Never before have I read a more well researched, well written, or more complete text on this essential event in our nation's history. The author is to be lauded for this truly amazing and inspiring work. I only wish i could meet the man himself.

The Philippines, a U.S. neocolony, has now captured the world's attention as the second front in the "war against terrorism" after Afghanistan. In this milieu of intensified global crisis and emergency, Cultural Studies must shift its attention to the hinterlands of Empire and enter/sustain dialogue with the many worldwide who, because they are deeply concerned with peace, genuine democracy, and social justice, are taking a firm stand to challenge the brutality of U.S. imperial hegemony. In 1898 the Philippines (from which E. San Juan, Jr. hails) was violently colonized by the United States; it shares this history with Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and Hawai'i. Currently, the Abu Sayaaf-- a counterinsurgency tool created by the CIA and the Armed Forces of the Philippines-- is used to justify the presence of thousands of U.S. troops dominating the Philippines. Recently, Sec. Colin Powell declared the major progressive insurgency groups, the peasant-based New People's Army and the Communist Party of the Philippines, part of the coalition called the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, as terrorist groups.

E. San Juan, Jr., one of our most important and prolific Filipino cultural theorists and a major critic of Establishment postcolonial discipline, offers a crucial intervention for our times. In BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (1998), San Juan argues that the progressive insurgent forces of the Philippine National Democratic mass movement play a vital part of the "postcolonial" subaltern resistance, but have been muted and silenced by post-al studies. San Juan's latest RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke UP, 2002) expands this critique in fresh, innovative ways that speak directly to our current collective desire for liberation and freedom for all.

Boldly pushing against the historical limitations of fashionable theoretical trends of the academy, San Juan urgently asks us to reclaim the various rich and dynamic Marxist traditions (both Western and Third World Marxisms) of theorizing the connection between culture/knowledge production and the struggle for radical social transformation (the twin task of ideological and material struggle). In RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (RCS), San Juan offers a rigorous historical materialist method of regrounding the dominant "new times=new politics" model of contemporary Cultural Studies. Thus, with San Juan's alternative methodology we shift from reified notions of difference to a dialectical regrounding in which difference is conceived as, in the words of Red Feminist Teresa Ebert, "difference within a material system of exploitation" (see her LUDIC FEMINISM for an excellent critique of post-al difference). This shifting of grounds enables San Juan to bring to the fore the importance of analyzing the complex ways in which difference-- race, gender, sexuality-- is historically produced and reproduced. A leitmotif of this book, to be sure, is the advancement of Marx's challenge to idealism. It is not enough to interpret the world. We must collectively and creatively struggle for a radically transformed society in which difference will no longer be produced by a racialized and gendered division of labor (exploitative social relations of production). Instead, genuine differences will emerge: so that each can live "according to his/her needs and abilities."

In this process of regrounding, San Juan acknowledges that we do, indeed, live in "new" times, but this "new-ness" must be contextualized properly (recall Jameson's mantra: "historicize, historicize, historicize"). San Juan asserts: "New post-Cold War realignments compel us to return to a historical-materialist analysis of political economy and its overdeterminations in order to grasp the new racial politics of transnationality and multiculturalism" (42). One of the central goals of this book is to confront the insidious ways in which racism, which established the foundation of the U.S. nation-state as a "racial-socioeconomic formation," functions as an international political force that is gendered, sexualized, and "naturalized" through U.S. nationalism. The focus on race and its dialectical connection to class resonates with other recent publications, such as Mark Solomon's THE CRY WAS UNITY: COMMUNISTS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS, 1917-1936 (1998). There Solomon asserts that "Capitalism's cornerstone was' laid by slavery and fortified by racism."

Far from advocating a return to economically deterministic, vulgar Marxism, San Juan provides a breathtaking inventory and synthesis of various figures from both Western and Third World Marxist traditions-- running the gamut from Antonio Gramsci to Frantz Fanon-- that provide examples of how to dialectically challenge current post-al temptations of abstracting civil society from the state, culturalizing hegemony, divorcing nation from class, and conflating the nationalism of oppressed neocolonial nation-states with the nationalisms of oppressor nation-states. The extended afterword focuses on the Philippine movement for genuine national sovereignty in relation to the Filipino Diaspora in a way that concretizes the dialectical method of global cognitive mapping proposed throughout the book.

