God's Favorite is a novel that in part is fiction, non-fiction, and imagination. Initially I was under the impression that the author was biased; now, after reading the book, I have to admit that Mr. Wright is a fluid writer. I enjoyed the piece on Noriega and the fictional Panama setting. I also found in many sections a great deal of humor. I had to put the book down to laugh. I have read works on Panama and Noriega and found this book flowing; it was not boring, dry, or difficult to read and understand. On the contrary, the book was an enjoyable read.

For those who would like to look at Panama under fiction, this is the book. It does not highlight a detail history; it does include fictional/non-fictional parts that can very well be argued in a political science course.

I would recommend this book for leisure, escape, and for fluid reading which allows the reader to enjoy. Wright's Noriega is a complex, somewhat understood character. Afte reading several works on Noriega (non-fiction), I would highly agree with this book for humor, leisure, and for imagination. Readers should not take the whole book for fact; it is a work of fiction and imagination.

An utterly arresting blend of fact and fiction, "God's Favorite" thrusts the reader into the bloody maelstrom of Panama under Noriega. The book is incredibly accessible, even entertaining, but it never loses its intent to put you into the heart of the situation, sparing no one, revealing everything. Of course, one cannot know what a historical figure thinks, believes or desires. Even their own words are tainted by the unswerving gaze of history. Wright, however, does not let his book rest on his assumtions of thoughts and feeling. He brings a trained observers calculated analysis and the well known documented facts of the situation to frame his narrative.

This is a truly delightful experience, crisp in style, engaging in content and memorable in the final experience. Recommended.

A novel of the highest order, taking in religion, history, various world views, politics, and cultures while introducing the reader to modern times. Set in Panama in the late '80's it is a bottom's up view of the top of the hierarchy and how the way that world works from both the macro and microscopic view. The bloody view of personal and corrupted power will make the reader wince, laugh out loud, and possibly bring a tear to the eye. We find out how an ugly Mestizo can own a country and as the reader gets into Mr. Noriega's skin to see his view, we find that the writer has a good grasp on the ordinary things that bring meaning to one's life; however it is also the view of a mad man. We are given a look at the USA machinations into that region and the ultimate purposes involving new-old fashion terrorism, narco-terrorism, with a pinch of romance. Often I felt as if I were participating in the movie Casablanca. An enjoyable read from front to back. On the other hand, my wife put the book down after page 10.

Pick it up and you can't put it down. Buck and Dolly Madison do it again, only bigger and better. William Penn's novels start out fast and then accelerate to full throttle. Interesting characters, global perspectives and written with Ian Fleming flair. Outstanding!

The Panama Conspiracy combines a racy action story with authentic history about one of America's not finest hours.

Turn the first page and enter the Politically Correct-free zone. William Penn deals with world issues in a manner too bold for the pusillanimous Media. A truly fine yarn of international intrigue and warfare conducted between the forces of good and evil . . . too bad some of the evil is imbedded within our own society.

I lived in Panama for 17 years and have written 3 books on Panama. How how I wish I had this beautifully spectacular book years ago. What an inspiraton it would have been during those dreary hours of writer's block. Each of these magnificient pictures are indeed worth a thousand words -- and there are so many pictures in this book! The United States "helped" Panama separate from Colombia in 1903, the following year the great task, which had defeated the French, of building an interoceanic canal began. It would take a full and painful 10 years. The rare photographs in this book document those years. How wonderful that they have been saved and are now offered to another generation!

Wealth of information! This book eloquently navigates through Panama's Canal history; merging dynamic cultural and socio-political elements that contributed to this technological marvel. As a lifetime resident of the Canal Zone I taught I knew the definitive version of the Canals creation, however these photographs of the mundane to the sublime still concedes a wealth of information.

After reading this I searched out and read the three other books by the same author.

