A Rare Sense of Discovery

...The books are exceptional esthetic objects, sustaining Rodman's reputation as art buff and irritant, dauntless anti-abstractionist critic, and one-man army in defense of the "humanist" viewpoint...

...Rodman notes: "The tragic history of Spanish America was ready to be written, as it would be, through the five centuries to follow, in blood...

...He also suspected that Belaunde's undoing would be that terror of all Catholic countries, an uncontrolled population explosion, but the reader will not be surprised by the recent Army coup...

...As it happens, they have as much to do with what is usually called a travel book as Rizzoli's International Book Store on Fifth Avenue, in New York City, has to do with a subway newsstand...

...Indeed, these slowly accumulating volumes are beginning to constitute the best balanced store of general material on the history and intellectual life of countries Americans desperately need to know more about...

...So history does repeat itself, after a fashion...

...The remaining 50 per cent is an amalgam of personal accounts of visits to and opinions about local painters, politicians, washerwomen, sculptors, hotel-keepers, intellectuals, peasants and poets, interspersed with personal escapades, scenery, and reactions to red tape, pettifoggery and police...

...For the moderately cultivated who have struggled through John Gunther without receiving any real insight or penetration into an alien culture, or have wrestled with academic analyses or empty-headed travelogues without comprehending anything, Rodman's books translate this material into a language that can be understood...

...Rodman includes a devastating account of Gaullist economic and colonial policy, noting that even milk and newspapers have to be delivered from Paris under an unlimited centralism, the crippling French malady since Louis XIV...

...He quotes a Dominican lady as saying "two revolutions ago my son took a gun and went into politics...

...Is there at last a glimmer of hope, he wonders...

...5.95...

...Or there is the East Indian priest in Trinidad who offers to exhibit his crippled daughter at the back of the Hindu temple: "Very curious deformities...

...Finally, contrary to everyone else, Rodman sees something positive in Haiti...

...About 50 per cent of the text is devoted to a well-written, hard-headed, generally anti-Spanish, pro-Indian recital of history...

...Honduras is an extreme example, with 132 coups d'etat in 142 years and fantastic Maya ruins...

...Hispaniola was the first West Indian island whose inhabitants naively offered Columbus gold ornaments, thereby insuring their own enslavement and extinction within a generation...

...Curiosity seems to drive Rodman to find out why diverse movements work, do not work, or simply struggle...

...One day in 1937...

...He believes that the clue to this lies in culture, people, and their beliefs, rather than in dialectics...

...I want $400,000 of that in cash, here, before you leave the country...

...Many of Rodman's best insights come from scenes and dialogues, such as the strange momtnt in a foggy pool at the top of the Mayan hills around Guatemalan Fuentes Georginas where an old Indian woman appears clothed in gorgeous textiles, wreathed in Delphic smoke, and proclaims "absolutely forbidden to swim here without your underwear pants...

...If I had to choose which of these five I prefer, I should have to plump for this and The Caribbean...

...Some are full of unusual photographs...

...The dictator opened a pocket and said "Good...

...The latest volume in the series, The Caribbean, attempts to do as much as all the rest of these books, and considering the task, succeeds dazzlingly well...

...others contain superb drawings by Bill Negron...

...involvement in the country...

...three more are promised for next year: The Mexico Traveler, The C/ule Traveler and a South American roundup...

...Studies written since then do not evoke as Quisqueya does the people, places and historical forces in this corner of the Caribbean...

...Guatemala's colonial story is both vivid and terrible...

...It summarizes the history, poetry and people of 32 beautiful islands, embracing half a dozen cultures...

...At the time of the Dominican intervention four years ago, there was a great scurrying about in our State Department to discover any available history of this tortured half island (Columbus' Hispaniola...

...He sandbags the Jamaican commercial tourist industry at the same time that he deplores those sheeplike American torpor-bearers who, in pursuing the Hilton life, regard the local culture as a sort of nightclub act lived out for their amusement...

...There were three million of them, according to some accounts...

...THE ROAD TO PANAMA Hawthorn Books...

...The Road to Panama is an unremittingly delightful book...

...224 pp...

...border to Mexico City, then south through Yucatan, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama...

...Quisqueya was duly discovered and, by one of those ironies of modern life, became the Bible of the occupation forces despite its bitter criticism of past U.S...

...Its problems, he says, "are nearly terminal," but the Haitian people, conquered by life, have somehow conquered existence, and "the poets find in Haiti what sustains their hope in the human race...

...QUISQUEYA University of Washington...

...Rodman tried to interest Be-laiinde in making "The Royal Hunt of the Sun" a national pageant, but was staggered to find the liberal President an admirer of Pizarro...

...A Dominican pitcher stabbed his second baseman during a game for criticizing a pitch...

...202 pp...

...His books are deceptively engaging, informal, and opinionated—yet they were written by a man with no perceptible ideology except human feeling...

...Rodman gives an instance of a maid whose master butchered her with the carving knife from the dinner she was serving...

...They are also intensely personal books written by a man with a remarkably acute sense of politics, people, literature, and art who has an objective, unprejudiced mind —an unusual combination which indeed makes for a rare sense of discovery...

...Two earlier books covering the same general area, Haiti: The Black Republic and Mexican Journal, are still in print...

...In Puerto Rico he illuminates Ferre's recent victory with the Statehood party, wondering how American and Spanish culture can possibly meld...

...At a loss to understand why Guatemalans remain friendly to Americans, Rodman was told, "to Guatemalans 'the Colossus of the North' is Mexico...

...on Trujillo's orders, 30.000 Haitians who worked in the Dominican Republic were massacred...

...Or the Puerto Rican contractor who told Dominican Dictator Tru-jillo that he would make $800,000 rebuilding the local docks...

...It covers the route of a journey from the U.S...

...Both provide the first modern accounts of countries that have amazing stories to tell...

...By Selden Rodman Reviewed by ANDREW GLAZE Author, "Damned Ugly Children" If these were merely travel books, there would be little point in reviewing them here...

...The Peru Traveler traces one of the most interesting developments in the long struggle of mankind—that gorgeous panoramic history from Chavin civilization, through Pizar-ro's mad gamble, to Fernando Be-launde Terry...

...Along the way it marks such contemporary anachronisms as the American Le Tour-neau's jungle-flattening machines, ranches, and Baptist fervor of heroic missionaries who are destroying admirable Indian cultures...

...Rodman finds everywhere depressing politics, a fierce, joyous, gay, desperate life, and marvelous art and costume...

...The Peru Traveler and The Guatemala Traveler are more formally written...