The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas ― and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control. There was never a single, unified Maya state or empire, but always numerous, evolving ethnic groups speaking dozens of distinct Mayan languages. The people we call "Maya" never thought of themselves as such; yet something definable, unique, and endlessly fascinating - what we call Maya culture - has clearly existed for millennia. So what was their self-identity and how did Maya civilization come to be "invented?" With the Maya historically subdivided and misunderstood in so many ways, the pursuit of what made them "the Maya" is all the more important. In this Very Short Introduction, Restall and Solari explore the themes of Maya identity, city-state political culture, art and architecture, the Maya concept of the cosmos, and the Maya experience of contact with ― including invasion by ― outsiders. Despite its brevity, this book is unique for its treatment of all periods of Maya civilization, from its origins to the present. Read more

'Breathtaking... vital and important. A wonderful read' PETER FRANKOPAN'Marvellous... escapes the inane, balance-sheet view of Empire and sees its full complexity' SATHNAM SANGHERA'Excellent... his mastery of detail is impeccable' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, Sunday Times'Extraordinary... [brings] the world of a century ago to fresh, vivid life' ALEX VON TUNZELMANNTHE STORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE AT ITS MAXIMUM TERRITORIAL EXTENTOn Saturday 29 September 1923, the Palestine Mandate became law and the British Empire now covered a scarcely credible quarter of the world's land mass, containing 460 million people. It was the largest empire the world had ever seen. But it was beset by debt and doubts. This book is a new way of looking at the British Empire. It immerses the reader in the contemporary moment, focusing on particular people and stories from that day, gleaned from newspapers, letters, diaries, official documents, magazines, films and novels: from a remote Pacific island facing the removal of its entire soil, across Australia, Burma, India and Kenya to London and the West Indies.In some ways, the issues of a hundred years ago are with us still: debates around cultural and ethnic identity in a globalised world; how to manage multi-ethnic political entities; racism; the divisive co-opting of religion for political purposes; the dangers of ignorance. In others, it is totally alien. What remains extraordinary is the Empire's ability to reveal the most compelling human stories. Never before has there been a book which contains such a wide spread of vivid experiences from both colonised and coloniser: from the grandest governors to the humblest migrants, policemen and nurses. Read more

The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption―but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora―a baby broker.Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South. Read more

An outstanding exploration of a photographer, educator, and curator whose work both documented and created change in post-Revolutionary Mexico This stunning and lyrical volume highlights the personal work of Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993), one of Mexico’s foremost photographers. Álvarez Bravo worked as a photojournalist, commercial photographer, portraitist, and educator and played a critical role in her country’s cultural renaissance. In the years following the Mexican Revolution, she captured a profoundly transformative moment for the country’s land, architecture, and people. She remains best known for these works and for her portraits of prominent modernists working in Mexico, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Lola Álvarez Bravo delves into a lesser-known body of work, in which attention to pattern, light, and abstraction guides the artist’s depictions of urban and rural landscapes and their inhabitants. It also addresses her role in building and securing the legacy of the post-Revolutionary period, her dialogue with modernist photographers, and her place within the broader cultural sphere, offering new insight into the mutual influence she shared with prominent painters, filmmakers, and literary figures of her time.Published in association with the Pulitzer Arts FoundationExhibition Schedule:Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (09/14/18–02/16/19) Read more

In November 1519, Hernando Cortés walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what happened afterwards--has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by scholars. For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes. The conquest, in this work, is neither an apocalyptic moment, nor an origin story launching Mexicans into existence. The Mexica people had a history of their own long before the Europeans arrived and did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization. Instead, they realigned their political allegiances, accommodated new obligations, adopted new technologies, and endured. This engaging revisionist history of the Aztecs, told through their own words, explores the experience of a once-powerful people facing the trauma of conquest and finding ways to survive, offering an empathetic interpretation for experts and non-specialists alike. Read more

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe "masterful chronicle" of the discovery of the legendary lost civilization of the Maya and the quest to unlock their secrets. Featuring a history and description of the major Maya sites, including Chichen Itza, Tulum, Palenque, Uxmal, Copan, and more. Illustrated with a map and more than 100 images.In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world’s most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would upend the West’s understanding of human history.In the tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome—and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published” and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their antiquity and sophistication overturned the West’s assumptions about the development of civilization.By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya’s heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the Spanish reached the “New World,” the Maya had all but disappeared; they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years.Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen’s rigorous research and his own 1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America, Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves. Read more