This was a really exciting narrative. David really knows how to tell a story, just enough detail to keep you in the real world, not so much as to slow down the story. In particular, I liked the history behind malaria and its cure, this could have been a book by itself. Did you know they used to place hospital bedposts in buckets of water to keep bugs off the patients? The buckets of clean water proved to be a perfect breeding place for mosquitoes. My next most favorite book by McCollough was on the Brooklyn Bridge. Try it also.

These two books are on my most recommended list, great examples of how serious history can be fun and interesting.

Noriega -- what a scourage on a hapless little country about to
become truly independent. How did it happen? Why did he reign so long? What went wrong and why? Panama has long been ruled by its "fifty families" but it never had a harsh dictator. How then did the complex, cruel and vindictive Noriega seize and retain such absolute power?

Professor Murillo's careful documented slice of reality provides useful answers. His vivid and accurate rendering presents a very bizarre and tragic story. As usual "the little people" paid with blood and suffering for events beyound their control. We should all ponder how drugs, mis-guided politics and lack of decisive leadership inevitably leads to corruption and suffering.

Have we learned our lesson? Probably not. We could were we to study and heed the lessons in this carefully written and accurate book.

I had the opportunity to read this book while I was in Panama last year and it's worth reading each of the 900+ pages. This book gives a very detailed and unbiased account of what has transpired in Panama for the last 90+ years since gaining their independce from Colombia, with special emphasis on the 21-year military government and the U.S. reaction (or lack there of) to Panama's situation.

It gives a very detailed account on the lives and roles of key players in the military government and sheds some light on a lot of things that were happening that were previously unknown by the general public. I would recommend this book to anyone that is eager to learn the truth about what really happened down there.

This book touches on the history of the United States Government's influence and control of the drug trade in the Americas. Truly honest people must read this book! This is a literary work that touches on critical issues of drugs in the United States and how the US government uses the media to manipulate it's citizens and the world.

If you are interested in the rural poor of Latin America, or have anything to do with Panama and improvement projects here, this is the bible. I have been in areas like the ones the author describes in her book, and even as a Panamanian, I was appalled to see how poor the poor can be. Evertyhing Rudolf said is true. Even so, the humanity she portrays in the lives of her characters, prevent them from being caricatures. They are real people, living their lives.

Rudolf gives us a unique look at the forgotten voices of Panamanian politics, society and culture. In the 1980s, we were led to believe that somehow, someway Panamanians were not well-suited for democracy. In Panama's Poor, we learn that the weak and poor of Panama have been struggling for a voice for countless years. When much of the writing on Panama focuses on the United States, the Canal and the elite in Panama City, Rudolf opens our eyes to what we should really be looking at: the authentic Panamanain.

The community of Loma Bonita comes to life for the reader and we begin to understand how the rural poor live in Panama, who they are, and the forms of human agency they have. Rudolf has an informed view, after spending more than twenty years interacting with the community of Loma Bonita. Highly recommended.

The author deserves great praise for a very well written account on a subject often ignored by historians. The people of Sindh have been excellent traders for a few thousand years and the author has done well to describe the development of 2 Sindhi networks developed in the past couple hundred years.

I'd highly recommend this book (and not only because it covers the history of my ancestors).

sb

BY LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

The Global World of the Indian Merchant 1750-1947: Traders of sind from bukhara to panama

By Claude Markovits, Cambridge, Price not mentioned

This is a book many of us have been waiting for. Periodic pronouncements have been made about the resilience and prescience of the Asian trader operating within and against the writ of the colonial economy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Along with these, the long debate on the world economy has sustained a level of interest and enquiry about the dynamics of non-European commercial activity in widely dispersed areas of the globe. Serious gaps and doubts have, however, remained and we are often left wondering, "Whose world economy was it anyway?" Was Asian enterprise a tedious aggregate of small, but countless, transactions indulged in by the colonial state with its own calculations and compulsions.

