This book caps Michael Coe's distinguished career as a Mayanist scholar. In this book, he joins with Justin Kerr to present the formal, technical, and aesthetic characteristics of the art of writing as practiced by the pre-Columbian Maya of Mesoamerica. The collaboration of a renowned archaeologist with an equally illustrious photographer and dedicated student of Maya art has created a readable, highly informative, and well-illustrated text.

This extraordinary volume represents more than ten years of research on Louisiana Creole (LC) by a group of outstanding scholars from Indiana University, l'Université Antilles-Guyane, Tulane University, and Southeastern Louisiana University. Both historical and contemporary sources are used for indexing, alphabetically and trilingually (English, French, and LC), the spoken form of the LC lexical items. The resulting collection of material is astonishing in its scope of knowledge, and comprehensive in its depth of detail. With more than 5,000 entries, this excellent work provides access through vocabulary to the history and culture of LC communities.

One suspects that the maps were the real reason for writing this book – nearly two hundred of them (accompanying nearly four hundred articles), all to the same scale (along with a few others at a much smaller scale for worldwide coverage); even the software used for making the maps is fully credited (734). Almost every map plots several languages, making this a unique and valuable reference (the maps are vastly preferable to those in Atlas of Languages 1996, see Daniels 1998). It is of course not so comprehensive as Moseley & Asher 1994, but far easier to use because of the compact format.