Name: Guatamala: Our man in Central America
Price: 72.39 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Stephen Platt
ISBN: 9781912460076

portada Guatamala: Our man in Central America

Type

Physical Book

Author

Stephen Platt

Publisher

Leveret Publishing

Language

English

Pages

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm

Weight

0.18 kg.

ISBN13

9781912460076

Edition No.

Synopsis "Guatamala: Our man in Central America"

We went to Guatemala to visit David, a friend I hadn't seen for more than twenty-five years since I lived in Venezuela. We stay with his delightful family, a house full of delightful women. We go to Chichicastenango on market day and witness the strangely pagan firework procession from the church; we take a cruise around Lake Atitlan and stop off in the villages around its shores. We fly to Tikal, climb pyramids and hear about the end of the world. And David takes us up the active volcano of Pacaya where we brave poisonous sulphur clouds and risk being bombarded with tephra bombs that David says land with a splat like red-hot cow pats. But the most amazing part of our trip, something we hadn't bargained for, is that David reveals he was for over thirty years 'Our man in Central America'.

Stephen Platt

(Author)

View Author's Page

Stephen R. Platt is an American historian specialized in the history of modern China, with a particular focus on the 19th century and the foreign relations of the Qing dynasty. He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and earned his PhD in Chinese history from Yale University in 2004. His research focuses on the conflicts and transformations that marked the decline of the Chinese Empire and its interaction with Western powers.

Among his most notable works is Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012), which received the Cundill History Prize. In 2018, he published Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (2024), where he analyzes the events that led to the First Opium War. This book was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

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