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. Read more

One of Time Magazine's Sixteen Best True Crime Books of All Time A crusading Mexican-American journalist searches for justice and hope in an increasingly violent Mexico In the last decade, more than 100,000 people have been killed or disappeared in the Mexican drug war, and drug trafficking there is a multibillion-dollar business. In a country where the powerful are rarely scrutinized, noted Mexican-American journalist Alfredo Corchado refuses to shrink from reporting on government corruption, murders in Juárez, or the ruthless drug cartels of Mexico. One night, Corchado received a tip that he could be the next target of the Zetas, a violent paramilitary group--and that he had twenty-four hours to find out if the threat was true. Midnight in Mexico is the story of one man's quest to report the truth of his country--as he races to save his own life. Read more

This topical and easily understood handbook explains how bankruptcy can affect a corporation and its capital structure and how investors can profit from the corporate bankruptcy process. Read more

The ideal travel companion, full of insider advice on what to see and do, plus detailed itineraries and comprehensive maps for exploring this breathtakingly beautiful country.Zipline across the rainforest canopy at Parque Nacional Volcan Arenal, marvel at pre-Columbian gold artifacts in San Jose's subterranean Museo de Oro Precolumbino, hike in the famous Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological reserve or visit the Doka Estate to learn about coffee production: everything you need to know is clearly laid out within colour-coded chapters. Discover the best of Costa Rica with this indispensable travel guide.Inside DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Costa Rica:- Over 15 colour maps, plus a road map of Costa Rica, help you navigate with ease- Simple layout makes it easy to find the information you need- Comprehensive tours and itineraries of Costa Rica, designed for every interest and budget- Illustrations detail iconic sights such as San José's fortress-like Centro Costarricense de Ciencias y Cultura, the elegant Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles in Cartago, the ancient Monumento Nacional Guayabo and more - Colour photographs of Costa Rica's natural wonders and spectacular landscapes - including rainforests, cloud forests, wetlands, beaches, mountains, volcanoes - plus its diverse wildlife, iconic buildings and historic sights, ancient settlements and more- Detailed chapters, with area maps, cover San José; the Central Highlands; the Central Pacific and Southern Nicoya; Guanacaste and Northern Nicoya; the Northern Zone; the Caribbean; and the Southern Zone- Historical and cultural context gives you a richer travel experience: learn about the country's unique history and culture, ancient settlements, historic sights, colourful festivals and events, varied cuisine and more - Experience Costa Rica with features on its landscapes, rainforest ecosystem, canopy tours, beaches and indigenous groups, as well as the story of Costa Rican coffee and a detailed field guide on the country's wildlife- Essential travel tips: our expert choices of where to stay, eat, shop and sightsee, plus how to get around, useful phrases, and visa and health information DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Costa Rica is a detailed, easy-to-use guide designed to help you get the most from your visit to this spectacular country.DK Eyewitness: winner of the Top Guidebook Series in the Wanderlust Reader Travel Awards 2017. "No other guide whets your appetite quite like this one" - The IndependentAbout DK Eyewitness Travel: DK's highly visual Eyewitness guides show you what others only tell you, with easy-to-read maps, tips, and tours to inform and enrich your holiday. DK is the world's leading illustrated reference publisher, producing beautifully designed books for adults and children in over 120 countries. Read more

When Columbus first landed in the New World there were about a hundred million Americans - a fifth of the human race. Most fell victim to imported epidemics, Christian fanaticism and sheer barbarity. Sophisticated worlds were sacked, great art destroyed, wealth stolen. But did "all" the New World people die, and so fast that they had nothing to say? In fact there is an Indian side to the story, though we have not been told it before. In telling it now, Ronald Wright quotes the actual speech and writing of five peoples - Aztec, Maya, Inca, Cherokee and Iroquois - through five centuries. We can relive their strange, tragic experience and see ourselves, the European invaders, through their shrewd eyes. Unlike Asia and Africa, the New World never saw its colonizers leave. But neither have the ancient nations disappeared. In the Andes, ten million speak the Inca language. If Guatemala had majority rule it would be a Maya republic. In Peru, the murder of Atahuallpa and the bizarre deeds of the Shining Path are parts of the same story; just as Canada's betrayal of the Iroquois led to the Mohawk revolt at Oka in 1990. The story is not over yet. Read more

