Costa Rica: The Last Country The Gods Made (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Brass McLean (Author), Kimberly Parsons (Photographer) "The Costa Rican national seal gives a revealing, stylized view of the country..." (more)
Key Phrases: coffee barons, last country, coffee industry, Costa Rica, Don Pepe, Central American (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Illustrated with 62 photographs, this workmanlike overview covers Costa Rican geography, history, geology, politics and mores. Colesberry, a journalist, and technical writer McLean, both of whom are based in Los Angeles, have produced an uninspired text that, despite the book's lyrical subtitle, is unlikely to send readers to the nearest travel agency. Parsons, a San Francisco-based travel photographer, captures the country in shots characteristic of Caribbean travel brochures.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Explores diversity of the people, natural beauty and ecology, portraying its history and politics in compelling prose and vibrant photography." -- 2004 Overseas Adventure Travel—Twice Awarded Travel & Leisure Magazine’s Top 10 Tour & Safari Operators in the “World’s Best Awards.” oattravel.com

Not the usual picturebook fluff, liberally accented with notes on history and archeology. The result is more illumination than whitewash. -- Coleman Andrews, The Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1994

This spectacular book introduces readers to the authors' love affair with Costa Rica. -- Book Passage, April 28, 1994

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 152 pages
• Publisher: Globe Pequot Press (October 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560442514
• ISBN-13: 978-1560442516
• Product Dimensions: 11.4 x 8.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #776,154 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #16 in	Books > History > Americas > Central America > Costa Rica
  #97 in	Books > Travel > Latin America > Central America > Costa Rica

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It covers everything about the country and has gorgeous pics, December 9, 1997

By	"dtsteeler" (Valencia, CA United States) - See all my reviews

I bought this book last year after I came back from a trip to Costa Rica. I wish I had known about it beforehand! The writers are very passionate about everything Costa Rican from coffee to indigenous peoples, from ants to women's issues, from bananas to religion! My favorite chapter was "House Made of Rain", an exploration of the rain forest from the point of view of a bird--you'll never forget it! By the way, the book is a beautiful hardcover, not paperback.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars strange but exciting, February 19, 2004

By	G. Phelps "whitfieldhouse, currently in China" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When you see the cover, you know you're in for a MOST unusual book about a country about which 100 guide books have already been written. One sees an angel statue in a graveyard at dawn, or is it twilight? Is this Costa Rica or "have goth, will travel"? Well, maybe a little of both. The eccentricities of the two writers are on the front burner here with subjects like bats, nitrogen-fixing organisms, Arab-oil embargoes, human diseases, hydroelectricity, the Pan-American highway, trash-burning and communism. But maybe that's what makes these series of essays a good read, especially while one is traveling, because the 1-10 page segments stand on their own.

And the photos are equally "unique," shall we say-not what one would normally expect from a travel book. Once you get past the beautiful inappropriateness of the cover picture, the reader is further challenged by artsy, gorgeous photos that seem to stand alone from the text. Fruit still-lifes, rodeo-cowboys, father and son mechanics on a lunch break, cattle herders, city street musicians, a sunlit pathway through a rainforest; all these random images "float" through the text without a care for relevance!

However, having said that, somehow it works. The book as a whole, pictures plus words, truly gives one a "feeling" for Costa Rican life as it is really lived. That's the best way I can describe this strange but exciting book. It makes you feel because it makes you understand. I can't recommend it highly enough.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A spiritual geography......, October 29, 2004

By	world traveler (California) - See all my reviews

This book evokes the country of Costa Rica and it's influence on its peoples by describing the harsh, desolate, yet sublime landscape that embodies the contradictions of Costa Rican life within it's borders and in it's geo-political stature in Central America.

As dry-wiited as it is information soaked, this book gives the traveler a place to begin in the land that never seems to be what the traveler expects. "The Last Country the Gods Made" is a contemplative book, a book of essays that creates a spiritual geography, explains the eccentricity of archeology and throws light on the urgency of visionary politics.

This masterful synthesis is a refreshingly unconventional analysis informed by anthopology, migratory science, architecture, environmentalism, epistemology and political minutiae. There is wonderful mini-essay that the authors' call a "sidebar" entitled, "Why No Empire." In it, Colesberry and McLean address the mystery of why the native people of Costa Rica, though amazingly organized, greatly populated and artistically skilled, never formed any urban centers like the Aztec and Mayan empires. Suffice to say, that they pose an utterly unique solution involving Egypt, mideval French wheat farmers, and Vasquez de Coronado's observations of buzzards!

They end this delightful foray with, "...perhaps the local Amerindians had no use for urban zones or concentrations of power that would have placed them in the ranks of advanced societies. If urbanity is the litmus test for civilizations, consider this: in the Diquis area, the leaders lived with not the warriors as one might imagine, but with the artists. How urbane can you get?"

I'd like to say one more thing. The Search Inside the Book pages that Amazon shows you in no way represent the book's text! The pages you can read are just the introduction written by the publisher! It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't present the meat of this lovely text, since the writing is particularly accomplished.