What type of music do the Creole play? How do you catch a land crab? How do you dance the limbo? Guadeloupe is an island in the Caribbean Sea. The people who live there are mostly Creole. In this book, you will learn all about the way they live. It is always warm in the Caribbean, but hurricanes are common. Most houses are made of concrete to keep them from blowing away.
This is the true story of a trip to the beach that never ends. It's about a husband and wife who escape civilization to build a small restaurant on an island paradise -- and discover that even paradise has its pitfalls. It's a story filled with calamities and comedy, culinary disasters and triumphs, and indelible portraits of people who live and work on a sliver of beauty set in the Caribbean Sea. It's about the maddening, exhausting, outlandish complications of trying to live the simple life -- and the joy that comes when you somehow pull it off. The story begins when Bob and Melinda Blanchard sell their successful Vermont food business and decide, perhaps impulsively, to get away from it all. Why not open a beach bar and grill on Anguilla, their favorite Caribbean island? One thing leads to another and the little grill turns into an enchanting restaurant that quickly draws four-star reviews and a celebrity-studded clientele eager for Melinda's delectable cooking. Amid the frenetic pace of the Christmas "high season," the Blanchards and their kitchen staff -- Clinton and Ozzie, the dancing sous-chefs; Shabby, the master lobster-wrangler; Bug, the dish-washing comedian -- come together like a crack drill team. And even in the midst of hilarious pandemonium, there are moments of bliss. As the Blanchards learn to adapt to island time, they become ever more deeply attached to the quirky rhythms and customs of their new home. Until disaster strikes: Hurricane Luis, a category-4 storm with two-hundred-mile-an-hour gusts, devastates Anguilla. Bob and Melinda survey the wreckage of their beloved restaurant and wonder whether leaving Anguilla, with its innumerable challenges, would be any easier than walking out on each other. Affectionate, seductive, and very funny, A Trip to the Beach is a love letter to a place that becomes both home and escape.
When your life is over, everything you did will be represented by a single dash between two dates—what will that dash mean for the people you have known and loved? As Joseph Epstein once said, “We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents, or the country of our birth. We do not, most of us, choose to die. . . . But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.” And that is what The Dash is all about. Beginning with an inspiring poem by Linda Ellis titled “The Dash,” renowned author Mac Anderson then applies his own signature commentary on how the poem motivates us to make certain choices in our lives—choices to ignore the calls of selfishness and instead reach out to others, using our God-given abilities to brighten their days and lighten their loads. After all, at the end of life, how we will be remembered—whether our dash represents a full, joyous life of seeking God’s glory, or merely the space between birth and death—will be entirely up to the people we’ve left behind, the lives we’ve changed.
The Caribbean before Columbus is a new synthesis of the region's insular history based on the authors' 55 years of research in the Bahamas, Lesser and Greater Antilles. The presentation operates on multiple scales, and individual sites highlight specific issues. For the first time, complete histories are elucidated through an emphasis on cultural diversity.
Set along both the physical and social margins of the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean explores the construction of difference through the everyday life of colonial subjects. Jenny Shaw examines how marginalized colonial subjects--Irish and Africans--contributed to these processes. By emphasizing their everyday experiences Shaw makes clear that each group persisted in its own cultural practices; Irish and Africans also worked within--and challenged--the limits of the colonial regime. Shaw's research demonstrates the extent to which hierarchies were in flux in the early modern Caribbean, allowing even an outcast servant to rise to the position of island planter, and underscores the fallacy that racial categories of black and white were the sole arbiters of difference in the early English Caribbean. The everyday lives of Irish and Africans are obscured by sources constructed by elites. Through her research, Jenny Shaw overcomes the constraints such sources impose by pushing methodological boundaries to fill in the gaps, silences, and absences that dominate the historical record. By examining legal statutes, census material, plantation records, travel narratives, depositions, interrogations, and official colonial correspondence, as much for what they omit as for what they include, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean uncovers perspectives that would otherwise remain obscured. This book encourages readers to rethink the boundaries of historical research and writing and to think more expansively about questions of race and difference in English slave societies.
Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher Lonely Planet Caribbean Islands is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Travel back to the 18th century as you wander along cobbled lanes and past meticulously restored buildings at English Harbour, Antigua; hoist a jib and set sail from sailing fantasyland, Tortola, and enjoy the journey to one of the 50 or so isles making up the British Virgin Islands; or hit the atmospheric streets of Cuba's Habana Vieja and join in the living musical soundtrack of rumba, salsa, son and reggaeton; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Caribbean Islands and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet's Caribbean Islands Travel Guide: Color maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - weddings, honeymoons, sustainable travel, cuisine, music, wildlife, culture, history Covers Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Jamaica, St Kitts, St Lucia, Trinidad, Turks & Caicos, US Virgin Islands, and more eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Caribbean Islands, our most comprehensive guide to the Caribbean Islands, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less traveled About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world’s number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveler since 1973. Over the past four decades, we’ve printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travelers. You’ll also find our content online, and in mobile apps, video, 14 languages, nine international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.
A masterwork of travel literature and of history: voyaging from Cuba to Jamaica, Puerto Rico to Trinidad, Haiti to Barbados, and islands in between, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of each society, its culture and politics, connecting this region’s common heritage to its fierce grip on the world’s imagination. From the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa María's deck in 1492 at what he mistook for an island off Asia, the Caribbean has been subjected to the misunderstandings and fantasies of outsiders. Running roughshod over the place, they have viewed these islands and their inhabitants as exotic allure to be consumed or conquered. The Caribbean stood at the center of the transatlantic slave trade for more than three hundred years, with societies shaped by mass migrations and forced labor. But its people, scattered across a vast archipelago and separated by the languages of their colonizers, have nonetheless together helped make the modern world—its politics, religion, economics, music, and culture. Jelly-Schapiro gives a sweeping account of how these islands’ inhabitants have searched and fought for better lives. With wit and erudition, he chronicles this “place where globalization began,” and introduces us to its forty million people who continue to decisively shape our world.
Caribbean Island Movements explores the different ways in which being mobile is central to the production and reproduction of social identities on the Caribbean island of Culebra. Rather than seeing insularity and mobility, and its associations, as mutually exclusive components, this ethnographic study demonstrates how they mutually inform each other. The book proposes the term of "transinsularism" as a means to articulate the complex ways in which islanders construct a unique place for themselves in the world, while referencing and engaging in practices of movement. Based on a long term relationship to the Caribbean island of Culebra, it describes how mobile islanders select from various, at times contradictory, discourses and practices in the process of fashioning their sense of island identity. It makes the case for a conscious social creative process where a group of individuals finds ways to narrativise a life-world that operates in tension with structural social forces associated with nation-building, colonialism, and "landed narratives".
It's everyone's dream: to leave behind the rat-race of the working world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colours, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise. This is the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk, who himself lived on an island in the sun for seven years, draws on his own experiences to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving about a man's search for happiness, and for himself.
