Product Description
Most travellers to Belize and Guatemala want to experience lush tropical forests and catch glimpses of exotic wildlife. This guide provides all the information you need to find, identify, and learn about the region's magnificent animal life. Beletsky selected approximately 500 of the animals you are most likely to see, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Also pictured are some of the highly endangered species of the area. You will want to have this easy-to-carry, entertaining, and beautifully illustrated book as a constant companion on your journey.

Key Features
* Illustrates the most commonly spotted animals and provides information on their identification, location, and conservation
* Provides extensive, up-to-date information on animals' ecology and behavior
* Covers Belize's famous coral reef and the animals seen by divers and snorkelers
* Presents the habitats of Belize and northern Guatemala and the most common plants visitors encounter
* Describes the region's most frequently visited parks and reservesAmazon.com Review
As ecotourism booms, it's only natural that eco-themed guidebooks wouldboom alongside it. The Ecotravellers' Wildlife Guides series, endorsed by theWildlife Conservation Society and researched by professional biologists, isone of the more credible brands in the swelling ecotravel ranks. The seriesprovides an encyclopedic introduction to Central America's flora and fauna,as well as a friendly primer on the principles of ecotourism. These richecological contexts are accompanied by hundreds of pictures and photographs.Miraculously, the guides deliver solid science without growing stilted orboring--as evinced by sections with such titles as "Avian Mating Systemsand Birds That Cheat" and "Frugivory: Animals That Eat Fruit and the TreesThat Want Them To." The one element that's in surprisingly short supply isecologically sound travel tips, from general do's and don'ts to a list ofecologically responsible tour operators and other eco-friendlyestablishments in Belize. This is mildly discouraging--learning how to travel responsibly is asimportant as knowing what you're going to see. But given the relativepaucity of travel literature on Belize, the guide proves a valuableresource for anyone curious about the natural wonders of this increasinglypopular destination.--Andrew Nieland ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Decent overall guide of wildlife in Belize
I debated between this book and the "Birds of Belize" field guide for my recent trip to Belize. I went with this one since I thought it would be nice to have a guide for wildlife other than birds and I was glad I chose this one. I used it quite a bit and was able to identify a lot of the wildlife I saw. I used it mostly for birds but I also used it to identify reptiles and some mammals.

The cons: It's a heavy book. About half of the book is text - an ecological background. I didn't read it and I'm sure there is interesting info in it but not what I want in a field guide. Either remove this portion of text and have the book lighter/smaller or replace it with more plates. The plates itself aren't the easiest to follow. The organization could be better. It would also have been good to have more clues on distinguishing features of the animals, especially when you are dealing with similar looking birds. A good bird guide will give you seasonal information. Also, there is no indication of size on any of the animals, which would be extremely useful.

That said, the pictures are good and for the most part, I was easily able to identify the wildlife I saw with a few flips through the book.
Overall, this book is a good purchase for the amateur wildlife enthusiast and it will enhance your experience while travelling through Belize.

Wonderful guide for beautiful Belize
As a frequent traveler to Belize I found this book a wonderful guide to all the natural beauty of Belize.

Great overview of Belize wildlife
I actually saw this book while travelling in Belize and wanted it to help me identify all the great animals we were seeing, but it was rather expensive. I got it on Amazon when we got home and it really helped identify some of the things I had taken pictures of. Next time I visit Belize I will be taking it with me. Nice colour photos and descriptions with some interesting information about the natural history.

BOOBY
Great book, but where's the picture of the red footed booby?

Excellent!
From Planeta journal:

An impressive first edition, not as much a tourist's guidebook as a naturalist's handbook. Color illustrations document native birds, mammals and reptiles. The author provides a briefeco-history of the region as well as background on environmental threatsand conservation. Excellent! ... Read more

Product Description
This book brings together a selection of speeches delivered by Said Musa since becoming Prime Minister, with the exception of the speech made in his capacity as Foreign Minister and delivered to the United Nations General Assembly.