Discover the remarkable history of the Maya Civilization...Free BONUS Inside!For more than one thousand years, the Maya people dominated areas of Central America and modern-day Mexico and made important advances in architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Then, after the Spanish occupation in the sixteenth century, Maya culture and thinking were deliberately suppressed. Only in the twentieth century did scientists appreciate just how advanced these people had been and how important they were in the history of Mesoamerica. The excavation and investigation of several large Maya cities in the second half of the twentieth century completely changed how we view these people. We now know that the Maya were capable of building vary large stone structures that were precisely aligned with astronomical features, though we do not know how this was done. We are still learning about Maya cities—as recently as 2018, the use of new technology uncovered more than 60,000 previously undiscovered Maya ruins in the jungles of Guatemala. Many scholars now believe that the Maya were one of the most important of all the ancient Mesoamerican cultures.There are still many mysteries about the Maya. At one point in their history, several major Maya cities were abandoned and left to the encroaching jungle while their people relocated to more inhospitable areas in the Yucatán. There are many theories, but no one is entirely certain why this happened. We also don’t know why the Maya made important advances in the fields of mathematics and medicine and yet failed to develop, for example, the wheel or metalworking.What we do know is that these people created a sophisticated culture which they recorded via one of the first complex writing systems. Unlike other contemporary Mesoamerican peoples, the Maya survived the Spanish occupation, and Maya language, religion, and culture continue to survive today in parts of Central America and Mexico.This is the story of the mysterious and frequently misunderstood Maya civilization.Discover a plethora of topics such as Origins Maya Religion and Medicine The Classic Period Weapons and Warfare The Spanish Conquest Maya Writing And much more!So if you want a concise and informative book on the Maya Civilization, simply scroll up and click the "Buy now" button for instant access! Read more

The definitive chronicle of the ancient peoples of Central America & Mexico including the Aztec, Maya, Olmec, Mixtec, Toltec and Zapotec. In a sumptuous new large-format edition, this wide-ranging reference book covers almost 3000 years of history, offering enthralling insights into the art and architecture, myths and legends, and everyday life of the many different empires of Central America and Mexico. Stories of sun-gods and blood sacrifice, of pyramids and temples, and of the fabulous treasuries filled with gold have fascinated many generations. This book unravels the true facts behind the stories and looks at how myth and legends can tell us much about the cult of war in these pre-industrial nations. The magnificent architectural and cultural achievements of a succession of Mesoamerican peoples - the Olmecs, Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs, Mixtec and Aztecs - cover almost 3000 years. These achievements range from the temple-pyramids and colossal stone carvings of the Olmecs to the awe-inspiring cities, vast trading networks and complex religious societies of the Aztecs and Maya. The World Heritage sites of historic Mexico City and Tenochtitlan, Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza, Tikal and Monte Alban, are examined giving life to the civic, military and everyday world of the time. Archaeological finds and surviving documents provide intriguing insights into astronomy, the development of calendars, mathematics, writing and the arts. They also reveal a grim commitment to war and a savage religious devotion to gods who demanded the blood of human sacrifice. Pottery and textiles, carvings, mosaics, and gold and metalwork show the technological innovations of these pre-industrial civilizations. Superbly illustrated throughout, with more than 1000 colour photographs, artworks, maps and plans, the book reveals every aspect of the history of these lost civilizations. This unrivalled volume is not only a perfect introduction to the subject but also a stunning visual record of a fascinating period that has helped to shape our world. Read more

