If you like this book of inquires then read Morgan Freeman, Black American Of Achievement by Gina Deangelis. It explains about Morgan Freeman and his times. This book shows his importance and how he evolve in life. What he stands for and so forth. This is also a very good Black History book. There is also a move out from this book and i belive the book would be good in a mini series about his life.

"Hernando Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico" looks at one of the most famous explorers of the New World whose reputation has suffered over the years because of his destruction of the Aztecs (see Neil Young's song "Cortes and the Killer). Author Gina De Aneglis points out that like many of the other Spanish conquistadors, Cortes was brutal in his treatment of the natives, but that he was also a fearless general and a brave explorer. Cortes was one of numerous soldiers sent by the Spanish to explore unknown lands after the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492. De Angelis relates how Cortes first arrived in the New World as a teenager, fighting against natives on Hispaniola and Cuba. He later convinced the king to let him explore the Yucatan peninsula, the area that is now Mexico. With a few hundred soldiers Cortes invaded the mighty Aztec empire, captured the emperor Montezuma, and conquered the natives. Whatever young readers may end up thinking about Cortes as a human being, he clearly helped shape the Mexico of today. Teachers and students can deal with questions of whether he should be judged by the standards of his own time or our own.

This book includes native artwork of Aztec rituals and the arrival of the Spaniards, as well as European paintings of other events described. You will find a Chronology from the founding of Tenochtitlan in 1325 to the death of Cortes in 1566, along with a Glossary, list of Further Reading, and Index. This book is part of the Explorers of the World series, which has 30 titles focusing on explorers from Marco Polo and the Vikings to Sir Edmund Hilary and the Apollo Astronauts.

Following the collapse of the Soviet empire there was great anticipation that capitalism would sweep the planet and transform the lives of the world's poor into something resembling life as we know it in the West. Instead of this rosy view of the future what has actually happened is that capitalism has failed to take hold in all but a few places around the world. This failure of capitalism to take hold has caused great consternation amongst the Western political establishment who fear that this failure may be seen by the Third World's poor as a deficiency of capitalism, or worse, as a purposeful effort by the West to keep them down.

Make no mistake about it though, the economic system that an overwhelming majority of the world's people currently operate under is NOT capitalism. "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" is Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto's explanation of why capitalism has failed to take root in most of the world's countries.

What de Soto believes that developing countries lack is an integrated property system that would allow the people of these countries to turn their homes into engines of growth. He starts by stating that he has collected data from all over the world and he concludes that the world's poor 'own' real estate assets in excess of trillions of dollars. He then states that the poor are unable to realize the capital potential of these assets because they do not belong to the formal property sector. Instead the world's poor often hold their assets in an informal, extralegal sector.

They do this not because they seek to avoid taxes or because they are engaged in illicit activities but because their governments have made it too difficult and too expensive to get legal. De Soto says that, in Peru, the city of Lima alone requires any person wishing to formalize their title to property to navigate over 200 steps that take years-worth of time. Given the difficulties and expenses involved with this bureaucratic nightmare, the poor often give up and form their own property associations to protect their rights.

De Soto then goes on to say that this is not much different from how things were in the United States up until about the mid-1800s. Modern Americans don't realize the difficulties our ancestors went through in establishing title to their property because there is no clear history of the effort to legalize American property holdings.

De Soto believes this legalization of property holdings is vitally important to the success of capitalism because most start-up enterprises are begun with money raised from someone's home. Without the access to a wider credit market that legalization provides, the developing world's poor are locked into a system that prevents them from expanding their businesses and from gaining economies of scale that would allow them to generate real wealth and jobs.

While all of this seems intuitive, de Soto falls short of adequately backing up his thesis. I am already a believer in the rights to private property so I don't need convincing. However, a majority of the world's people are not believers in private property rights. I assume that it is to them that de Soto is directing his effort. If it is, he needs to include more support for his argument than just assuming the Western concept of private property rights is accepted everywhere in the world.