On the other hand, the visibility and movement of Indian merchant groups in the emerging global economy since the 19th century have invested the Asian experience with a certain significance, which, in turn, warrants a closer examination of the process, its antecedents and its projections. Claude Markovits's study attempts precisely to do all this and more, with the result that we have a narrative that is rich in detail, sensitive to the play of historical configurations and supported by a theoretical framework that is balanced and not overly ambitious. He focuses on two communities - the Shikarpuris and the Sindworkis, and through them proceeds to weave a story of dispersal and circulation, rather than that of a unitary diaspora with overarching Indian connotations.

Markovits argues that south Asian merchant movements were essentially temporary migrations and that the settlements, when these did occur, were largely involuntary. Nor did these correspond to any unitary category of caste, territory or religion and were in every sense the outgrowths of regional compulsions and local realities. The experience of the two communities chosen by Markovits, the Shikarpuris and Sindworkis, illustrates the juxtaposition of local processes with that of the global economy, where the activities of merchant groups took on a fuller meaning.

Obviously, such an approach is admissible when dealing with the operation of a colonial economy and not that of a national one, and it is no coincidence that the study should stop at 1947. Within this framework of local and global history, Markovits teases out a fascinating story of the merchant networks of Sind region, that has suffered an overdose of orientalizing descriptions. He also traces their emergence in the context of 18th century transition politics and their expansion in the high noon of British imperialism and Russian centralization. There is also the story of their spatial advance from Bukhara to Panama. The relocation of the south Asian merchant networks in the world economy in the 18th century is a well-established fact, even if its implications are not so well drawn out. The 18th century, in particular, is seen to have constituted a turning point in the positioning of the Asian merchants who suffered major reverses and in the process facilitated the marginalization of Asia in the newly emerging world economy centred firmly in Europe. The process of relocation was not coeval with that of decline and dislocation, and according to Markovits, it was marked by sharp regional and sub-regional variations.

Additionally, the establishment and workings of the colonial economy reared a sub-stratum of commercial functions and operations that were deftly handled and taken over by enterprising indigenous groups. It is within this context that Markovits positions his communities. He argues that far from operating in a residual space left open by the colonial dispensation, these merchant networks adapted successfully to a trading world dominated by European capital through a complex process of collaboration and conflict. The Shikarpuri and Sindworki networks developed under very different circumstances. The surge in Indo-Central Asian trade from the 1840s enabled the Shikarpuris to rework an existing network of caravan commerce and credit transactions under the dispensation of the Uzbeg khanates of central Asia. Meanwhile, the Sindworkis regrouped under the British dispensation and took advantage of the extension of the colonial economy from Bombay into Sind to operate a trade of truly global proportions. The Shikarpuri network was forced out of its base in Sind by changes that followed in the wake of colonial subjugation and changing configurations of commercial exchange. They exploited their old connections with central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan to emerge as principal moneylenders and traders, especially in the khanate of Bukhara. The details of the network have been deduced from a mass of legal material that the Russian authorities felt compelled to share with the British government in the eventuality of any death-related succession dispute involving a British Indian subject. One of the most striking features of the network to emerge from this legal discourse is the working of Shikarpuri panchayats in most localities of central Asia. The Sindworkis, on the other hand, were very much part of the colonial economy and began as modest peddlers of native crafts to a European clientele. This venture expanded substantially to include, in subsequent years, a wide range of curios that found their way into the European markets. Their initiative and intrepidity were quite remarkable. Consider the trader who protested against Australian immigration restrictions and flashed his credentials as a trader of repute who bought and sold exotic goods besides carving the occasional tortoise shell or setting a piece in jade. Curios became doubly important as the tourist traffic caught the fancy of European visitors, enabling a massive expansion of Sindhi enterprise on both sides of the Suez that soon turned to trade in textiles and financial speculation.

In all, this is a fascinating story of commercial dynamism. What makes the story even more fascinating is the exploration of the proclivity to spatial and social mobility among the networks. Caste did not play a central role in forging solidarities. The affinity seemed very much to lie with the region and with the ability to travel extensively and, in the process, ensure a circulation of skills and entrepreneurial labour.