'Urgent, extraordinary . . . a tribute to the astonishing indomitability of the human spirit.' - Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of PainNew Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer has been covering the immigration crisis at America’s southern border for nearly a decade, but the current emergency is the end of a much larger story. In this, his first book, Blitzer goes back to the beginning: to the shadowy civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s; to the American prison system in the 1990s and the policies of mass deportation that transformed local street criminals into international crime syndicates; to Honduras’s brutal crackdown on crime in the 2000s and the emergence of gangs across Central America and the United States. And then the Trump era, in which immigration became a vector of resurgent populism, with mass internments the order of the day.Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a fresh and full account of America’s immigration problems, but it is much more than that. It is an odyssey of struggle and resilience, telling the epic story of people whose lives ebb and flow across the border and those who help and hinder them. It is a gripping and persuasive attempt to answer not only the question of how America got there, but the vital question of who we are and who we want to be in our liberal Western democracies, whether we are incarcerating children on our southern borders or watching them drown on the shores of the Mediterranean.'A searing, gut-wrenching, and masterfully reported account of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century.' - Jill Lepore, New York Times bestselling author of These Truths: A History of the United States Read more

Zapotec CivilizationThe Zapotecs formed one of the most important of the pre-Columbian civilizations. For one thousand years, their main city of Monte Albán was one of the largest and most sophisticated in Mesoamerica. Building this city was an astonishing engineering feat—it involved flattening a hill in the center of the Oaxaca Valley to create an artificial plateau and then constructing a series of large, ornate buildings on this inaccessible site. Maintaining this large city on a site with no natural source of water must have required an enormous and willing workforce. Despite this, Monte Albán became one of the largest and most important cities in Mesoamerica, and the Zapotecs came to dominate not just the Oaxaca Valley but many adjacent lands.Inside you will read about...✓ The Emergence of the Zapotecs and Monte Albán✓ Monte Albán Phase 1 to 5✓ Zapotec Architecture, Art, and Science✓ Zapotec Religion and Society✓ LegacyAnd much more!We don’t know why or how the Zapotecs suddenly seemed to acquire new engineering and architectural skills, but their rise to prominence was astonishingly swift. Once in a position of dominance, they maintained their hold over the region for more than one thousand years. Then, for reasons that are equally unclear, the Zapotecs faced a slow decline which saw them abandon Monte Albán to decay and ruin and return to the Oaxaca Valley floor to become once again a mainly agrarian, peasant people.The Zapotecs still exist as a separate culture in Mexico, but they have never regained their prominence and are now little more than one of the indigenous peoples of that region. This is the story of the rapid rise and gradual decline of the ancient Zapotec people. Read more

A General History Pirates is a 1724 book published in Britain containing biographies of contemporary pirates, which was influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates. Its author uses the name Captain Charles Johnson, generally considered a pseudonym for one of London's writer-publishers.First appearing in Charles Rivington's shop in London, the book sold so well that by 1726 an enlarged fourth edition had appeared. It pandered to the British public's taste for the exotic; revelling in graphic stories on the high seas. English naval historian David Cordingly writes: "It has been said, and there seems no reason to question this, that Captain Johnson created the modern conception of pirates." Scottish novelists Robert Louis Stevenson (author of Treasure Island) and J. M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan featuring Captain Hook) both identified Johnson's General History of the Pirates as one of their major influences, and Stevenson even borrowed one character's name (Israel Hands) from a list of Blackbeard's crew which appeared in Johnson's book. Read more

A dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Hernando Cortés that completely overturns what we know about the Spanish conquest of the AmericasOn November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas—has long been the symbol of Cortés’s bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere.But is this really what happened? In a departure from traditional tellings, When Montezuma Met Cortés uses “the Meeting”—as Restall dubs their first encounter—as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Drawing on rare primary sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, and the worlds in which they lived—leading, step by step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story. As Restall takes us through this sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in modern civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself.  Read more

In April 2006 a small British peace-keeping force was sent to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. Within weeks they were cut off and besieged by some of the world's toughest fighters: the infamous Taliban, who were determined to send the foreigners home again. Defence Secretary John Reid had hoped that Operation Herrick 4 could be accomplished without a shot being fired; instead, the Army was drawn into the fiercest fighting it had seen for fifty years. Millions of bullets and thousands of lives have been expended since then in an under-publicized but bitter conflict whose end is still not in sight. Some people consider it the fourth Anglo-Afghan War since Victorian times. How on earth did this happen? And what is it like for the troops on the front line of the 'War on Terror'?James Fergusson takes us to the dark heart of the battle zone. Here, in their own words and for the first time, are the young veterans of Herrick 4. Here, unmasked, are the civilian and military officials responsible for planning and executing the operation. Here, too, are the Taliban themselves, to whom Fergusson gained unique and extraordinary access. Controversial, fascinating and occasionally downright terrifying, A Million Bullets analyses the sorry slide into war in Helmand and asks this most troubling question: could Britain perhaps have avoided the violence altogether? Read more