These failings aside, "The Mystery of Capital" is an important work in that it gets us focusing on what needs to be done to improve the lot of the world's poor. Capitalism, free trade, and private property are the means to improve those lots. However, these concepts will only triumph if most of a country's people are plugged into the system. If they are left out, no matter how successful those concepts may be for the ones on the inside, they will fail to achieve their ultimate goal, which is the improvement of the quality of life for a majority of the world's people.

The Mystery of Capital attempts to "reopen the exploration of the source of capital and thus explain how to correct the economic failures of poor countries." I believe the author makes an interesting argument within the book concerning the failure of capitalism to catch on in developing and post-communist countries. His argument deals with institutions we here in the West take for granted-property rights and other legal institutions. The connection between these legal institutions and economic growth is clear-and de Sota is clear on this point as well.

He states that an individual living outside the West faces an impenetrable wall of rules that bar them from legally established social and economic activities-such as deleterious bureaucracies that retard growth by wielding red-tape. De Sota sent teams to Peru, the Philippines, Egypt, and Haiti and they experienced firsthand how it takes several years to obtain legal verification of assets-years compared to days here in the West. Under these burdens, individuals create new laws-extralegal laws. These social contracts have created a vibrant but undercapitalized sector. This sector is known in economic layman's terms as the underground or informal economy. The author estimates that over half on the inhabitants in developing countries engage in this sector-using Dead Capital. The value of the assets in the informal markets are huge-surpassing the assets of rich countries sometimes. De Sota has brought attention to the core of the problem-he then states that the solution can be found at the heart of the countries.

He supplies the formula to fix the backwardness of the nascent capitalist nations. The first objective is to unify the many social contracts already existing in the extralegal sector into one, all encompassing social contract-by listening to the "barking dogs", or the people. Past attempts with this aim have failed because they have lacked the legitimacy and support from the current extralegal world. De Sota creates a bridge to fix this dilemma-a bridge that integrates old social property customs into a new all encompassing social contract. By working with their people, government leaders can forge a new regulatory framework. The second task is a task of a political nature because the plan outlined above requires the support of the poor, the elite, and the lawyers. The poor will gain the most because they will greatly increase their economic lifestyles with a more unified social property system that will enable them to use their assets as full functioning capital. The elite will harvest gains as well; they will benefit from an expanded market and growing capitalist economy. The lawyers must not use the current law, but instead fine-tune the law and change it to make it work for all.

De Sota's real world studies and solutions make sense in my mind. He identified a problem and supplied the solution. He may fall short though in his solution because a complex capitalist economy requires much more infrastructure than only property rights-of course I mean other forms of capital, such as human capital. By De Sota is on the right tract; a capitalist economy demands strict and discrete property laws that enable individuals to utilize their assets. His premise is right-under capitalism, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. In the third world, the poor don't have access to their assets, and they thus flounder in the extralegal sector.

"The Mystery Of Capital" is a text on development economics and the history of economic thought. It addresses development economics by analyzing roles played by incentives and institutions in shaping the evolution of markets in third world countries. In addition, it addresses the development of economic thought by demonstrating how the notion of capital evolved in the West to encompass incentives for transforming property into productive assets over time. In doing this, de Soto seeks to provide a solution to the dilemma haunting the third world: how to create a system of rules to put the proper economic incentives in place while respecting existing institutions that currently drive economic behavior.

In the book, de Soto argues that it is the inability to produce capital, rather than a lack of respect for private property or the rule of law per se, which inhibits rapid economic growth in the third world. He notes there is a difference between protecting property rights and producing capital. Specifically, he states that over time in the West, mechanisms were developed within systems of property rights to produce capital very quickly. He asserts that many westerners are oblivious to these mechanisms, and that they "...view them as parts of the system that protects property, not as interlocking mechanisms for fixing the economic potential of an asset in such a way that it can be converted into capital."

