In 1964, Edwin and Jean Armbruster left their home in the United States to raise their family on the Panama Canal Zone, a little known American territory in the Central American country of Panama. In Canal Zone Daughter, Judy (Armbruster) Haisten chronicles her unique childhood culminating to the crushing loss when former President Jimmy Carter signs treaties that effectively eliminates her -and fellow U.S. citizens' -former home. Charming, funny, and poignant, the author captures her remarkable American story in an exotic place and time. www.canalzonedaughter.com
Zone Policeman 88: A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and Its Workers is a non-fiction book written by Harry A. Franck and published in 1913. Franck, a travel writer who had produced a highly successful 1910 travelogue, Vagabond Journey Around the World, took a position as a police officer in the Panama Canal Zone, reporting his experiences and observations in a book that proved, like his debut, popular.
One must handle the challenges of growing up with a sense of humor. Though living in paradise can be a dream, life is not without strife. There were no rich, no poor, and no unemployment in Brian Allen's Panama Canal Zone. Yet his home town was utterly destroyed and the dead exhumed. Brian tells his story with humor, warts and all. My Paradise Lost is about a boy growing to manhood in the golden age of the Canal Zone. It was an innocent, Huck Finn in the rain forest existence. His township of Coco Solo was a blue collar world of mangoes and maids, exotica and history. Misadventure abounds and teen romance is just as awkward in paradise as anywhere. There is parental conflict, life, death, and the ghost of Jim Crow racism. At the best time of his life, Brian is involved in a fatal car accident that puts him in the custody of the intimidating Guardia Nacional. His fate rests in the courts of a dictatorship whose El Supremo is bent on sovereignty over his Canal Zone home. You will feel the tropical sun, splash in the canal, ache for love, laugh at the familiar, and cry for the dead. Photos and popular recipes are included."I thought the wonderful days of growing up in the Zone were gone until I read My Paradise Lost. This Coco Solo girl was transported back to treasured days gone by. Brian beautifully captured the spirit of the Zone, mosquitoes and all. Thank you Brian for a personal peek at an evolving Paradise." --Betty LeDoux-Morris, four time past president of the Panama Canal Society. “You learn something when you read Brian Allen's work, about history, about the world, about yourself, in a voice that is as familiar and comfortable as your best friend's.” --Karen L. Barron, English Professor and award winning fiction and non-fiction writer. Reader: be prepared. This is a charming coming-of-age memoir set in the exotic location of the Panama Canal Zone, and filled with humor, adventure, and insight. But My Paradise Lost is also an examination of colonialism, justice, hardship and loss. Through his story, Allen reveals the development of his character. In doing so, he enlarges our sense of what it means to be both Americans and global citizens. --Thomas Averill, English Professor, W.U. Writer in Residence, O. Henry Award winning author.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys: A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. • "One of the best books of the year." —Esquire After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong… At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
The Panama Canal's untold history—from the Panamanian point of view. Sleuth and scholar Marixa Lasso recounts how the canal’s American builders displaced 40,000 residents and erased entire towns in the guise of bringing modernity to the tropics. The Panama Canal set a new course for the modern development of Central America. Cutting a convenient path from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, it hastened the currents of trade and migration that were already reshaping the Western hemisphere. Yet the waterway was built at considerable cost to a way of life that had characterized the region for centuries. In Erased, Marixa Lasso recovers the history of the Panamanian cities and towns that once formed the backbone of the republic. Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal recollections, Lasso describes the canal’s displacement of peasants, homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the lost cities and towns—a space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and people—which served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburbs built exclusively for Americans. By restoring the sounds, sights, and stories of a world wiped clean by U.S. commerce and political ambition, Lasso compellingly pushes back against a triumphalist narrative that erases the contribution of Latin America to its own history.
A genealogical compilation of the descendants of Henry & Margareth Crook and their seven children. The couple was married circa 1812 in South Carolina and by 1828 could be found in Rankin County, Mississippi. Many of the descendants are traced to the present, including biographies and photographs when available.