Immerse yourself in the beauty of Costa Rica with this exploration of the country's wonders. In this meticulously crafted book, every page invites you on a journey through Costa Rica's breathtaking landscapes, vibrant culture, and extraordinary biodiversity.Unleash your imagination as you traverse the lush rainforests, lounge on pristine beaches, and venture into the heart of Costa Rica's vibrant cities. With vivid descriptions and evocative storytelling, this book paints a vivid picture of the country's natural splendor and cultural richness.Discover the enchanting biodiversity that thrives within Costa Rica's protected national parks and reserves. From the majestic scarlet macaws soaring through the sky to the elusive jaguars stealthily roaming the rainforest floor, you will be captivated by the astonishing array of wildlife that calls this country home.Learn about Costa Rica's commitment to sustainability and its status as a global leader in ecotourism. Delve into the country's deep-rooted traditions and folklore, and savor the flavors of its exquisite cuisine.Please note that this book is a text-only edition and does not include any pictures. Instead, the power of words is harnessed to transport you to the heart of Costa Rica, allowing your imagination to paint vibrant images of its natural wonders.Whether you are planning a trip to Costa Rica, seeking inspiration for your next adventure, or simply yearning to experience the beauty of this remarkable country from the comfort of your home, this book is a must-read.Embark on a literary voyage through Costa Rica and be transported to a world of stunning landscapes, diverse wildlife, and a culture infused with warmth and hospitality. Get your copy today and let the power of words whisk you away to the enchanting realm of Costa Rica. Read more

Embark on an extraordinary literary adventure with "Costa Rica: Everything You Need to Know," an immersive and text-only exploration of one of the world's most captivating destinations. This book is your passport to a land of breathtaking landscapes, rich history, vibrant culture, and the essence of "Pura Vida" living.In "Costa Rica: Everything You Need to Know," we've meticulously crafted a captivating narrative that takes you on a comprehensive journey through every facet of this remarkable Central American gem. This text-only masterpiece provides you with an in-depth understanding of Costa Rica's history, from its indigenous roots to its path to modern independence—a narrative as compelling as any novel.Through the words on these pages, you'll traverse Costa Rica's diverse geography, from the verdant rainforests and misty cloud forests to its pristine beaches and awe-inspiring volcanoes. You'll virtually hike through its national parks, dive into its marine treasures, and ride the world-famous waves along its coastlines—all without leaving the comfort of your reading nook."Cuisine enthusiasts" will relish in the gastronomic journey, exploring the tantalizing flavors of Costa Rican dishes, coffee, and emerging craft beer scene. You'll be tantalized by the exotic fruits and refreshing drinks unique to this region, savoring the essence of its fertile lands.The book unravels the tapestry of Costa Rica's vibrant culture, from its music and dance to folklore and legends, giving you a front-row seat to the cultural celebrations that paint the calendar with color and tradition throughout the year. We'll introduce you to the heart of Costa Rican society—the family and community bonds that define "Pura Vida" living."Costa Rica: Everything You Need to Know" is your personal window into the spiritual landscape of Costa Rica, where religion and indigenous spirituality converge. You'll also learn about the country's rich linguistic diversity and its commitment to preserving indigenous languages.As you delve into these pages, you'll discover Costa Rica's unwavering commitment to environmental conservation and sustainable tourism—a model for the world to emulate. And, when you read the final words of this journey, you'll find yourself transported to a place where the pace of life aligns with the essence of "Pura Vida."This book is a celebration of Costa Rica's stunning natural beauty, its extraordinary cultural richness, and the warmth of its people. It's a timeless adventure that you can revisit again and again, each reading revealing new layers of this enchanting country. "Costa Rica: Everything You Need to Know" is more than just a book; it's an invitation to explore, learn, and fall in love with the "Pura Vida" lifestyle. Buy your copy today and embark on a literary journey like no other! Read more