Product Description
Beautiful; aggressive; exuberant, talkative; humorous; resourceful; unpredictable Jamaica brings many adjectives to mind, but boring is not one of them. No other country so young and so small has had such global cultural influence as the land of Marcus Garvey, Louis Bennett, Bob Marley and Usain Bolt. Jamaica Fi Real provides an in-depth look at Jamaica s people, history, music, sports, religion and culture, creating a vivid twenty-first century portrait of perhaps the world s most fascinating island.Author of bestselling book Reggae Routes: The Story of Jamaican Music and longstanding columnist with the Jamaica Observer and the Jamaica Gleaner newspapers, Kevin O Brien Chang, paints a real and insightful portrait of Jamaica looking at its music, culture, sports, religion, history and people. To the world at large Jamaica means sunny beaches, reggae and rum, but Jamaica Fi Real: Beauty, Vibes and Culture goes far beyond the surface exposing and exploring the unique things that make Jamaica, Jamaica; in some cases setting the record straight, and also highlighting some significant achievements and little known facts about Jamaica. Did you know that in the 2008 Olympics Jamaica won more gold sprint medals than every other country put together?; that Ska a mixture of rhythm and blues, mento, revival and rastafarian music was born in poor west Kingston ghettos?; or that Martin Luther King Jr praised Jamaica as having felt more at home there than anywhere else in the world?Lavishly illustrated with over 200 images featuring places to go, foods to eat, religious practices and cultural and historical icons, no other book on or about Jamaica provides such an in-depth, honest and creative representation of Jamaica as Jamaica Fi Real. It will appeal to the Jamaican Diaspora, persons wanting to visit Jamaica, and persons generally interested in Jamaican history, culture and lifestyle. ... Read more

Product Description
The modern-day town of Port Royal, Jamaica, bears little evidence of its spectacular past. In Port Royal Jamaica, Pawson and Buisseret detail the establishment of the town of Port Royal in the second half of the seventeenth century, in the heyday of privateering. The town was critical to the successful colonization of Jamaica by the British and pivotal to British mercantile activity, but is best known for the activities of its swashbuckling pirates. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Fascinating History of Port Royal
With its wealth of detail & eyewitness accounts (numerous direct quotes from visitors, residents, and administrators of Port Royal), this book is a treasure trove for anyone who wants to learn about the same wicked town familiar to the pirates & buccaneers of the late 17th century.
Having recently traveled to Port Royal, it was still difficult to imagine the city in its heyday. The city (now actually a sleepy village) and its surroundings has been changed so much by disaster (three major earthquakes, more than a dozen hurricanes, and several fires) and natural evolution. The biggest change came when two-thirds of the city sunk under the water in the 1692 earthquake. It's as if the pre-1692 city existed in an alternate universe, with the boundaries slightly shifted, and the veil of time cast in between. The accounts in this book help to lift several of the veils to provide a glimpse of what the famous Port Royal might have looked like - the city where buccaneers walked the street, the "Sodom & Gomorrah" of the New World, a city that rivaled Boston in size and shipping traffic.
The 1st edition of this book was published in 1974, but this 2nd edition has been able to include many of the findings of archeological work and research done in the interim. Fascinating tales abound within it's pages about the ship captain turned pirate who easily escaped from the prison, about the return home of the governor's widow, of the petty infighting between Lt. Governor Morgan (the famous ex-pirate) and new Governor Lord Vaughn, and much more.
See plans of the streets and buildings of Port Royal. Read of everyday life in this city, of the grandeur of gala receptions and celebrations for the King's birthday, of the various religions represented (including Quakers and Jews). Fird hand descriptions of actual taverns and brothels are given, including accounts of the available activities and entertainments.
Following an entire chapter on the 1692 earthquake, subsequent chapters tell of the strategic importance held by this English naval port where many famous British officers were stationed (including Admiral Nelson), on up to modern times.
The various charts and lists in the Appendices are fascinating to pour over: names of ships, tradesmen and craftsmen, ministers, and even taverns. While full of details, footnotes, and references, this book is written in a very approachable fashion, and will interest the casual reader as well as the scholar. Whether researching for an historical book, a fictional story, movie, documentary, or developing a reenacted persona, if you have any interest in the history of Port Royal, or of Jamaica in general, I can not recommend this book enough. ... Read more

