Books by Ambassador Odeen Ishmael

About the Author
Born in Guyana, Dr. Odeen Ishmael served as a teacher both in Guyana and The Bahamas for almost three decades. He has been a premier writer on the problems and perspectives of education in Guyana and the Caribbean and, since 1970, his writings on this subject have been published in newspapers and journals in Guyana, the Caribbean and North America. He has also researched and published expensively on issues of Guyana's political history.

Before publishing "Amerindian Legends of Guyana", he wrote two books on education -- "Problems of the Transition of Education in the Third World" (published in 1990) and "Towards Education Reform in Guyana" (published in 1994). An Internet edition of a fourth book, "The Trail of Diplomacy", was released on the World Wide Web in 1998. Biography of Ambassador Odeen Ishmael.

The Guyana Story – From Earliest Times to Independence by Odeen Ishmael

The Guyana Story — From Earliest Times to Independence traces the country’s history from thousands of years ago when the first Amerindian groups began to settle on the Guyana territory. It examines the period of early European exploration leading to Dutch colonization, the forcible introduction of African slaves to work on cotton and sugar plantations, the effects of European wars and the final ceding of the territory to the British who ruled it as their colony until they finally granted it independence in 1966. The book also tells of Indian, Chinese and Portuguese indentured immigration and shows how the cultural interrelationships among the various ethnic groups introduced newer forms of conflict, but also brought about cooperation in the struggles of the workers for better working and living conditions.

The final part describes the roles of the political leaders who arose from among these ethnic groups from the late 1940s and began the political struggle against colonialism and the demand for independence. This struggle led to political turbulence in the 1950s and early 1960s when the country was caught in the cross-hairs of the Cold War resulting in joint British-American devious actions which undermined a democratically elected pro-socialist government and deliberately delayed independence for the country until a government friendly to their international interests came to power.

Trade Paperback; $23.99; 688 pages; 978-1-4797-9588-8
Trade Hardback; $34.99; 688 pages; 978-1-4797-9589-5
eBook; $3.99; 978-1-4797-9590-1.

Guyana Legends—Folk Tales of the Indigenous Amerindians - By Odeen Ishmael
Publication Date: August 30, 2011
Trade Paperback; $19.99; 212 pages; 978-1-4653-5668-0
Trade Hardback; $29.99; 212 pages; 978-1-4653-5669-7
eBook; $9.99; 978-1-4653-5670-3
Press Release

Guyana Legends—Folk Tales of the Indigenous Amerindians is a collection of fifty folk tales of the first people to inhabit Guyana and the contiguous regions of the north coast of the South American continent.

Very little is known of Amerindian history in Guyana before the arrival of European settlers in the early seventeenth century and, actually, no written form of their languages existed until about seventy years ago.

Indeed, much of the history of the Amerindians people is based on oral traditions which are not quite clear because the periods when important events occurred are difficult to place. Still, native oral traditions are very rich in folk stories of the ancestral heroes and heroines of these indigenous people. Some of these folk stories have varying versions among the nine different language groups—or tribes— that comprise the Amerindian population of Guyana.