The loss of El Dorado : a colonial history / V.S. Naipaul
Material type: TextPublication details: New York : Vintage Books , 2003.Description: xiv, 376 p. : maps ; 21 cmISBN:- 9781400030767
- LAS 972.98 NAI
- F2120 .N3 2003
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Latin American Studies | Biblioteca Pública de San Miguel de Allende, A.C. | LAS 972.98 NAI (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 024118 |
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LAS 972.9123 EST Havana : autobiography of a city | LAS 972.9123 PUB Havana 1900's | LAS 972.95 PEO Puerto Rico, the flame of resistance | LAS 972.98 NAI The loss of El Dorado : a colonial history | LAS 972-91 OPP Castro's final hour : the secret story behind the coming downfall of communist Cuba | LAS 973 ASH The quest for America | LAS 973.046 RAA Revoltosos : Mexico's rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 |
Includes index.
The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book, V. S. Naipaul-himself a native of Trinidad-shows how that delusion drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries. Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long rivalries of the El Dorado quest and, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of slavery. An accumulation of casual, awful detail takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the slave colony, where, in spite of various titles of nobility, only an opportunistic, near-lawless community exists, always fearful of slave suicide or poison, of African sorcery and revolt.
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