He defines property as a mediating device that captures and stores the mechanisms necessary to run a market economy. He states that it "...seeds the system by making people accountable and assets fungible, by tracking transactions, and so providing all the mechanisms required for the monetary and banking system to work and for investment to function." He relates the idea of property to capital by pointing out that - rather than a mere representation of assets on paper - it is a process through which a society extracts value from those assets. Therefore, property is not the assets themselves but an expression of how those assets should be used.

From this, de Soto develops his theory of how the West grew rich. He argues that American property systems flourished because they incorporated legal rights to allow people to use their property to create capital. He lists occupancy, preemption, homesteading, miners' laws, and other mechanisms for bringing informal property rights into the legal arena as examples of how Western systems created a new economic order providing the right incentives for massive growth to occur. He believes this evolution occurred under America's legal umbrella rather than Britain's because America's system responded to shifting political attitudes more quickly than Britain's - where the common law had entrenched a static system hostile to extralegal notions of property.

These extralegal notions of property are crucial, de Soto notes, because they dominate most economic transactions in the third world. He points out that with their formal economies so heavily regulated, black markets are the only systems available to most third world residents. As a result, most businesses in the third world incur heavy visible costs in the form of paying bribes, making payments outside legal channels, and operating through dispersed networks without a source of credit. However, the largest costs - which are invisible - are the absence of institutions necessary to create incentives for people to raise investment funds, achieve economies of scale, or protect their innovations in the marketplace.

Thus, de Soto argues, the problem with most proposals to establish property rights and the rule of law is that they ignore existing black market institutions that already guide economic activity in third world countries. He explains that when new legal institutions are created, those institutions must embrace contracts and arrangements that exist under the black market, or they will be rejected over time. He believes the solution is for reformers to codify black market rules so they can be made uniform within individual countries. Thus, leaders can compare these rules to other newly proposed frameworks and create an individual set that best enables them to create a system that is legitimate and self-enforceable over time.

De Soto's book sheds important light on many of the problems inherent in development economics. His insights into the evolution of market institutions to provide incentives for people to both protect their property and use it productively explain many of the frustrations experienced by officials at international aid agencies and third world governments. These leaders would do well to heed his advice.

This book explores the murky world of the Bacardi Empire. Bacardi has had dealings with the CIA and the extreme right-wing National Cuban-American Foundation (CANF) as well as links with both political and violent attempts to overthrow the Cuban government. This began almost from the Revolution in January 1959 and has continued to the present day. As the prologue puts it, the book: "raises fundamental issues about the relationship between multinational corporations and imperialist politics, about the instrumental use by the state of private corporations to serve state-directed terrorism."

Bacardi has sought to use US laws to put a stranglehold on Cuban trade. This includes sponsoring the Helms-Burton Act that tightens the 40-year blockade. The author comments that "the text is so severe and over-arching that doubtless not even the laws and treaties imposed on African colonies by the European powers have contained such a degree of arrogance and lack of respect for a sovereign nation."

Bacardi lawyers were also heavily involved in writing the new trade laws that mean Cuban brands are no longer recognized in the US. Havana Club rum's French partner Pernod-Ricard (the major competitor to Bacardi) has convinced the European Union that such moves are an infringement of fair-trading laws.

Bacardi and others are aiming not just to remove Castro from power but establish Cuba as a colony of the US with chosen front men running the place.

This book is the letters that Cortes wrote home to the king of Spain, and they provide a first hand account of his amazing adventure, and how he conquered one of the most powerful civilizations in the world. It is astounding how ruthlessly brutal the conquistadores were, and how devastatingly successful. It definitely puts a heavy dose of reality on the dates and names that usually make history dull.

Salsa! Havana Heat, Bronx Beat is a good book. You'll find it to be an easy and good read into the history of "Afrocuban/Salsa". The book does make a number of errors, such as, stating that Tito Puente is a Cuban musician, when in fact he was born in New York City of Puerto Rican parents. I also did not agreed with a some of Mr.Calvo's "left-wing" analysis. Nevertheless, on balance, I believe this is a book you will enjoy and worth reading.