Product Description
Jamaica has recently come to the attention to global strategic planners.This report puts these executives on the fast track.Ten chapters provide: an overview of how to strategically access this important market, a discussion on economic fundamentals, marketing & distribution options, export and direct investment options, and full risk assessments (political, cultural, legal, human resources).Ample statistical benchmarks and comparative graphs are given. ... Read more

Product Description
A field guide to the birds of Jamaica including many birds never photographed before. It is a compilation of knowledge gleaned over a 25-year period of bird watching, bird ringing and bird song recording. All endemic species and subspecies unique to the Caribbean are described in detail. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Good photos of Jamaica's endemics
Basics: hardcover, 1990; 45 species shown in 74 color photographs, total of 200 (68%) of the islands birds are addressed in the text, no range maps

The primary focus of this small photo guide is to focus on Jamaica's endemic species and subspecies (about 46) along with some of the other Caribbean specialties.Nearly 200 species ar covered in this book, which represents about 68% of the islands complete list.Of the 200 in this book, only 45 are illustrated.The remainder of the birds are addressed with a brief amout of text that denotes only their status and range.

All the photos are in color and of good quality with their sizes range from a 2-inch square to a full page.Additional photos display those species that have notable male-female differences.

For the birds that are photographed, a greater amount of text covers identification, status, voice, range, habitat, and habits.The identification notes are reasonably descriptive but typically do not compare similar species.Since their are not too many similar species, this will allow this book to be reasonably effective for identification.

This book will be a handy guide for your birding trip to Jamaica, if your focus is on just the specialties and you've seen the other Caribbean and US species that are found on the island.If you're not familiar with the other 150+ species typically found in the US, you might want to include a standard US field guide on your trip.-- (written by Jack at Avian Review / Avian Books, August 2008)

I've listed several related books below...
1) A Photographic Guide to the Birds of Jamaica by Downer/Sutton/ Rey-Millet
2) Photographic Guide to Birds of the West Indies by Flieg/Sander
3)A Guide to the Birds of the West Indies by Raffaele et al.
4) Birds of the West Indies by Raffaele et al.
5) Birds of the West Indies by Bond
6) Oiseaux des Petites Antilles -- Birds of the West Indies by Benito-Espinal (ISBN 2950228453)
7) Birds of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands (Caribbean Pocket Natural History) by Hallett
8) Birds of the Cayman Islands by Bradley

Birds of Jamaica : A Photographic Field Guide
BIRDS OF JAMAICA
A PHOTOGRAPHIC FIELD GUIDE

Authors: Audrey Downer and Robert Sutton
Photographs: Yves-Jacques Rey-Millet

First Edition
Format: Hardcover, 152 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1990
Condition: New, Out of print

Maps, color photos, glossary, bibliography,
index, Printed on coated stock.

All birds are photographed in the wild.

"In Jamaica there are 25 species and 21
subspecies of birds which are found nowhere else
on Earth. More endemic bird species occur in
Jamaica than on any other Caribbean island or most
other oceanic islands around the world. Birding in
Jamaica is enhanced by the outstanding beauty of
many of the birds, the unique richness and variety of
landscape, and the pleasant tropical climate."
--Birds of Jamaica. ... Read more

Product Description
A Jurisprudence of Power concerns the brutal suppression under martial law of the Jamaica uprising of 1865, and the explosive debate and litigation these events spawned in England. The book explores the centrality of legal ideas and institutions in English politics, and of political ideas that give rise to great questions of English law.

It documents how the world's most powerful and articulate political elite struggled to define its soul, and poses penetrating questions such as can an imperial nation remain committed to laws and legality? Can it contend with the violent resistance of subjugated peoples without corrupting the integrity of its legal and political ideals?

The book addresses these questions as it reconstructs the most prolonged and important conflict over martial law and the rule of law in the history of England in the nineteenth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Meticulous study of plantation management
The title doesn't quite convey the essence of the work.Higman's monograph is an encyclopedically detailed study of plantation management in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Jamaica, focusing in particular on the role of "planting attorneys," who stood in for absentee proprietors.He draws some parallels to estate management in England, Ireland, and the U.S. South, and readers knowledgeable about those regions will find this work interesting.The second half of the book includes lengthy biographical sketches of two Jamaican planting attorneys, one who was active in the mid to late 18c, and one who was active in the early 19c.The book is well-written and concise, but its abstruse subject matter will daunt most general readers; it's really a book for scholars. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Very thorough research
Although it is surprising to find that modern climate records are less available than records from the 18th century in Jamaica, as a hurricane researcher, I found this work very useful in hinting at muti-century trends in hurricane activity across the western Caribbean.Mike is a very thorough researcher, which is on display throughout this book.Anyone interested in tropical climatology and 18th century Caribbean hurricanes should own this book. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (6)

Great book! Great seller!
I have learned so much knowledge about Jamiacan music cultures.
This is really great for anyone!!

