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	The Maya - Palaces and Pyramids of the Rainforest Click picture to look inside The most remarkable examples of Mayan architecture. The author and editor Henri Stierlin has based his presentation of these most remarkable examples of Mayan architecture on the latest findings from excavations in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. Cities have been rediscovered in the depths of the rainforest, along with soaring pyramids, mysterious tombs, palaces with frescoes and steles. Particularly intriguing is the fact that, although this very advanced civilisation evolved completely separately from that of the 'Old World', the architectural parallels are astonishing. Only very recently has it been possible to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics to any great extent. This new research is used to full advantage by this volume as a key to unlock the language of Mayan architecture. Publisher: Taschen ISBN: 3822812412 Published: 2001 Softcover: 240 pages, 240 x 300 mm Price: £6.99


	Edward S. Curtis Click picture to look inside For over thirty years, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) travelled the length and breadth of North America, seeking to record in words and images the traditional life of its vanishing indigenous inhabitants. Like a man possessed, he strove to realize his life's work, which culminated in the publication of his encyclopedia 'The North American Indian'. In the end, this monumental work comprised twenty textual volumes and twenty portfolios with over 2000 illustrations. No other photographer has created a larger oeuvre on this theme, and it is Curtis, more than any other, who has crucially moulded our conception of Native Americans. This book shows the photographer's most impressive pictures and vividly details his journey through life. Author: Hans Christian Adam Publisher: Taschen ISBN: 3822819816 Published: 2004 Flexicover: 196 x 245 mm, 240 pages Price: £9.99


	Kahlo The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the most important 20th century painters. Her life and work were more inextricably interwoven than in almost any other artist's case. Two events in her life were of crucial importance. When she was eighteen, a bus accident put her in hospital for a year with a smashed spinal column and fractured pelvis. It was in her sick bed that she first started to paint. Then, aged twenty-one, she married the world-famous Mexican mural artist Diego Rivera. She was to suffer the effects of the accident her whole life long, and was particularly pained by her inability to have children. Kahlo's arresting pictures, most of them small format self-portraits, express the burdens that weighed upon her soul: her unbearable physical pain, the grief that Rivera's occasional affairs prompted, the sorrow her childlessness caused her, her homesickness when living abroad and her longing to feel that she had put down roots, profound loneliness. But they also declare her passionate love for her husband, her pronounced sensuousness, and her unwavering survival instinct. Author: Andrea Kettenmann Publisher: Taschen ISBN: 3822859834 Published: 2000 Softcover: 185 x 230 mm, 96 pages Price: £4.99


	Kahlo Wall Calendar 2006 Click picture to look inside The Taschen Wall Calendar Kahlo 2006 features 12 big and beautiful reproductions and an elegant layout for the days of the month. Laminated cover, 300 x 300 mm, 24 pages Publisher: Taschen ISBN: 3822845841 Published: 2005 Price: £6.99


	World Music (vol. 2) - Latin and North America, Caribbean, India, Asia and Pacific The Rough Guide to World Music was published for the first time in 1994 and became the definitive reference source. Six years on, the subject has become too big for one book - hence World Music 2: Latin and North America, Caribbean, India, Asia and Pacific - on everything from salsa and merengue to qawwali and gamelan and biographies of artists from Juan Luis Guerra to the Klezmatics to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Publisher: Rough Guides ISBN: 1858286360 Published: 2000 Paperback: 720 pages Price: £17.99


	Native American Myths A richly illustrated title featuring the myths of the Pawnee, Iroquois, Algonquian, Navajo and many more. The myths and legends of the Native American peoples have a character all their own. As part of an ancient cultural heritage, these stories remain a fitting tribute to the imaginative power and spiritual world view of the first Americans. Publisher: Chrysalis/Collins and Brown Retold by Diana Ferguson ISBN: 185585824X Published: 2001 Paperback Price: £17.99


	Christopher Columbus - The Four Voyages 'The Admiral was quite certain that they were near land...He promised to give a silk doublet to the first sailor who should report it.' No gamble in history has been more momentous than the landfall of Columbus's ship the Santa Maria in the Americas in 1492 - an event that paved the way for the conquest of a 'New World'. The accounts collected here provide a vivid narrative of his voyages throughout the Caribbean and finally to the mainland of Central America, although he still believed he had reached Asia. Columbus himself is revealed as a fascinating and contradictory figure, fluctuating from awed enthusiasm to paranoia and eccentric geographical speculation. Prey to petty quarrels with his officers, his pious desire to bring Christian civilization to 'savages', matched by his rapacity for gold, Columbus was nonetheless an explorer and seaman of staggering vision and achievement. J. M. Cohen has skilfully woven together Columbus's logbooks and letters, the biography by his son Hernando, the official history by Oviedo, and the letters of the fleet physician and a loyal lieutenant, and the result is a unique contemporary record of a great adventure as it unfolds. Publisher: Penguin Classic ISBN: 0140442170 Published: 1992 Paperback: 320 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £9.99


	The Vinland Sagas - The Norse Discovery of America The two medieval lcelandic sagas translated in this volume tell one of the most arresting stories in the history of exploration - the discovery of America by Norsemen five centuries before Christopher Columbus. In spare and vigorous prose they record Europe's first surprised glimpse of the eastern shores of the North American continent and the people who inhabited them. The Sagas describe how Eirik the Red founded an Icelandic colony in Greenland and how his son, Leif the Lucky, later sailed south to explore and if possible exploit the chance discovery by Bjarni Herjolfsson of an unknown land. Publisher: Penguin Classic ISBN: 0140441549 Published: 1973 Paperback: 128 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £7.99