The speeches cover diverse local (Belizean), regional and international topics and issues delivered to an equally diverse audience, including students, the United Nations, Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community and the Central American Integration System, the Belizean parliament, the Royal Institute of International Relations (Chatham House) and other international organizations. They provide a useful insight into the philosophy, personality and value system of this regional leader, as well as his vision for the development of Belize and its unique dual role as both a Central American and Caribbean nation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Tales of the Foreign Service
Nobody would read this book to learn about Belize or the casualties left by Hurricane Hattie.This memoir belongs to the category of Foreign Service Tales -- like Durrell's "Esprit de Corps."Laughter helps you survive almost anything, even working for the consul from Hell.Although I wish Conroy had focused exclusively on his time in Belize -- because that's where the action is -- memoirs do tend to meander, like real life, and anybody who ever worked in a consulate will recognize Conroy's predicament.

Snafus of Diplomacy
I thoroughly enjoyed this book because I read it as a foreign service adventure commentary, NOT as a travel log of Belize.As a daughter of a foreign service officer and as an avid listener of f.s. stories thereof, I chuckled about the various snafus, ridicula, and adventures of this young man and his family on their first post.

Could have been better.
Conroy is funny and the book is very readable, but I didn't give him a higher rating because I didn't think he tried very hard to know the people of Belize, or the country itself.He has a lot to say, all true, about the poverty and the governmental inefficiency when he was there, but didn't notice any of the natural beauty or the native culture(s) in this unique little place. He got really distressingly cold-blooded when he wrote about Hurricane Hattie, a tragedy in which there was great loss of life, and seemed mostly concerned that he wrecked his boots!If you want to know Belize, I would recommend that you read Zee Edgell's fine book BEKA LAMB, which is a nice antidote for Conroy's fin-de-colonialism attitude in this book.Conroy's attitude is reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh in this book, but although he is (almost) as cruel, he is not half so funny.

Delightful recreation of British Honduras days
Our Man in Belize is the story of Belize before satellite TV, before tourism, and before crack.

In 1959, Richard Timothy Conroy,something of state department misfit,was posted as U.S. vice consul to BritishHonduras,a lowly job in one of the backwaters of the diplomatic world. Two years later,one of the worst hurricanes of the century would strikean unprepared Belize.Out of this mixture of colonialism and disaster, Conroy builds an entertaining, fanciful memoir of life when the driving wasstill on the left.Or, as likely as not, in the middle.

Thejust-arrived vice consul recounts a trip into the Belize City of 40 yearsago:

"The car crunched over the land crabs that had crawled onto the roadto enjoy the last heat of the day ... The two-mile drive into Belize alongPrincess Margaret Drive was a drive into another century.Out at theracetrack, the few houses, for all their bleak shabbiness, had a cheapmodern look.A failed subdivision on the edge of an abandoned town in asmall country with unsupportable pretensions .... The old part of Belizepresented, as we entered, a certain harmony of man, dog, and environment. Even shabby charm ... But the big difference was the number of inhabitantsin the streets. The desolation that had so marked the new settlements wasreplaced by a town teeming with life, on foot, paw, and bicycle as well asrooted in the salty ground."

Conroy quotes U.S. state department reportsof the time that the country has "a road going west, and a road goingnorth;both going nowhere."He reports, too, that except for the FortGeorge Hotel,Government House, and a few houses in the British sectionwhich had piped-in water, most of the city collected its water in cisterns"with the occasional rat or cat for body and flavor." He tells of some ofBelize's great eccentrics:"Paddy," who would filch the Americanconsulate's copy of The New York Times, and then, after removing all hisclothes to wash them in the sea, would sit naked on the public seawallreading The Times while his clothes dried.And of "Bugger," achess-playing Polish physician who always wanted to go to Africa, so whenoffered a position in Belize City, he quickly accepted, learning only afterhe was half-way there that Belize wasn't in Africa.