Comprehensive Dancehall Reference!
This is an excellant book, written by a genuinely knowledgeable scholar of dancehall music and Jamaican popular culture. Dr. Stolzoff has done an incredible amount of research for this book and puts it altogether with Wake The Town. A must for all reggae and dancehall afficionados. This book will be a classic for a long time.

Exceptional Research Study
I would like to commend Mr. Stolzoff for an in depth and enjoyable study of dancehall reggae.Being a dancehall fan for some time now, it's wonderful to see the music and culture being taken seriously.Ready first hand accounts of artists like the great Tenor Saw was an unexpected and exciting part of the book.Mr. Stolzoff goes indept as he discusses the origins of dancehall back to Africa right up to today with the top artists like Buju Banton, Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Sizzla, etc etc.As Ricky Trooper says in the begining of the book, if you haven't been to the dancehall before, you wouldn't understand it, dancehall it something that you have to experience.Great reading!

A Whole New Insight to Jamaican Music!
As a lover of the creative, colorful and very controversial culture known as Jamaican dancehall, I received this book ecstatically, but I wasn't quite sure of what to expect. I mean, this is a world that changes so rapidly that any attempts to document it have felt outdated even before their ink dried. I thought Stolzoff would play it safe and keep his approach as superficial as possible-a nice coffee table book perhaps, filled with eye-pleasing full-color pix of scantily-dressed dancehall queens, posturing dapper dons, maybe even the occasional text paragraph with amusing tidbits like, "Whatever happened to Wayne 'Sleng Teng' Smith?" Instead, I found a meticulously researched study packed with so much detail that several times I had to "wheel back and come again" (re-read pages) in order to digest it all.

Of course, this isn't the first piece of writing to cast a critical eye on dancehall; but past discussions (helmed mostly by staunch roots reggae apologists who make no bones about expressing their view of the subject as an anti-musical ebola responsible for devouring the innards of upright, "real" reggae as exemplified by the likes of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Burning Spear), irrespective of whether they have been pro- or anti-dancehall, have all revolved to varying degrees around the old dancehall "reggae" vs. "traditional" reggae issue.

Stolzoff distinguishes himself from the pack by sidestepping that stumbling block altogether: In (what I think is) a revolutionary move, he posits ALL Jamaican music, in essence, as dancehall-from the creolized drum and fiddle music of 18th century slave frolics to the thundering amplified bass blaring from contemporary Kingston sound systems. In short, he sees dancehall not as a distinct genre of music, but as an interactive method of experiencing music that might be specifically Jamaican.

Stolzoff's an anthropologist, not a rock critic, so rather than examining the music in isolation, he reconstructs the world that is dancehall's context, starting from the beginning with the sound systems, the cornerstone of the Jamaican music world.( Stolzoff scores a major coup by including extensive interviews with sound system pioneers like Hedley Jones, who provide a lot of insight into the Jamaican music experience prior to the birth of the local music industry-all other books on reggae up until this time have summed the whole era up in a sentence or two). Upon that foundation, Stolzoff layers the various social and ideological trends that have shaped the dancehall: rude boys, Rastafar-I, fashion, technology... You come to see that as chaotic as the dancehall universe appears to be, it is a well-ordered cosmology where everything has its place: sexuality, piety, violence, flamboyance, humility... They can all co-exist.

What I really, really love is the "career trajectory" Stolzoff maps out from his observation of the dancehall field. Using many of the aspiring and established dancehall stars he befriended, Stolzoff illustrates the stages of a career as a performer in the dancehall economy-which is an actual economy that employs millions of Jamaicans in various capacities.

I think this is definitely an important book and a complete must-read not only for fans of Jamaican music, but for anybody interested in the way that music and culture intersect with the daily lives of its participants.

