Beautifully illustrated throughout with color plates, photographs, and drawings, this volume is a comprehensive introduction to the natural history of the tropics worldwide. 59 color photos. 21 maps.

Seventeen marvelous essays introducing the habitats, ecology, plants, and animals of the Central and South American rainforest. A lively, lucid portrait of the tropics as seen by two uncommonly observant and thoughtful field biologists. Its seventeen marvelous essays introduce the habitats, ecology, plants, and animals of the Central and South American rainforest. Includes a lengthy appendix of practical advice for the tropical traveler.

Images of the Tropics critically examines Dutch colonial culture in the Netherlands Indies through the prism of landscape art. Susie Protschky contends that visual representations of nature and landscape were core elements of how Europeans understood the tropics, justified their territorial claims in the region, and understood their place both in imperial Europe and in colonized Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book thus makes a significant contribution to studies of empire, art and environment, as well as to histories of Indonesia and Europe. Surveying a rich visual culture developed over a period of some 350 years of Dutch colonial engagement with Indonesia Susie Protschky demonstrates how views of the archipelago’s environment were far from simple topographical souvenirs. Rather, this book reveals how images of the tropics visually articulated colonial attempts to legitimize and historicize what were in fact continually changing and contested claims to Dutch territorial sovereignty in the Indies. Further, colonial images of nature were routinely inflected with diverse cultural preoccupations, among them the constitution of gender, class and racial boundaries in Indies society; the tenor of sexual mores in the tropics; and the political role of religion in the archipelago. Landscape art thus indexed colonial views on a range of pressing social and political concerns.

The co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. Through the lens of history and photography, The Experiment of the Tropics returns to early-twentieth-century Philippines during American occupation and asks, "How does one look at the past?" By braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric, Lawrence Ypil explores history's archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined, that is constituted by the shimmer of petal and porch, coral and brass--a river-refrigerator where women catch their reflections on the sheen of magazines and men lean against the walls of old houses and beckon, come here. So, we approach. The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of a city and its longing, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.

Leo Oakley ; Evelyn O'Callaghan ; Jean Rhys ; Tom Redcam (Thomas Madcermot) ; Victor Stafford Reid ; Gordon Rohlehr ; Reinhard Sander ; Dennis Scott ; Lawrence Scott ; Karl Sealey ; Samuel Selvon ; A.J. Seymour ; P.M. Sherlock ; Rajkumari Singh ; Mikey Smith ; Henry Swanzy ; Tropica (Mary Adella Wolcott) ; John Vidal ; Derek Walcott ; A.R.F. Webber ; Sarah Lawson Welsh ; Sylvia Wynter ; Benjamin Zephaniah.