Spain Books

This plastic-coated fold-out map provides an excellent overview of Barcelona. The sights stand out in three dimensions, and key features (metro stops, hotels, hospitals, etc.) are clearly marked. There are separate sections showing the greater Barcelona area and the public transit system (it would be nicer if public transit were overlaid) and some helpful information for visitors.

A better map of the various districts (including candid recommendations re shops, restaurants, etc.) is the Knopf CityMap Barcelona. Together, the two maps will provide you with a good introduction to the city.

The National Geographic guidebooks for Madrid and Barcelona are better than other guidebooks. They are more fun to read before the trip because they give more in-depth information. They also provide walking tour directions and maps of interesting areas; for example, a walking tour of ancient Roman ruins in Barcelona.

The National Geographic guidebooks for Madrid and Barcelona are better than other guidebooks. They are more fun to read before the trip because they give more in-depth information. Also they give you directions and maps for walking tours of interesting areas.

This guide is beautiful and very thorough, including information on even small towns and good subway maps for Barcelona and Madrid. It is also thorough in noting all the attractions each place has to offer, providing historical information as well as contact information, subway stop, operation hours, and free days! Most museums in Spain are closed at least one day a week, and we used this everywhere we went. It discusses major museums, churches, and mosques and points out important artists, carvings, or architechtural peculiarities in each. Another great feature is suggested walking routes in interesting neighborhoods in major cities - Spain has plenty of small streets, and we would've definitely missed some amazing places if not for this guide.

This isn't going to give you a lot of hotels or restaurants, but it does a sufficient job in translating and explaining some peculiar foods and merchandise.

This book is very special and I could not review it better than was done in the Publishers Weekly critique above. I wholeheartedly agree. The artwork is as unsual and special as the story and the storytelling. I would not have found this unusal book had I not by chance met the author, a man with an extraordinary mutlicultural backgound and a Ph.D. in anthropology form UC Berkeley (besides many other academic accolades.) And his background shows in every facet of the story.
My 4-year old daughter enjoys this book very much. I wish it could have a broader audience.

Having just passed it's 200th anniversary, the Battle of Trafalgar was the deciding battle that enabled Britain to rule the waves for the next century and more. In this book Mr. Lee, the author of the award winning radio history of Britain, 'This Sceptred Isle,' takes a view of the battle and of the key commanders.

The title of the book reflects the main subjects, a rivalry of commanders that had gone on for years. The secondary commanders such as Villeneuve, Cornwallis, Collingwood are likewise covered in detail.

This is a well researched, well written history of the battle and the people. There are a lot of histories of Nelson and Napoleon, this book has a lot more on their lower level commanders. Perhaps best however, is the final fifty pages or so. Here is where the battle itself, and the aftermath is described. In addition there is a very interesting 'What If.'

'What if Nelson had lived?' Blind in one eye, he was losing his vision in the other. Politically astute and extremely popular, could he have become Prime Minister, what about his temper - not good in a politician. Very interesting book.

This is a good easy to read book for California history, taught in 4th grade. It conveys the motives of Junipero Serra's mision Sagrada to establish missions in Alta California. It also emphasizes the views of the indigenous peoples who were affected. Good for an introduction for 4th grade students.

A parody of M. G. Lewis's The Monk. It's a great gothic read, full of hilarious morbidity and unforgettable dialogues! I strongly recommend it to those who have read The Monk.

Only book of its type, as far as I know. Went on a wine tasting trip to Priorat, Montsant, and Penedes with my father, and found this guide invaluable. It was practically the only source of information we had when we set out, and it gave us plenty of info for a perfect 4 days of wine tasting. Simple things, like hotels, generally efficient routes through the regions, restaurants, etc., would have been dramatically more difficult to plan without this guide. For what it's worth, she's absolutely right about the tourism office in Falset, they have a giant map of the Montsant and Priorat regions that supplements this book perfectly.

If I have any complaint, it's that she's very liberal in her praise. She is unlikely to tell you when a given winery, much less a region, isn't very good. But so what? The purpose of this guide is to give you enough information to be able to go there and make your own judgments.