An interdisciplinary tour de force, RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES offers timely critiques and suggestions for advancing a unique "methodology of the oppressed" that may, for the moment, seem submerged or repressed in the industrialized global North, but is, as I write, being tested and refined in the overexploited global South where the wretched of the earth have been proclaiming through protracted organized mass struggle (based on a worker-peasant alliance) that "another world is possible." In the so-called "Third World," subalterns have uttered this expression long before it became the clarion call of the young and courageous anti-globalization movement in the North.

I urge all of us to engage San Juan's latest book-- to learn from his lessons in dialectical analysis and his suggestions for creating strategies for cognitive mapping, to listen to his impassioned appeal to activists, insurgent intellectuals (both organic and academic), and all democratic minded people to critique the central roles that racism and U.S. nationalism play in the ways in which global capitalism wrecks havoc on the daily lives of millions all over the world. After a careful reading of this book, one will appreciate its ability to sustain in new and imaginative ways a politics of hope in these perilous times-- an intervention that can, to quote Raymond Williams, "make hope practical, rather than despair convincing" (quoted in RCS, 313).

James Aton and Robert McPherson successfully collaborate to present a succinct environmental history of the Lower San Juan river in River Flowing From The Sunrise. Profusely illustrated throughout with period photos, this seminal survey ranges from the Clovis Hunters and Corn Farmers of prehistory, to views of the region as "sacred land" by Navajos, Paiutes, and Utes. River Flowing From The Sunrise presents a fascinating and informative history of exploration and geological science defining the river; and presents chapters dedicated to livestock, agriculture, city building, mining, the impact of the federal government with dams and river wildlife; and the role of local and national values with respect to the San Juan's symbolisms and realities. River Flowing From The Sunrise concludes with a superb epilogue "Visions: Flowing from the Sunrise or a Water Spigot?". The highly recommended, accessible, reader friendly text is enhanced with notes, a bibliography, and an index. River Flowing From The Sunrise could well serve as a template for similar environmental histories of other major and minor rivers elsewhere in the country.

Keep this book at the top of your pack. All the information is concise and up date. Even though this book is published in '95 the best places are still there. We refered to it during both our trips and found it a must have. Please have these guys get out to our next destination. They saved us stress and time from where to by dinner to where to sleep they covered it all.

Texas history buffs will no doubt want to read Robert Weddles's interesting book on the famous San Juan Mission, located at the present day site of Guerrero in Coahuila, Mexico. In the seventeenth century, the Spanish forts in this part of North America were of vast importance to the colonization of Texas and beyond. This book is a valuable chronicle of the religious, military, colonial, and commercial expeditions that passed through San Juan and the Spanish borderlands. It won the Texas Institute of Letters' Amon G. Carter Southwest history award in 1969.

If you are going to fish The San Juan River you need this book. Heck for ... with shipping even if the book was bad it couldn't hurt but this book is really great. Shows maps of all the great spots and lots of local tips. I have used one other of the author's books and got "hooked" on their simplicity and usefulness.

Organized approach to life, poetry and prose tracing the spiritual journey made by St. John. Life details are summarized into a chronology. The original Spanish and English translation of famous poems such as "Dark Night" are included. The prose focuses on the Saint's explaination of the poems and omits portions written to address the Inquisition.

Until the railroads were built the only form of transport in California was the stagecoach or the steamer. Stagecoaching On The California Coast examines the coastal stagecoach route and those companies which operated along the route, considering the stagecoach experience, the establishments which evolved along the route, and the modern route today.

This was very much the first anthology that specifically addressed contemporary grass-roots orientated social movements of the Asian Pacific Islander American community. The essays are diverse and useful, allowing the reader a full picture of the issues that the APIA community have organized around. Glen Omatsu's essay is astounding clear, concise, and his ability to "tell it like it" is gives readers a true sense of what community-orientated leaders have to say. Not only does this anthology address struggles with other communities but also within the diverse APIA community itself. In a nut-shell, this anthology puts it all together.

The authors reexamine the "Hero of San Juan Hill" to find that the heroic legend was manufactured, partly by Roosevelt himself, partly by the powerful newspaper correspondents he courted, and, perhaps surprisingly, supported by the Rough Riders themselves. That Roosevelt didn't mind risking their lives in his political ambition didn't seem to bother them overmuch - they were, after all, alive and victorious, and shared the prevailing military ethos of those innocent pre-Passchendaele days, when "glory" was counted as a real and achievable goal.
The story is well told here in this well-researched and readable work, with admirable maps by Texas A&M's own Cartographic Unit. Highly recommended for the general reader of military history and Roosevelt fans, as well as others who would like to see the birth of "spin".

The "score" rating is an unwelcome feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.