sri lanka

Sri Lanka (Country Guide)
$22.99
Lonely Planet knows Sri Lanka. With our 11th edition we help you board the train to the lush tea plantations of Ella, show you where the spotten leopards hide, lead you to Sigiriya's mysterious ancient ruins and when your adventuring is done, reveal the nation's most-secluded beaches.

Lonely Planet guides are written by experts who get to the heart of every destination they visit. This fully updated edition is packed with accurate, practical and honest advice, designed to give you the information you need to make the most of your trip.

In This Guide:

Complete national-parks table leads you to the best elephant-spotting
Detailed research on safe travel
Unique Green Index directs you to sustainable listings

The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka (Rough Guides)
$21.99
Rough Guides are always great. Detailed colorful and accurate with great maps. Its always a toss up Lonely Planet or Rough Guide. They are both very well done. I usually buy both so I am covered - but if I only had the money to buy one it would be Rough Guide. (assuming it is a recent published version) The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka (Rough Guides)

Paradise Poisoned: Learning About Conflict, Terrorism and Development from Sri Lanka's Civil Wars
$25.00
John Richardson's *Paradise Poisoned* is an important, timely, and groundbreaking book. The product of more than 18 years of work, it is a carefully researched account of Sri Lanka's fall from a beautiful island paradise and international development "success story", to a headline-grabbing example of a nation torn apart by terrorism and deadly civil conflict.

Drawing both on an innovative methodology and his long-standing work in the fields of international development and conflict, Professor Richardson demonstrates how Sri Lanka's tragic story clearly exposes a world-wide issue that has long been hiding in plain sight--that international development programs, conflict, and terrorism are intimately linked, and often in very negative ways. This is obviously a highly important and policy-relevant finding that is rarely discussed or analyzed in a rigorous manner--the only other book I can recall is Peter Uvin's work on Rwanda (Aiding Violence, 1998). Other important authors, like Mary Anderson (Do No Harm, 1999) offer valuable advice to practitioners on how to reduce conflict in the field, but Richardson and Uvin's more structural analyses expose how contemporary international development policies, put in place by well-meaning leaders and the international community, can be a factor that leads to deadly conflict in the first place.

The book has many lessons, but for me the most important is this profound critique of contemporary development wisdom, and Richardson's carefully documented case study makes it impossible to ignore his findings, or write them off as a simplistic superficial analysis based on preconceived conclusions. Quite the contrary, Richardson's approach is highly sophisticated, and his innovative systems methodology enables him to clarify how deadly conflict arises not from a single cause, but from a complex interaction of a number of critical factors that, acting together, help to explain the fall of Sri Lanka from apparent success to disastrous failure.

The practical policy lessons to be drawn are many, and reach well beyond the Sri Lanka case. Perhaps the most important lesson is that development policies need to be examined with an additional lens that clarifies the ways in which well-intended programs can exacerbate this complex set of factors that undo the development goals and lead to violent and persistent conflict and terrorism. Professor Richardson's useful book goes a long way in this direction by pointing out some of the most critical reference points for this new perspective. It is essential reading, both as a cautionary tale, and as an important source for anyone concerned with discovering specific ways to improve international development policy and reduce global violence.

Steven Arnold, University of Washington (formerly Director, International Development Program, American University)

Sri Lanka (Country Guide)
$21.99
This book helped me navigate my way through my very interesting recent trip.