In March 2014, award-winning journalist Melinda Voss headed to the Miami airport to travel to Cuba, a country that had fascinated her since she was a girl growing up amid animated dinner conversations about the Cuban revolution, Castro’s leadership, and the missile crisis. After her plane landed, she disembarked with thirty-one other Americans and prepared to explore Cuba’s complexity, its leaders, people, culture, and relationship with America. Offering a thoughtful glimpse of Cuban life, Voss not only interweaves interesting facts about Cuba’s history, customs, housing, education system, agriculture, health care, family life, and aging, but also provides perspective on the differences and similarities between American and Cuban cultures. While sharing valuable insight into landmarks such as the stately University of Havana, Santeria Cultural Center, Che Guevara’s tomb, Revolution Square, tobacco and organic farms, and community projects, Voss introduces others to an impressive array of Cuban musicians and artists and includes excerpts from unusually frank conversations with locals as well as Americans. From Mango Cuba to Prickly Pear America shares a concise and carefully researched comparison between two New World countries as a new and uncertain era of Cuban-American relations dawns.

From the prehistoric era to the present, food culture has helped to define civilizations. This reference surveys food culture and cooking from antiquity to the modern era, providing background information along with menus and recipes. Food culture has been central to world civilizations since prehistory. While early societies were limited in terms of their resources and cooking technology, methods of food preparation have flourished throughout history, with food central to social gatherings, celebrations, religious functions, and other aspects of daily life. This book surveys the history of cooking from the ancient world through the modern era. The first volume looks at the history of cooking from antiquity through the Early Modern era, while the second focuses on the modern world. Each volume includes a chronology, historical introduction, and topical chapters on foodstuffs, food preparation, eating habits, and other subjects. Sections on particular civilizations follow, with each section offering a historical overview, recipes, menus, primary source documents, and suggestions for further reading. The work closes with a selected, general bibliography of resources suitable for student research.

The book summarizes the history of biological control in Latin America and the Caribbean. Few publications provide historical detail and the records are, therefore, fragmented until now. By bringing information together in this book, we offer a more complete picture of important developments in biological control on this continent. There are a wealth of text, tables and references about the history of such projects, and which were succesful and which failed. This will help plan future biocontrol projects. An overview is provided of the current situation in biological control for many Latin American and Caribbean countries, revealing an astonishing level of practical biological control applied in the regio, making it the largest area under biological control worldwide. The final part describes new developments and speculates about the future of biological control in Latin America and the Caribbean.