Bringing the World to You! Colombia: Food & Culture

To many foreigners, Colombia is a nightmare of drugs and violence. Yet normal life goes on there, and, in Bogotá, it's even possible to forget that war still ravages the countryside. This paradox of perceptions--outsiders' fears versus insiders' realities--drew June Carolyn Erlick back to Bogotá for a year's stay in 2005. She wanted to understand how the city she first came to love in 1975 has made such strides toward building a peaceful civil society in the midst of ongoing violence. The complex reality she found comes to life in this compelling memoir.

An exhilarating travelogue for a new generation about a journey along Colombia’s Magdalena River, exploring life by the banks of a majestic river now at risk, and how a country recovers from conflict.

Latin American food is steeped in history and tradition. From Peru's spicy and citrusy ceviche to hearty Colombian beef, pork, and seafood stews to Argentina's silky, sweet dulce le leche desserts, cooks of all skill levels are invited to discover what make this region's cuisine incomparable.

Latin American Paleo Cooking combines exciting, new flavors and unique ingredients that adventurous paleos and foodies will not want to miss out on. With the help of co-author Millie, Amanda's Puerto Rican mother-in-law, Amanda provides authentic recipes inspired by Puerto Rican, Cuban, Haitian and Caribbean flavors. Recipes include Anticuchos (Peruvian Beef Heart Kebabs), Carne Molida (Puerto Rican Seasoned Ground Beef), Chicharrones (Pan-Latin Fried Pork Belly), Mofongo Relleno de Camarones (Puerto Rican Plantain Stuffed with Stewed Shrimp), Carimañolas (Columbian Stuffed Yuca Fritters), Mangú (Dominican Mashed Plantains) and Hojaldre (Puerto Rican Spice Cake), all as flavorful as they are healthy.

This bestselling Hippocrene cookbook explores the cuisine of all the regions of Colombia, with more than 200 recipes, a glossary of Colombian foods and ingredients, and a 16-page color photo insert.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.

In this long-awaited first volume of a planned trilogy, the most acclaimed and revered living Nobel laureate begins to tell us the story of his life. Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Gabriel García Márquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife.

Bestselling author of The War of Wars, Robert Harvey bring a lifetime's fascination into Bolivar and explores the complex personality behind the revolutionary. He vividly recreates the story of the campaigns and draws a panoramic portrait of South America at the turning of the Spanish Empire.

Containing over one hundred selections--most of them published in English for the first time--The Colombia Reader presents a rich and multilayered account of this complex nation from the colonial era to the present. The collection includes journalistic reports, songs, artwork, poetry, oral histories, government documents, and scholarship to illustrate the changing ways Colombians from all walks of life have made and understood their own history. Comprehensive in scope, it covers regional differences; religion, art, and culture; the urban/rural ÷ patterns of racial, economic, and gender inequalities; the history of violence; and the transnational flows that have shaped the nation.

Lesley Gill traces the rise and fall of the strong labor unions and working class of Barrancabermeja, Colombia, showing how the incursion of neoliberalism, the drug trade, and counterinsurgency military campaigns into civil society that began in the 1980s has destabilized everyday life and decimated the city's powerful social institutions.

Fighting Monsters in the Abyss offers a deeply insightful analysis of the efforts by the second administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006-2010) to resolve a decades-long Marxist insurgency in one of Latin America's most important nations. Continuing work from his prior books about earlier Colombian presidents and yet written as a stand-alone study, Colombia expert Harvey F. Kline illuminates the surprising successes and setbacks in Uribe's response to this existential threat. In State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986-1994, Kline documented and explained the limited successes of Presidents Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria in putting down the revolutionaries while also confronting challenges from drug dealers and paramilitary groups.

This history of Colombia's illegal drug trade--and of the extreme violence it created--describes how in the late 1960s narcotics traffickers from the United States convinced Colombians who had no previous involvement in the drug trade to grow marijuana for export to America. By the early '70s, foreign (mostly American) traffickers began requesting cocaine. This book focuses on the decades of crime and violence the illegal drug trade brought to Colombia and how this social upset was ended in the early 2000s. Six chapters detail the Medellín and Cali cartels' war against the Colombian government, the revolutionary guerrillas' war against the government, the war that paramilitary groups conducted against the guerrillas, and the way in which the government finally put a stop to the cartel-financed bloodshed. In conclusion, the author assesses Colombia's progress and prospects since the end of the violence claimed the lives of some 300,000 between 1975 and 2008.