After his BritishHonduras post, Conroy did a tour in Vienna, then left the state departmentfor the Smithsonian Institution.Happily for us, Conroy's time ingovernment workdidn't ruin his knack for a good story.He's publishedthree mystery novels and can tell a tale with the best of them.

Witness:The sedate dinner party when giant roaches, attracted by thecandlelight, drop from the ceiling into the gazpacho, or the story of afool-proof method for stopping the cook from stealing your scotch.

Thatthese stories have, as the author admits, taken on a life of their own, areperhaps as much fantasy as fact, does not at all detract.Such recastingof reality, however,is likely behind Conroy's irritating and otherwiseunexplainable habit of changing the names of nearly everybody, and even ofsome cities and countries, long after most of these people are gone and theevents forgotten.

Some old Belize hands, including those who knew himpersonally,take exception to Conroy's tales. It is not, after all, always a flattering memoir. He tells of the petty stupidities of the U.S.government and of the bunglings of both the British and the local Creoleestablishments, albeit disguising the identities of the participants. Conroy revels in juicy and unflattering gossip.He reports, for example, the story of the long-time Belize City department store owner who, aftergetting a nice settlement from the insurance company on losses fromHurricane Hattie and the looting afterwards, piled his Rover full of cashand drove north to the Mexican border, outrunning a customs inspector on abicycle and violating British currency exchange regulations then inforce.

More significantly, Conroy also could be faulted for focusing onthe details, however amusing,of personal discomforts and calamitiescaused by Hurricane Hattie, rather than on the human tragedy the hurricanecaused. Hattie struck on the night before Halloween 1961, killing morethan 400 Belizeans and destroying much of Belize City.Conroy gives shortshrift to the misery of homeless Belizeans in the shacks of Hattieville(which Conroy misidentifies as the site of Belmopan, the new capital) yetlightheartedly claims that after Hurricane Hattie young girls in Belizestopped wearing underwear, in a primordial reproductive reaction to anatural disaster.With an irreverent nod, however,to Graham Greene's OurMan in Havana and a wave to the captivating scoundrels of In the Garden ofGood and Evil, Conroy's is the kind of memoir which, to paraphrase WilliamPowell as Nick Charles in Shadow of the Thin Man,we enjoy no other kindthan.

Conroy says he has not been back to Belize since 1963 and proposesthat today's Belize he would not even recognize. He suggests that HurricaneHattie may have been, as it were, a watershed in Belize's history, theturning point from the old colonial backwater past to self-government and amove to a new order of politics and business on a wider stage. The finallaugh of this memorable memoir, this one on Vice Consul Conroy himself, may be that the Belize of the 1950s, with its entertaining eccentrics, bordellos, heavy drinkers, comic politicians, inept diplomats, dopeairstrips in the bush, auto-theft rings, and port thieves, is not that muchdifferent from the Belize of 1998. ... Read more

Product Description
Belize, a small, newly independent country in Central America, has recently garnered a great deal of the world's attention with its commitment to the protection of the environment and its promotion of eco-tourism. This book presents a full and diverse picture of such a unique country and its history. It contains some of the best research presented at the Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Belize. The conference has succeeded in building a scholarly community for Belize scholars and in promoting the study of a country that has perhaps been unjustly understudied. The conference papers gathered in this book serve as an introduction to Belize and to current scholarship taking place in the country. Papers and their authors include: International Migration and the Ruralization of Belize, 1970-1991, Louis Woods, Joseph Perry, Jeffrey Steagall and Ronald Cossman; A History of Banking in Belize, Anthony Gabb; Predicting the Past and Preserving It for the Future: Modeling and Management of Ancient Maya Residential Sites, Scott Fedick; Population and Ethnicity of Belize, 1861, Michael Camille; The Festival of Arts: British Hunduran, Belizean, and National, Michael D. Philips. ... Read more

Product Description
Belize in Pictures explores the history and government, economy, people, geography, and cultural life of Belize. This edition includes comprehensive text with strong curriculum ties, beautiful full-color photography throughout, and interesting, detailed sidebars. ... Read more