Circulation however, remained confined to males, very rarely did wives accompany their partners. The absence of female company did not, however, deflect the passion for riches as merchants alternated between celibacy and permissiveness to balance the sexual economy of circulation.

This book is several books in one. In addition to his varied personal experiences on the road, it includes some well researched history of the countries he visits, both ancient and contemporary. He talks about the big people in history, like Cortes, Clinton, Subcomandante Marcos, Leon Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Manuel Noriega. He then gives equal attention to the little people he meets along the way, like the Mexican museum curator whose family had been guarding an ancient relic for several generations. He even travels to Paul Gauguin's house with a Playboy Bunny he met in a youth hostel. But he also engrosses the reader with his thoughts about his personal life, most interestingly, his romance with a Nicaraguan girl. Hurricane Mitch, which strikes when he is Guatemala and devastates the region, adds a sinister backdrop to his odd holiday, but in the end he achieves his goals despite numerous setbacks. It is a little bit like a collection of short stories, since it is written in diary form, so each day represents a new thought, and a new mini adventure. The stories about the crocodile and the monkey I almost wouldn't have believed except that he included photos in the book. I especially liked his description of his climbing of the volcano... and was left feeling it is much more enjoyable - and safer - to read his description of it than to attempt such a feat in real life.

Some years past, a colleague suggested a year of travel instead of my intended return to school. It took thirty years to fulfill that suggestion. David Short didn't require any more prompting than a dull, dirty and dangerous job. His destination, prompted by a world-traveling grandfather, became Central America, specifically, the Panama Canal. The journey lasted just short of six months and resulted in this account of his adventures. A spirited read, An Odd Odyssey should inspire anyone of nearly any age to pull up stakes at least once in a lifetime and venture somewhere distant. Short's account shows how richly rewarding travel can be to those willing to make the effort.

There are two kinds of travel books - the "guidebook" with sights, prices, accommodation ideally suited for those seeking comfort instead of adventure. Glossy photos, usually portraying conditions found on movie sets, detailed maps, prices listed. The other type is the personal journal, which, properly done, imparts a far better sense of "being there" than does the guidebook. Short's chronicle is the second type, a vivid sharing of his thoughts, experiences, disasters, even love. The means of travel was by bus. Just finding one was fraught with hazards - timing, crowding or even just running. Once boarded, there was the issue of finding the proper seat: "Sit in the rear. Bandits will shoot through the front window." On a limited budget the "guidebook" hotels were out of the question for Short. Many havens he found for a night's rest became adventures in their own right. Weather, ever a primary topic for travellers, added its own quirks - a major Caribbean hurricane being the most spectacular.

These minor discomforts aside, Short's recital of his travels points up the many benefits of journeying solo. One of these is that you don't remain alone for long. Not every acquaintance is a welcome companion, but none are dull. They bring their lives into his view, and to ours. Short meets former convicts, travellers from Europe, Canada and Australia. Not limiting himself to fellow "gringos" he deals well with the local residents. Although a few are not as friendly as he - he's robbed twice and has the usual tangles with bureaucrats, cheating taxi drivers and sullen hoteliers. Still, he maintains his equanimity, exhibiting strength in adverse circumstances. In this modern age he can turn to internet cafes, at one point spending more on email and 'net surfing than on accommodation and food.

Short is a learner, eager to know the current and historical conditions of the lands he visits. Teotihuacan, Tikal and the world's largest stone sphere. His account leads you along with him in fine descriptive prose. He shares his learning without becoming pedantic or opinionated. His judgments result of thoughtful assessment and it's easy to agree with them. The book becomes not only the tale of his journey, but a guidebook without gloss or sham. By the end of it, we envy his adventures and his ability to relate them. It's hard not to embark on a similar jaunt with the aim of duplicating his effort for your chosen locale.

excelent book Tom and Nancy,proffesional piece of art.Finally i found you Tom,im your old buddy from naval academy in Gdynia,contact me pls.Chris kowalski E-mail-kowal17@hotmail.com

I am the author of Lonely Planet's guide to Panama. While conducting research for LP Panama I came across this incredible work by Nancy Schwalbe Zydler and Tom Zydler. Their attention to detail is remarkable. The history and description they provide is right on and well put. Much of the information that appears on the islands they comment upon you won't find anywhere else. For cruising sailors and Panama buffs alike, The Panama Guide is an excellent read and a vast source of knowledge. My hat's off to both of you Zydlers for a job extremely well done.