The Definitive Book on Dancehall Music
This book is too incredible to believe. For those of us who are into dancehall, when we are in the midst of it, study and academia seem so far away. I never thought it was something that someone could record on paper and carry the true vibes of the whole thing. Stolzoff has not only captured the vibes of the dancehall itself, but also the vibes of life for the dancehall community, the economy, and the realities of Jamaica today. For anyone who ever wanted to get away from the tourist fakeries of what you think Jamaica and reggae music are all about, this book is for you. Of course there is nothing like the true experience of the dancehall itself, but outside of that, this book is the next best thing. Buy this book, you won't regret it. Even most of us Jamaicans, can learn a thing or two from it. And for my anthropologists out there, this book is the most gripping, meaningful ethnography since Bourgois' "In Search of Respect : Selling Crack in El Barrio". ... Read more

Product Description
In this volume the stories included are but pieces of Jamaica's very rich past. Stories range from the strictly historical, such as the founding of the nation's two political parties, to the reminiscences of service in World War II, to the exploration of place names and proverbs. ... Read more

Product Description
This book brings back into print, for the first timesince the 1830s, a text that was central to the transatlantic campaignto fully abolish slavery in Britain’s colonies. James Williams, aneighteen year old Jamaican “apprentice” (former slave), came toBritain in 1837 at the instigation of the abolitionist JosephSturge. The Narrative he produced there, one of very fewautobiographical texts by Caribbean slaves or former slaves, becameone of the most powerful abolitionist tools for effecting theimmediate end to the system of apprenticeship that had replacedslavery.

Describing the hard working conditions on plantations and theharsh treatment of apprentices unjustly incarcerated, Williams arguesthat apprenticeship actually worsened the conditions of Jamaicanex-slaves: former owners, no longer legally permitted to directlypunish their workers, used the Jamaican legal system as a punitivelever against them. Williams’s story documents the collaboration oflocal magistrates in this practice, wherein apprentices were routinelyjailed and beaten for both real and imaginary infractions of theapprenticeship regulations.

In addition to the complete text of Williams’s originalNarrative, this fully annotated edition includes nineteenth-centuryresponses to the controversy from the British and Jamaican press, aswell as extensive testimony from the Commission of Enquiry that heardevidence regarding the Narrative’s claims. These fascinating andrevealing documents constitute the largest extant body of directtestimony by Caribbean slaves or apprentices. ... Read more

Product Description
When Henry Clarke died in 1907 his obituary described him as an Englishman, yet he had only spent the first 19 years of his life in England, the next 60 being spent in Jamaica. He was a teacher, a cleric politician, a businessman, an inventor, and the father of eleven children. He left behind an extraordinary amount of writing, including a six volume diary upon which this biography is based. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A reward for plant lovers
This guide is a unique and exhaustive work on flora many of which are endangered.The author has devoted many years to this study.It offers the plant enthusiast written and visual documentation and the means to identify plants encountered in the Blue Mountains. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Required reading for all Caribbean nationals
This book should be required reading for all Caribbean people.This is the history we learnt in school told by a contemporary.It adds meat and marrow to the skeleton theories we memorized and regurgitated for external examinations.Maria Nugent was a woman of her times.She was, therefore, less than enthusiastic about being dispatched to a remote colonial outpost to live among the "blackies".

You have to be patient with poor Maria when reading her journal.She was orthodox in every way imaginable.But although she was not given to thinking outside the box, she was far from clueless.She was intelligent, if in a mundane way.

The prevailing mantra of the time was that empire was a noble project and slavery liberated the "blackies" from darkest (read non-Christian) cannibalistic Africa.There were times when I found her attempts at convincing herself of this quite frankly, amusing.In describing a scene where a new shipment of Africans had been brought ashore, she employed the most amazing mental gymnastics to convince herself that the new imports were happy to be where they were and in the state in which they found themselves.This same Maria Nugent is later terrified out of her skull when the happy "blackies" of Haiti inexplicably revolt.She was beside herself with worry that revolution fever would spred to Jamaica and infect the happy blackies there.

But don't be too hard on the good lady; she was a conventional "thinker"(now there's an oxymoron).Her journal is interesting from the point of view that it gives first hand narratives about events and a time which seem academic and far removed from who we are as 21st Century Caribbean people.Although I knew intellectually that these events were very real and that they have shaped who we now are; reading this book sharpened my emotional understanding of the events and time. ... Read more

Product Description
Memories of Africa, pre-civil war New England, political turmoil in Russia, the end of slavery in Jamaica, and Caribbean pirates; an intrepid black woman experiences many turning points in world history.

Nancy Prince paints a blunt picture of the struggle of free blacks to make a living in the North. When Boston failed to provide her with a livable wage, she and her husband found employment on a boat bound for Russia. A black household servant was a rare commodity in the land of the czars, and Prince was well compensated in St. Petersburg. ... Read more