	Bernal Diaz del Castillo - The Conquest of New Spain 'Whenever we fired our guns, the Indians gave great shouts and whistles, and threw up straw and earth so that we could not see what harm we had done them.' Vivid, powerful and absorbing, this is a first-person account of one of the most startling military episodes in history: the overthrow of Montezuma's Aztec Empire by the ruthless Hernan Cortes and his band of adventurers. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier under Cortes, presents a fascinatingly detailed description of the Spanish landing in Mexico in 1520 and their amazement at the city, the exploitation of the natives for gold and other treasures, the expulsion and flight of the Spaniards, their regrouping and eventual capture of the Aztec capital. The Conquest of New Spain has a compelling immediacy that brings the past and its characters to life and offers a unique eyewitness view of the conquest of one of the greatest civilizations of the Americas. Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0140441239 Published: 1973 Paperback: 416 pages Price: £9.99


	Bartolome de Las Casas - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies Bartolomé de Las Casas was the first and fiercest critic of Spanish colonialism in the New World. An early traveller to the Americas who sailed on one of Columbus's voyages, Las Casas was so horrified by the wholesale massacre he witnessed that he dedicated his life to protecting the 'Indian' community. He wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542, a shocking catalogue of mass slaughter, torture and slavery, which showed that the evangelizing vision of Columbus had descended under later conquistadors into genocide. Dedicated to Philip II to alert the Castilian Crown to these atrocities and demand that the Indians be entitled to the basic rights of humankind, this passionate work of documentary vividness outraged Europe and contributed to the idea of the Spanish 'Black Legend' that would last for centuries. Nigel Griffin's powerful translation conveys the compelling immediacy of Las Casas's writing. This edition also contains an introduction discussing his life, work and political legacy. Publisher: Penguin Classic ISBN: 0140445625 Published: 1992 Paperback: 192 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £8.99


	Hiram Bingham - Lost City of the Incas First published in the 1950s, this is a classic account of the rediscovery in 1911 of the lost city of Machu Picchu. In 1911 Hiram Bingham set out to Peru in search of the legendary city of Vilcabamba, capital city of the last Inca ruler, Manco Inca. With a combination of doggedness and good fortune he stumbled on the perfectly preserved ruins of Machu Picchu perched on a cloud-capped ledge 2000 ft above the torrent of the Urumbamba River. The buildings were of white granite, exquisitely carved blocks each higher than a man. Bingham had not, as it turned out, found Vilcabamba, but he had nevertheless made an astonishing discovery which he described in this bestselling book. Publisher: Orion ISBN: 1842125850 Published: 2003 Paperback: 224 pages, 198 x 129 mm Price: £8.99


	Fidel Castro - Clive Foss Biography of the Cuban leader Publisher: Sutton Publishing ISBN: 0750923849 Published: 2000 Paperback: 128 pages, 198 x 127 mm Price: £5.99


	Ernesto 'Che' Guevara - The Motorcycle Diaries In January 1952, two young men from Buenos Aires set out to explore South America on 'La Poderosa', the Powerful One: a 500cc Norton. One of them was the 23-year-old Che Guevara. Written eight years before the Cuban Revolution, these are Che's diaries - full of disasters and discoveries, high drama, low comedy and laddish improvisations. During his travels through Argentina, Chile, Peru and Venezuela, Che's main concerns are where the next drink is coming from, where the next bed is to be found and who might be around to share it. Che becomes a stowaway, a fireman and a football coach; he sometimes falls in love and frequently falls off the motorbike. Within a decade the whole world would know his name. His trip might have been an adventure of a lifetime - had his lifetime not turned into a much greater adventure... 'Politically-correct revolutionary hero? Perhaps a few years later, but in this account Che Guevara comes over as one of the lads' - Bike News 'What distinguishes these diaries is that they reveal a human side to El Che which historians have successfully managed to suppress...one senses El Che's belief that determination and conviction can be enough to change one's self and others...a joy to read from start to finish' - Financial Times 'Political incorrectness galore...this book should do much to humanise the image of a man who found his apotheosis as a late Sixties cultural icon. It is also, incidentally, a remarkably good travel book about South America' - Scotsman Publisher: Harper Perennial ISBN: 0007172338 Published: 2004 Paperback Price: £7.99


	Charles Darwin - Voyage of the Beagle When the Beagle sailed from England on 27th December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. The journal that he kept shows a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology and natural history as well as people, places and events. Volcanoes in the Galapagos, the Gossamer spider of Patagonia, the Australasian coral reefs and the brilliance of the firefly; all are to be found in these extraordinary writings. The insights made on the five-year voyage were to set in motion the intellectual currents that lead to the most controversial book of the Victorian age: The Origin of Species. This volume reprints Charles Darwin's journal in a shortened form. It contains an introduction providing a background to Darwin's thought and work, as well as notes, maps and appendices and an essay on scientific geology and the Bible by Robert FitzRoy, Darwin's friend and captain of the Beagle. Publisher: Penguin Classic ISBN: 014043268X Published: 1989 Paperback: 448 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £8.99


	Alexander von Humboldt - Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent Alexander von Humboldt visited the tropics of the 'New' World between 1799 and 1804. On his return he wrote this book, a classic work of travel that is also one of the great products of Enlightenment natural science. In his lifetime, Humboldt was described as 'next to Napoleon, the most famous man in Europe'. An admirer of the French Revolution, a Neptunist, an anti-slavist, a lover of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and a close friend of Goethe (whom he resembled), he was also a profound influence upon Darwin and the course of Victorian science, as well as upon the proponents of new world independence. Publisher: Penguin Classic ISBN: 0140445536 Published: 1995 Paperback: 400 pages Price: £11.99