ruins
Uganda's Economic Reforms: Insider Accounts
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Kuteesa, Florence / Tumusiime-Mutebile, Emmanuel / Whitworth, Alan, PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Following the eight year rule of Idi Amin, then several years of war and civil war, the Ugandan economy was in ruins by the time peace was restored in . Since then Uganda has consistently been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, leading to a substantial reduction in poverty. Its economic success has attracted considerable attention and has arguably had more influence on development thinking and on the international aid architecture than any other country. The HIPC debt relief initiative, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the growth of budget support have all been strongly influenced by Ugandan experience and thinking. Ugandan innovations such as poverty reduction strategies, public expenditure tracking surveys, and virtual poverty funds have been widely adopted elsewhere. Most of the reforms which transformed the economy originated within the Uganda government during the s, rather than being imposed through donor conditionality. In this book, for the first time many of the architects of those reforms give their personal accounts of the thinking behind the reforms, how they were implemented, and their impact. Since measures that work well in one environment may fail when transplanted to a different environment, the authors identify factors that were critical to the success of Uganda's reforms. While a number of individual reforms have been the subject of academic study, this book represents the first consolidated account of the economic reforms undertaken by the Uganda government and their impact on growth and poverty reduction.
Ninevah and Its Remains: A Narrative of an Expedition to
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Layard, Austen Henry / Fagan, Brian M., PUBLISHER: Lyons Press, A rise, go to Nineveh, that great city, " said the Lord to Jonah. For centuries, generations of scholars pondered the historical truth of the Scriptures. Had Ninevah actually been a great city? The question would remain unsolved for centuries. But in , a twenty-two-year-old Londoner named Austen Henry Layard left England for Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, seeking a less dreary place in which to practice law. He never got there. Traveling by land, he reached the town of Mosul, on the banks of the Tigris, and spent the next ten years in Persia. Driven by little more than an insatiable well of desire for discovery, Layard soon became the foremost archeologist of his time, and discovered the ancient ruins of Ninevah at the tender age of thirty one. While the British Museum unloaded hundreds of tons of sculpture from Layard's excavations, Layard wrote "Nineveh and Its Remains," a popular account of his discoveries reprinted in an abridged form here. The book appeared to rapturous acclaim and sold out numerous printings. Everyone loved the fluent mix of high adventure and archaeology in his books, the intoxicating stew of compelling characters and sudden crises. He made the Assyrians accessible to the common person and brought alive a shadowy Biblical civilization. The book made Austen Henry Layard one of the archaeological immortals, who achieved miracles of discovery against seemingly impossible odds. Originally published in , "Nineveh and Its Remains" is Layard's account of his extraordinary discoveries in the East. This masterpiece, described by the London Times as "the most extraordinary work of the present age, " is one of the great archeological books of all time.
The Informers
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Vasquez, Juan Gabriel / McLean, Anne, PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books, A virtuosic novel about family, history, memory, and betrayal from the brightest new Latin American literary talent working today. When Gabriel Santoro's biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous BogotA rhetorician, Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the s, "A Life in Exile" seemed a slim, innocent exercise in recording modern history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into Sara's story, searching for clues to his father's anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his father's exalted reputation and redefine his own. After his father's mysterious death in a car accident a few years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman and his father's young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriel's world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of s BogotA to a stranger's doorstep in s MedellA-n, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his father's life and he wades into a dark, longsilenced period of Colombian history after World War II. With a taut, riveting narrative and achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel VAsquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration of the sins of our fathers, of war's devastating psychological costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has earned VAsquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and MArquez, "The Informers" heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.
Apalachee
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Hudson, Joyce Rockwood, PUBLISHER: University of Georgia Press, Known mainly for her YA novels (To Spoil the Sun), Hudson turns to adult fiction in this sweeping novel of Native American life during the early colonial period. The focus is on the eponymous Apalachee people, the Native tribe that dominated northeastern Florida before the coming of Europeans. By the early 18th century, in which the story is set, the Apalachee have been greatly reduced by disease and other dislocations brought by the Spanish invaders. Besides sicknesses against which the Indians had no natural defenses, the Europeans also brought another influence, Christianity. The new religion has had devastating effects upon the tribe, undermining traditional culture and dividing family members against each other. Lucia, a member of the Hinachuba clan, has, like her mother and grandmother, resisted conversion to Christianity. Despite the fact that the old religious centers lie in ruins, they try to keep the old ways alive. A medicine man's vision tells Lucia she is to be the White Sun Woman, the priestess of the tribe. Meanwhile, more pressing concerns intervene. Armed by the English, a neighboring Creek tribe stages raids on the Apalachee mission settlements. War between Spain and England looms, promising doom for the Apalachee caught in the middle. Lucia, now married to Carlos, a Christian convert groomed by Spanish priests to be the chief of the Apalachee, is captured and sold into slavery. Carlos's struggle to recover his wife, who is toiling at a turpentine plantation in the colony of Carolina, seems hopeless. Spanning the years from to , this melancholy book chronicles multiple conflicts between Spanish and English, the details of plantation existence and the ultimatedestruction of the Apalachee way of life. An historical note and extensive bibliography demonstrate the author's attempt at verisimilitude. Despite employing a somewhat romantic and elegiac tone, Hudson presents the Apalachee as real human characters and evokes their culture vividly.