Note: This review first appeared in The Arizona Daily Sun

In his powerful Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1950, William Faulkner delivered this tragic assessment of the state of literature: "The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."
Beth Alvarado has not forgotten.
In her first collection of short stories, Not a Matter of Love, Arizona writer Alvarado creates characters whose suffering and triumph is as real and as tangible as the paper on which the book is printed. In the title story, "Not a Matter of Love," we meet Jackie, a woman whose stepfather Paul cares only for his missing rum, and whose mother, Louise, consistently tells her daughter that she cannot be loved by the kind of man Jackie thinks might: a Mexican named Armando. Instead, Louise advocates for her daughter to date Frank, a golf pro. Jackie's sense of isolation in the context of her parents increases and she is forced to recollect the joy of being with Armando by herself. Her mother's judgmentalism and her stepfather's indifference demonstrate a weak love to Jackie, and Armando comes to represent the type of freedom she wants love to embody.
Here, Alvarado reveals one of her greatest strengths as a writer: her ability to be both inside and outside a character's psyche, sharing the innermost suffering and triumph of that character while remaining loyal, even omniscient, to the story as a whole. Dealing with Jackie's inner turmoil and confusion about who to love and what love is, Alvarado writes, "Once, when they were making love, [Armando] stopped and pulled a book out from under the bed. Oh, he'd said, that's how you do it! She'd laughed. She'd never known it was okay to laugh while you were making love. He was nothing like Walker." Armando, as opposed to Walker, is carefree about love: it is a fun thing, something about which he can joke and laugh and enjoy.
Walker, we learn at the start of the story, is Jackie's on-again-off-again boyfriend who becomes more a stalker than any sort of love interest. He corners her in Jackie's kitchen while her mother is outside and we are again both inside and outside Jackie's head: "Move it, Walker, your hand. He grins, no, make me, laughing." After Louise sees Walker cornering her daughter and does nothing, Jackie thinks to herself, "This must be love."
Through these background situations, Alvarado leads us to Jackie's triumphant, though still sad, departure from home to be with Armando. Her relationship with her mother is still in disrepair, but Jackie has made the realization that her mother has not: it is not a matter of love--at least, not a matter of that kind of love, forced upon her by Walker or suggested via the golf pro. Jackie thinks to herself at one point, "It wasn't a matter of love, she wanted to tell her mother, it was a matter of living in her own skin."
As with Jackie, above, Alvarado's great strength is exploring the intricate mazes of her characters' hearts. In "What Lydia Thinks of Roses" we meet a high school woman whose determination to rise above a boyfriend, Carlos, who only wants one thing is both believable and steady. Alvarado's measured development of Lydia leads us to first understand her as a character who struggles with that all-consuming fire many teenage women feel: the desire to please the boy, but feel confident as well. Lydia represents the familiar stereotype of the high school girl who desires to please, to be popular and liked. Alvarado, however, gives us Lydia's victory in a way which calls us to rally for her. Our muscles tense as we are prepared for the final scene--already hating high school as if we ourselves were back--when Lydia asserts her own humanity and womanhood in the face of all her bystanders. "There were petals everywhere, petals falling all over the parking lot. Red petals. Petals scattering away in the wind. `That,' Lydia said to Carlos, `is what I think of roses.'" Alvarado's dénouement reveals a reversible action whereby Lydia destroys the roses given by her sexually-hungry boyfriend (who has also, we learn, degraded her in public) and tramples the stereotype prescribed by high schools all over the country. Lydia's feat reveals the conflict of her human heart, and the triumph she achieves through it.
Whether describing a young boy whose sister has been shot and whose parents are separated or revealing two mothers who share children, and had their turn with the same husband, Beth Alvarado is able to straddle tension in the hearts of her characters, presenting to us a world with a tapestry as rich as any that great short story writers have given. Akin to Andre Dubus, Alvarado allows the full scope of what it means to be human to breathe, move and thrive on the page. Bypassing fear boldly, Alvarado has committed herself to tracing the desires, suffering and triumphs of the human heart. This, indeed, is the stuff of great literature. And perhaps, even, the stuff of transformation.