Kirjahaku

This memoir of a young gringo's assimilation into the exotic street life of a bustling port on Mexico's Sea of Cortez is an eye-opening account of the area's working-class life. After months of anthropological field work in late 1960s Ecuador, David Stuart returns to Guaymas with broken bones and a broken heart, finding comfort in the cafes and night spots along the waterfront. There he reveals his failings to people whose lingua franca is the simple wisdom of listening and understanding. The loyal barmen and taxi drivers adopt him into their tight-knit circle, helping him ride out the devastation of betrayal by a woman who is carrying another man's child. Dubbed El Guero (Whitey) on the street, Stuart drifts into 'la movida', the Mexican world of hustlers, politicians, police officials, businessmen, and street urchins. In a 1970 Mexico, where a $500 bribe and a two-year wait 'might' get you a telephone, he needs help. A headstrong shoeshine girl, Lupita, becomes his 'mandadera' (messenger) and then his confidante and junior business partner, working her magic by bribing customs officials and making deals for tires, fans, blenders, and other 'fayuca' (contraband). A scrawny eleven-year-old, she is not just street-brilliant but complicated and utterly fascinating. This vivid, haunting portrait of a world many Americans have visited but few understand, is a unique examination of what Mexico means to one American and what America means to the everyday Mexican people who surround and protect him.

Over twenty-five years ago, David Stuart began writing award-winning newspaper articles on regional archeology that appealed to general readers. These columns shared interesting, and usually little-known, facts and stories about the ancient people and places of the Southwest. By 1985, Stuart had penned enough columns to fill a book, ""Glimpses of the Ancient Southwest"", which has been unavailable for years. Now he has rewritten most of his original articles to include recently discovered information about Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, and Mesa Verde. Stuart's unusual perspective focuses on both the past and the present: 'Want to know why gasoline now costs $4.00 a gallon, and is headed higher, yet we have no instant solution? Chacoan, Roman, even Egyptian archeology all provide elemental answers'. ""The Ancient Southwest"" shares those with us.

Fresh out of college, David Stuart put off graduate school to take a job close to his West Virginia home as a counselor at the Youth Development Center at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Known locally as the Morganza, the facility was founded in the nineteenth century as a farm for orphaned boys. By the 1960s, the Morganza had long been burdened with a sinister reputation when it was converted into a detention center for Allegheny County youth convicted of crimes ranging from petty theft to armed robbery, rape, and murder. Reporting for duty during the racially turbulent and riot-torn summer of 1967, Stuart describes the life of students and staff in what was, in reality, a youth prison camp. Confronted with the glaring shortcomings of the reform school's methods of rehabilitation, Stuart irritated the bureaucracy, advocating for detainees whose only crimes were a lack of education and belonging to the wrong race or economic class. He confronted an establishment that refused to distinguish between hardened criminals and those who would benefit from actual reform. In the ""Morganza, 1967"" Stuart offers a brutally honest - at times touching - insider's view of a juvenile justice system that was badly in need of fixing.

At the height of their power in the late eleventh century, the Chaco Anasazi dominated a territory in the American Southwest larger than any European principality of the time. Developed over the course of centuries and thriving for over two hundred years, the Chacoans’ society collapsed dramatically in the twelfth century in a mere forty years.David E. Stuart incorporates extensive new research findings through ground breaking archaeology to explore the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi and how it parallels patterns throughout modern societies in this new edition. Adding new research findings on caloric flows in prehistoric times and investigating the evolutionary dynamics induced by these forces as well as exploring the consequences of an increasingly detached central Chacoan decision-making structure, Stuart argues that Chaco’s failure was a failure to adapt to the consequences of rapid growth—including problems with the misuse of farmland, malnutrition, loss of community, and inability to deal with climatic catastrophe.Have modern societies learned from the experience and fate of the Chaco Anasazi, or are we risking a similar cultural collapse?