Mountains More Ancient

It is 1751, and nine-year-old Wulan finds herself half a world away from her home in Java: torn from her adored grandparents, her chattering cousins, the sounds and smells of the landscape that she loves. She and her father, Parto, are enslaved on a Cape Colony farmstead, with little hope of returning home. In this new world they hold fast to their Javanese identity and beliefs while, through their shared suffering, they forge bonds with the multicultural community whose descendants would come to be known as the Cape Malays. “Isna Marifa has extended the geographical and emotional reach of the modern Indonesian novel. The result is an original and captivating story that has launched the career of a new and promising literary voice.” A visit to South Africa led to Isna Marifa’s commitment to telling the story of the Javanese who were taken to South Africa in the colonial era. Her début, Mountains More Ancient, is the first novel to focus on the Indonesian experience of slavery in South Africa, illuminating this history of unfreedom through a timeless story of love, loss, and longing.

T his is the forth book by William White and deals with treasure hunting lore and the a ctual treasure hunters who still walk the upper reaches of the fabled Caballo Mountains. This will be the last book dedicated exclusively to this Mountain Range. There will be other stories no doubt, but not enough to fill a complete volume with. William is a treasure hunter first, and a writer second, and because of this, most of his stories come from actual treasure hunting experiences. This book was designed to finish off most of the untold stories that abound here. It would be pure conceit to assert that all the treasure stories about the Caballo Mountains are now committed to print. This is simply not true and William would agree that these tales represent only those stories that he is aware of. His style of writing is both entertaining and informative in such a manner that one could easily relate to his experiences. This is another book that will be difficult to put down once one has started reading it. William is humbled by the fact that so many people enjoy reading his books and says that it fuels the fires of creative energy that causes him to continue his work. The reader will find this an honest book with no punches pulled for the sake of someone’s feelings. It is uniquely William White and I can almost hear him telling the stories as I read them in print.

Mountains have captured the interests and passions of people for thousands of years. Today, millions of people live within mountain regions, and mountain regions are often areas of accelerated environmental change. This edited volume highlights new understanding of mountain environments and mountain peoples around the world. The understanding of mountain environments and peoples has been a focus of individual researchers for centuries; more recently the interest in mountain regions among researchers has been growing rapidly. The articles contained within are from a wide spectrum of researchers from different parts of the world who address physical, political, theoretical, social, empirical, environmental, methodological, and economic issues focused on the geography of mountains and their inhabitants. The articles in this special issue are organized into three themed sections with very loose boundaries between themes: (1) physical dynamics of mountain environments, (2) coupled human–physical dynamics, and (3) sociocultural dynamics in mountain regions. This book was first published as a special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.