Reading List
FIELD GUIDES
A Guide to the Birds of Panama with Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras
Robert Ridgely & J.A. Gwynne
This comprehensive field guide, noteworthy for its beautiful color plates, covers additional species found in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica.
Snorkeling Guide to Marine Life
Paul Humann
Humann’s compact guide illustrates Caribbean fishes, corals, invertebrates, and plants commonly encountered in shallower water.
Nicaragua Pacific Slope Birds
Rainforest Publications
Perfect identifying the feathered friends of Nicaragua's Pacific Slope, this 12-panel guide easily slips into a pocket. Full-color illustrations.
Nicaragua Wildlife
Rainforest Publications
Perfect for trailside identification, this 12-panel guide easily slips into a pocket. Full-color illustrations.
MAPS
Nicaragua Map
ITMB
A map of Nicaragua at a scale of 1:750,000 with good topographic relief.
Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador Adventure Map
National Geographic
This durable, folded map shows the region at a scale of 1:710,000, indicating parks, reserves, and points of interest.
GUIDEBOOKS
Moon Handbook Nicaragua
Josh Berman
A handy, practical guide to Nicaragua, this book is a good resource for planning a trip, featuring extensive, up-to-date listings, maps, volcano hikes, and other background information.
Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish
Joseph Keenan
Idioms, common mistakes in word usage, and other helpful advice on tackling spoken Spanish. You’ll need some foundation to take full advantage of this book—but even a complete novice will appreciate the author’s playful sense of humor.
Lonely Planet Nicaragua
Paige Penland, Gary Chandler, & Liza Prado
This practical guide to Nicaragua features maps, a good overview of culture, history, and nature, and much nuts-and-bolts information on accommodations and sightseeing.
Nicaragua in Focus: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture
Hazel Plunkett
Essential reading for Nicaragua, this compact, illustrated travel guide focuses on politics, economy, history, and culture. It’s especially strong on the difficult history of relations with the U.S. but also includes a good short summary of traditional culture and history from colonial times to the present.
NATURAL HISTORY
Tropical Nature
Adrian Forsyth & Ken Miyata
Two uncommonly observant and thoughtful field biologists offer a lucid portrait of the tropics through 17 marvelous essays that introduce the habitats, ecology, plants and animals of the Central and South American rainforests.
Nature of the Rainforest: Costa Rica and Beyond
Adrian Forsyth, E.O. Wilson, & Michael Fogden
Our favorite biologist-writer returns to the Neotropics in this beautifully illustrated, oversized overview of the rainforest. With chapters on Monteverde and Guanacaste, plants, frogs and snakes, birds, monkeys and jaguars, the sloth, peculiar insects and biodiversity, the book is a marvelous, anecdotal introduction to ecology, evolution, and conservation.
The Naturalist in Nicaragua
Thomas Belt & Daniel Janzen
A print-on-demand edition of the 1874 original by Thomas Belt, trained as an engineer, who lived four years in Nicaragua. Praised by Darwin and other Victorian luminaries, his classic account is a richly detailed natural history of the region.
HISTORY & CULTURE
The Jaguar Smile, A Nicaraguan Journey
Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s account of his visit to the country at the height of the Contra war goes underneath the headlines. It’s a cultural portrait—simple, straightforward, and “Written with a novelist’s eye for irony,” wrote the New York Times.
A Brief History of Central America
Hector Perez-Brignoll
A good overview of the region’s economic, political, and social history through the 1980s by a professor at the University of Costa Rica. Well-written, informative, and concise.
Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
Dan Koeppel
Koeppel traces the history, natural and otherwise, politics, and precarious current status of modern monoculture, touching down in India (world center of banana diversity), Ecuador (world’s largest producer), and Central America.
Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle
Thomas Walker
The fifth edition of Walker’s invaluable portrait of the country, focusing on U.S. influence since the Somoza era and the Sandinista Revolution.
The Country Under My Skin
Giaconda Belli
The memoir of a young, upper-class Nicaraguan woman who joins the revolutionary Marxist Sandinistas while continuing to work her bourgeois day job at an advertising agency.
Travels with Myself and Another, A Memoir
Martha Gellhorn
The “Another” of this title (also known as the unwilling companion), was Gellhorn’s husband at the time, Ernest Hemingway. Her witty account of worldwide travels is a classic of unexpected encounters and sharp description. She’s a marvelous, incisive writer who covered every important conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. Originally published in 1979.
Stories and Poems, A Dual-Language Book
Ruben Dario & Stanley Appelbaum
A selection of poems and stories by the beloved Nicaraguan writer, with Spanish and the English translation on facing pages.