Roos, Omer Van Renterghem

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

For those who want good solid information 4 out of 5 stars.
33 of 35 people found this review helpful.

If you are looking for a good overview of Ecuador without all of the tourist related fluff, this is the book for you. It briefly covers topics from Ecuador's early history right up to present day politics, people and enviroment.

brief but honest picture of Ecuador 4 out of 5 stars.
22 of 22 people found this review helpful.

This short book packs in a great deal of honest and accurate information about the beautiful, complex, culturally rich, and ecologically threatened country of Ecuador. It is not a tourist guide, but recommended for prospective visitors who want to understand the culture and politics of Ecuador, and understand it quickly. It is especially valuable for its summary of the destructive effects of the petroleum industry on the ecology and economy of the country, and for its its brief but accurate introduction to the country's powerful indigenous movement. It gives a sense of the country's cultural riches, and has some great color photos.

Galapagos: World's End

William Beebe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Still Pertinent after all these years... 5 out of 5 stars.
49 of 50 people found this review helpful.

In anticipation of a forthcoming trip to the Galapagos a visit to the local library turned up this 1924 book by Wm Beebe. Somewhat to my astonishment, the book captivated me. Wm Beebe (1877-1962) was not (as I heretofore had thought) merely a one-dimensioned, deep sea explorer. World traveler, naturalist, director of the NY Zoological Society -- he wrote books ranging from birding to jungle exploration. Beebe turns out to have been an early 20th century Loren Eiseley. This book records a 1923 trip undertaken by fourteen scientists from New York to the Galapagos in a steam power yacht, provided by a wealthy patron. They were later to learn that it was more suited to ladies "sipping tea" than oceanic cruising. They discovered to their astonishment that it was "neither an inexhaustible reservoir of fresh water, nor a floating coal mine". They had to cut short their Galapagos collecting and beat an unplanned retreat to Panama for more provisions. Beebe is a very readable author, with many a well turned phrase sprinkled thru the book. He describes the ocean voyage as, "... driving a momentary wedge thru sunshine, wind, and water..." Later, in a small boat, going ashore in the Galapagos, he describes the gentle swell "...which rose and fell as if the Pacific were breathing quietly and regularly." Accordingly, when it came time to jump, he appropriately waited for the ocean to "exhale". He finds both comfort and wonder in contemplating the Darwinian explanation of all he sees. For Beebe, there is an "honour of being one with all about me and in a small way to have at least an understanding..." He marvels, for example, in picking up a crustacean's shell, that having parted ways uncountable millions of years previously, now, quite by accident, they cross again. Beebe deplores both the early sailing depredations of the tortises and the wholesale slaughter of animals by previous scientific expeditions (how many flightless cormorants do you need to get an accurate description?). This expedition restricts themselves to capturing various specimens, which they hauled back to the NYC Zoo. They also took back sacks full of lava rocks, sand, plants, etc with which to make scenic dioramas in the AM Museum of NH. On page 265 one comes across the single most arresting observation in this book. As usual, profundity lies hidden in the details. It seems that Beebe "secured" (his euphimism for collecting) several specimens of different Darwin finches on Daphne, and found to his astonishment that their crops all contained identical food items, despite their differing bill shapes. All, even the heavy beaked birds, for exaple had uncrushed seeds in their crops. He repeated this observations several times, always with the same results. So there is more to the oft repeated, now almost cannonical evolutionary explanation of the differing finch beaks. The various finches are all eating the same things! Natural selection provides what appears to be a reasonable hypothesis to explain the various beaks, but what is really going on? I can think of no less than four explanations, but that is another tale. If anybody reads this and is curious, I am at proode@pol.net.

Editorial Review:

More than 100 splendid illustrations enhance this fascinating firsthand account of a 1923 expedition to survey the wildlife of the Galápagos Islands. Beebe, a renowned biologist and explorer, combines literary skill with careful research to produce an exceptionally readable book. "High romance, exact science, fascinating history, wild adventure." — Nation.

Indians, Oil, and Politics: A Recent History of Ecuador (Latin American Silhouettes)

Allen Gerlach

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

It is indispensable that Ecuador has peace, but to have peace you need freedom and to have freedom you need justice. And the Indian population needs justice.-President Gustavo Noboa, January 23, 2000 For five centuries, the Indians had very little voice in Ecuador. Now they are major protagonists who seek more acceptable terms in which to coexist in a society with two vastly different world views and cultures-that of Indians and that of the descendants of Europeans. Their recent political uprising has become the most powerful and influential indigenous movement in Latin America. Author Allen Gerlach details the origins and evolution of the Indian rebellion, focusing on the key period of the last thirty years. He infuses his text with an abundant supply of quotations from participants in the rise in ethnic politics, bringing Ecuador's history and the Indians' opposition to the country's government to life. This valuable case study of the politics of ethnicity will become increasingly useful for those interested in Latin American politics.

Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

Suzana Sawyer

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ecuador is the third-largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the western United States. As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements.

Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality—that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging—as they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.

Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910

Brooke Larson

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Editorial Review:

Brooke Larson's interpretive analysis of the history of Andean peasants reveals the challenges of nation making in the republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the volatile nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more turbulent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew deep and where the "Indian problem" seemed so discouraging to liberalizing states. The analysis raises broader issues about the interplay of liberalism, racism, and ethnicity in the formation of exclusionary "republics without citizens" over the nineteenth century.

Travellers' Wildlife Guides Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands (Travellers' Wildlife Guides)

David L. Pearson, Les Beletsky, Priscilla Barrett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Travellers to Ecuador want to experience tropical forests and other stunning habitats and catch glimpses of exotic wildlife: toucans and parrots, monkeys and anteaters, frogs and toads, crocodiles and snakes. On the Galapagos Islands, curious visitors want to see with their own eyes the exotic, unique, tame wildlife that stimulated Charles Darwin to formulate the theory of evolution. In this book is all the information you need to find, identify, and learn about Ecuador's magnificent animal life. The authors, professional biologists, selected for color illustrations more than 500 of Ecuador's most common insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals -- the species you are most likely to see. In one easy-to-carry, entertainingly written, beautifully illustrated book, you will have as constant companion on your journey:

- Identifying and location information on the most frequently spotted animals - Up-to-date information on the ecology, behavior, and conservation of the families of animals to which the pictured species belong - Information on Ecuador's habitats and on the most common plants you will encounter - Brief descriptions of the region's most frequently visited parks and reserves.

Canar: A Year in the Highlands of Ecuador

Judy Blankenship

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Once isolated from the modern world in the heights of the Andean mountains, the indigenous communities of Ecuador now send migrants to New York City as readily as they celebrate festivals whose roots reach back to the pre-Columbian past. Fascinated by this blending of old and new and eager to make a record of traditional customs and rituals before they disappear entirely, photographer-journalist Judy Blankenship spent several years in Cañar, Ecuador, photographing the local people in their daily lives and conducting photography workshops to enable them to preserve their own visions of their culture. In this engaging book, Blankenship combines her sensitively observed photographs with an inviting text to tell the story of the most recent year she and her husband Michael spent living and working among the people of Cañar.

Very much a personal account of a community undergoing change, Cañar documents such activities as plantings and harvests, religious processions, a traditional wedding, healing ceremonies, a death and funeral, and a home birth with a native midwife. Along the way, Blankenship describes how she and Michael went from being outsiders only warily accepted in the community to becoming neighbors and even godparents to some of the local children. She also explains how outside forces, from Ecuador's failing economy to globalization, are disrupting the traditional lifeways of the Cañari as economic migration virtually empties highland communities of young people. Blankenship's words and photographs create a moving, intimate portrait of a people trying to balance the demands of the twenty-first century with the traditions that have formed their identity for centuries.

Valverde's Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure

Mark Honigsbaum

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1887, two British sailors landed on the coast of Ecuador and set off across the Andes on a secret mission. Their task was to locate an immense hoard of Inca gold which had been lost for hundreds of years. A botanist who had recently returned from Ecuador had provided them with documents proving it still existed and gave them the route to find it. And find it they did - but both perished before they could make their way back to the cave a second time.In Valverde's Gold, Mark Honigsbaum attempts to unravel a riddle that has inspired frustrating and fatal treasure hunts for centuries. When he delves into the botanist's life and discovers an ancient Spanish treasure guide buried in his notebook, he cannot help but be drawn into the mystery. Undeterred by the cursed history of the gold, Honigsbaum embarks on an epic journey into the last uncharted range in the Andes-the Llanganati Mountains of eastern Ecuador. This is the story of how the lure of gold intoxicates even the most level-headed of historians, and of how men-and women-are seized with the desire to claim treasure from one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the world. Honigsbaum battles through mountains, jungles, and conflicting stories, and, as he draws closer to the hidden cache, illuminates the allure of lost gold and the hold it has on our imagination.

The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the Andean city of Otavalo, Ecuador, a cultural renaissance is now taking place against a backdrop of fading farming traditions, transnational migration, and an influx of new consumer goods. Recently, Otavalenos have transformed their textile trade into a prosperous tourist industry, exporting colorful weavings around the world.

Tracing the connections among newly invented craft traditions, social networks, and consumption patterns, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld highlights the way ethnic identities and class cultures materialize in a sensual world that includes luxurious woven belts, powerful stereos, and garlic roasted cuyes (guinea pigs). Yet this case reaches beyond the Andes. He shows how local and global interactions intensify the cultural expression of the world's emerging "native middle classes," at times leaving behind those unable to afford the new trappings of indigenous identity.

Colloredo-Mansfeld also comments on his experiences working as an artist in Otavalo. His drawings, along with numerous photographs, animate this engaging study in economic anthropology.