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The new, sixth and thoroughly updated edition of Bradt’s Latvia remains the only standalone guide to this fascinating and ever-changing Baltic nation. This is a small but enchantingly varied country that will appeal to culture vultures, history buffs, outdoors enthusiasts and foodies alike. Latvia is best known internationally through its capital city Riga, whose centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site combining a medieval core providing testimony of its importance as a port of the Hanseatic League and an outer area containing the most extensive assemblage of Art Nouveau buildings in Europe. Latvia is much larger than Denmark or Switzerland yet, with a population of under two million, is one of the most verdant countries in Europe. A low-lying landscape of forests, lakes and marshes offers an increasing range of rural tourism options facilitated by recent EU infrastructural investments. Why not go hiking or kayaking in Gauja National Park, go cycling or explore Latgale’s lakes? In summer, Latvia’s Baltic Sea coast comes into its own: almost 500km long, much comprising pristine sandy beaches backed by dunes. Seaside options range from cosmopolitan Jurmala, once a favoured holiday destination of the Soviet elite, to out of the way idyllic spots the visitor will have to themselves. Latvia’s complex history results in tourist attractions ranging from medieval castles to the Baroque splendour of Rundale Palace, and from Daugavpils’s Mark Rothko arts centre to a once-secret Soviet nuclear bunker. Latvian culture and identity reaches peak expression in the five-yearly Song and Dance Festival, involving forty thousand performers. If you can’t wait for that, why not uncover Latvia’s pagan roots, including the mystical stones of the Pokaini Forest, or relax in a combination of traditional saunas and modern spas. For something completely different, you could even visit Karosta former military prison, where the intrepid can book a night in a cell, sleeping on an iron bunk. Balancing coverage of the country’s cultural attractions with guidance on where and how to enjoy its natural environment, Bradt’s Latvia is the perfect guidebook to inform and inspire your visit.
Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.
Vividly told and richly illustrated with more than 160 photos, this fascinating history of the cultural, religious, fraternal, economic, and everyday life of Chicago's Jews brings to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape today's Jewish communities. 15 maps. Graphs & tables.
This book analyzes the political experience of a small and unique American ethnic group-American Latvians. This community was constituted by post-World War II political refugees, who fled Communism and arrived in the United States seeking safety and protection. For decades, they insisted on preserving their ethnic identity and therefore did not call themselves Latvian Americans. Instead, they formed a distinctive double identity, that is, they blended into the American society economically and socially, but refused to become assimilated culturally and politically. The book offers a detailed look into the life of this community of political refugees, which also provides a novel perspective on the Cold War as experienced by certain ethnic groups. From a theoretical point of view, the book makes two major contributions. First, it reasserts the need to understand the generalized category of "white Americans" or "white ethnics" with more nuance and attention to differences, and, second, it strengthens the so-called realist claim that refugees are not like other immigrants. In order to achieve these goals, the book provides compelling descriptions and interpretations of the most politically relevant moments in the experience of American Latvians in the period between the 1950s and the 1990s. Concretely, the book deals with topics as the American Latvians' anti-communist activism, the impact of the hunt for Nazis on Latvian emigres, the Soviet Union's anti-emigre propaganda campaigns and the exiled Latvians' involvement in the politics of national liberation in Latvia. The author strives to reveal the complexity of the refugee experience in the United States during the Cold War and its aftermath. Since such aspects of the life of ethnic groups in the United States have not been sufficiently studied, this book makes a substantial contribution to a fuller understanding of American immigration history and sociology of ethnic groups. It is well written, expertly organized, and will be of interest to a large readership at many levels of academia.
Follow the ultimate coffee geeks on their worldwide hunt for the best beans. Can a cup of coffee reveal the face of God? Can it become the holy grail of modern-day knights errant who brave hardship and peril in a relentless quest for perfection? Can it change the world? These questions are not rhetorical. When highly prized coffee beans sell at auction for $50, $100, or $150 a pound wholesale (and potentially twice that at retail), anything can happen. In God in a Cup, journalist and late-blooming adventurer Michaele Weissman treks into an exotic and paradoxical realm of specialty coffee where the successful traveler must be part passionate coffee connoisseur, part ambitious entrepreneur, part activist, and part Indiana Jones. Her guides on the journey are the nation’s most heralded coffee business hotshots: Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts, and Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson. With their obsessive standards and fiercely competitive baristas, these roasters are creating a new culture of coffee connoisseurship in America—a culture in which $10 lattes are both a purist’s pleasure and a way to improve the lives of third-world farmers. If you love a good cup of coffee—or a great adventure story—you’ll love this unprecedented up-close look at the people and passions behind today’s best beans. “Weissman illustrates how the origin, flavor compounds and socioeconomic impact of a cup of coffee are relevant now more than ever. . . . Tagging along behind the main characters in today’s specialty coffee scene, [she] travels from the exotic to the expected to artfully deconstruct the connoisseur’s cup of coffee.” —Publishers Weekly