Bill Boyd does his homework. "Panama; An Historial Novel," is a wonderful work of fiction filled with valuable nuggets of history. Still and all, the author does a splendid job a capturing the "zeitgeist" of this vibrant era that was spurred by a brash young president enamored with "Manifest Destiny."

This is a book that is hard to put down. Most avid readers will go cover to cover in 48 hours. Boyd's masterful command of dialogue keeps the plot moving at a brisk pace. Moreover, Boyd is a polished writer who constructs a powerful protagonist who shines in moments of conflict.

This book is much more than a swashbuckling account of a dynamic moment in American history. Boyd is a deep writer and nurtures a strong understanding of a young nation boldly storming onto the world stage as a global superpower.

This book is full of a history which I was not aware of and is most informative about the way the United States became the builder of the Panama Canal and of how, in the end, we had to give up this great engineering feat. Moreover, being a novel, it is very fast reading. It moves rapidly and intelligently and is, in my opinion, an easy way to learn history.

In the first three books of the series, Nancy Bartholomew introduced us to Sierra Lavotini, the headliner of the Tiffany's Gentleman's Club in Panama City. Sierra is book smart, loyal and no nonsense. She controls her boss, Vincent Gambuzzo, by hinting to her (non-existent) familial connections to a New Jersey Mafia boss known as 'Big Moose' Lavotini. Ms. Bartholomew's books are filled with funny situations, a great supporting cast and a nice, cozy mystery. The author never makes her characters demeaning or condescending but after writing those fun books the writer decides to get a bit serious this time.

It is December and Christmas is just around the corner. Vincent Gambuzzo has lost the club during a poker game and is then accused of killing one of the players. Sierra is exploring her relationship with Detective John Nailor wondering if she has finally found true love. She is unhappy with the club's new management after changing its name to Big Mike's House of Booty that she decides to stage a walkout with the other dancers. Just when everyone needs her to help Vincent and save the club she has to fly to her hometown of Philadelphia to deal with a family emergency. This event will demonstrate how strong Sierra can be with herself.

In STRIP POKER, Sierra Lavotini has matured as a character after her adventures in the previous three books. We get to appreciate how she interacts with her entire family throughout their personal crisis and see the love that they share with each other. With the sole exception of Sierra's kooky neighbor Raydean, the comedy in this book is not so strong but that is all right. We get to see a major change in Sierra's life at the end of the novel making us wish that the next novel comes out soon. I guess it is time to read Ms. Bartholomew's other two novels that introduces Maggie Reid. It should be good.

The Sierra Lavotini series is a must for anyone who has NO LIMIT when it comes to taking a GAMBLE on a well-written, smart and funny romantic suspense. Here's the DEAL: Sierra is an UNDERDOG amateur detective who happens to have a TOP PAIR, a real stacked DECK, and strips at a HOUSE with a GUNSHOT STRAIGHT when it comes to murder. Sierra, unlike the other exotic dancers, doesn't FOLD when it comes to solving the murders; she ANTES up, which RAISES the Panama City Police Department's frustration in solving the crime, especially a FIVE CARD STUD detective named John Nailor. I'm not BLUFFING when I say take the CHANCE on STRIP POKER; it's a SURE THING that you'll hit the JACK POT...the ODDS aren't against you.:)

We missed you! With the introduction of Sierra Lavotini, the readers of mysteries starring wonderfully human female sleuths have another series to wait impatiently for. In Strip Poker, Nancy Bartholomew has returned us to Sierra's world- complete with all the lovable characters, and not so lovable ones, we hope to meet again and again. Keep writing, and we'll keep reading!