New Mexico Books

Saburo Sugiyama, who has participated in many of the key excavations in Teotihuacan, explore the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, in so far as this Pyramid (and human sacrifices associated) is an evidence of State Ideology and rising militarism of a superpower in Mesoamérica between 200-650 AD.
Excellent archaeological book!

Teotihuacan is an amazing mystery. At its peak, it was the 6th largest city in the entire world and exerted at least partial control over key Maya cities up to 600 miles away. Yet it did so with stone age technology, no written language, no beasts of burden, and not even the wheel. And because of the lack of written records, it's very difficult for us today to understand how any of this was possible in general terms, let alone know the details of its civilization and administration.

This book is an attempt to throw some light on these enigmas. It was written by one of the recognized experts on the site, who has participated in many of the key excavations there, and is based on what is known as of the present. The main discussion is a detailing of the massive (200-odd) victim human sacrifice that was part of the ground-breaking ceremony of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, one of the 3 major buildings of Teotihuacan, and its implications for the government of the city.

This book is definitely not light reading. It's written in a clear yet rather technical manner, so those who aren't familiar with scientific writing might find it rather heavy going, although still informative. For those with a real interest in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history, however, it's a very useful and fascinating book. However, there's no way around the disturbing nature of its subject matter, although the book doesn't dwell or even speculate on the gory details. It just tries to explain what the quantity and arrangement of bodies and artifacts means for our understanding of life and government in Teotihuacan.

I went to grade school with the gal who commited this horrendous crime and while I was deeply upset by her actions, I was glad to be able to read about what happened.

This is one of the better true-crime books I've read. What a horrific crime! What a disturbed person! One almost feels sorry for Darci, yet her gruesome crime is unforgivable. This book was well researched and very well written. I found myself neglecting everything around me until I finished this book; I simply couldn't put it down!

In the modern age, traveling from Iowa to California is nothing. But in 1849, it was deadly and treacherous journey. "I Have Seen the Fire" is a splice of reality and fiction, following Sarah Royce (a woman who truly existed) in a work of historical fiction. Telling of her family's journey west, "I Have Seen the Fire" is an eye-opening look at the harsh journey and trials people undertook for a chance at a better life. Highly recommended for community library historical fiction collections.

I was enchanted by this book and had to force myself to put it down so i would have some left to read tomorrow. Knowing that the author is a noted historian, you might expect this book to be a history lesson of sorts and it's true that the details of life on the trail heading west and in the mining camps are colorful and engaging. But mostly this is a deeply personal story written from inside the mind of a righteous, brave and interestingly optimistic woman who feels more deeply and passionately than she may even admit to herself. Hine writes a woman's voice so well you feel like you know Sarah Royce, a woman who loves her home and yet travels constantly, who sees God and yet is haunted by her own failings in not saving a friend from a fire as a child, who supports her husband and yet has a very special relationship with a man with clear, blue eyes. Maybe like me you won't want this short little book to end, but when it does that ending will make you catch your breath!

John Nichols's short, prescient essays and Bill Davis's photographs constitute a classic memoir of a place. The book describes a small Hispanic and Native American agricultural community forced to modernize by big business and a group of hippies.

Nichols moved to Taos in 1969, after an "eye-opening and life-changing trip" to Guatemala, which gave him a perspective on the disparity of wealth and poverty. He found a similar battle in Taos with Taos farmers fighting against the construction of a dam.

Davis came from Georgia almost 40 years ago; he arrived in Taos on Christmas Eve: "The mystery so captivated my heart and soul that in the years since I have had little cause to leave the village of Taos and its surrounding countryside."

Nichols lived (and still lives) in a three-room adobe, drove an ancient Dodge pickup, and worked "the graveyard shift", writing every night from about 10 pm until dawn. "And I love this wounded valley for precisely the same reasons that I often hate it: It is one of the few places that I have ever been that I have truly taken personally."

Nichols went on to write a trilogy of novels, essential to understand the conflicts between this indigenous society and "progress": The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel, The Magic Journey: A Novel and The Nirvana Blues: A Novel.

Nichols's essays in If Mountains Die deal with the difficulties and joys of living in an adobe building, the joy of trout fishing, and the challenges of maintaining the irrigation system. His most moving passages deal with his neighbors and their efforts to maintain their way of life.

Davis contributed sixty-five color photographs that capture the mountains, mesas, forests, deserts, rivers and farmland in several seasons. People rarely appear in the photographs; the scenery predominates; but the impact of humanity is always in evidence.

Together, Nichols and Davis have created a extraordinary memoir of a wonderful place.

Robert C. Ross 2008

New Mexico, and the Taos area in particular, has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. John Nichols captures this beauty perfectly in his first of the Taos series, "If Mountains Should Die." Accompanied by heart-grabbing photographs, this book describes his first few years in Taos as a transplanted East-Coaster. Nichols not only captures the raw beauty of the land, but also the people that occupy it. Along with this, he describes the disturbing and continous struggle to keep it alive and free from suburbanization. His personal and touching accounts of his own struggle with the place and the people bring it alive in unexpected ways. There is also plenty of respect here, along with a deep anger for what is being done to the land, the people, and the unique way of life found in Taos Valley. As this is a very special place in my heart, I found it easy to cry and laugh along with him.

I have not yet read this book, I have only just ordered it, but I am so excited to read it because currently I am the coordinator of the Hollenback Community Garden in Brooklyn New York. Our garden is on the former site of the Hollenback Mansion where Amelia grew up, which burned down in 1979.

Compiled, edited and Annotated by Mary J. Straw Cook, Immortal Summer: A Victorian Woman's Travels In The Southwest is a collection of letters and black-and-white photographs by Amelia Hollenback, a Victorian woman who had the opportunity to see 1897 America with her own eyes. With extensive contextual annotation, Immortal Summer is a vivid, superbly organized and presented primary source which takes in what American life, land and people were really like more than a century ago. One curious note: Author and historian Mary Cook lives in Santa Fe in the very house that Amelia Hollenback commissioned John Gaw Meem to build in 1932!

Chaco Canyon is in the middle of nowhere, a unexceptional canyon in the New Mexico desert where nobody in his right mind would try to make a living. All the more amazing is that this barren place was the center of the Anasazi civilization. The Great House of Pueblo Bonito is the largest pre-historic building north of Mexico, counting 800 rooms and constructed about 1,000 years ago.

Chaco is mysterious and this book of seventeen essays by authorities in several fields explores those mysteries. One is given the point of view of the scholars as well as representatives of the Pueblo, Hopi, and the Navajo Indians. Good charts, maps, and photos, some in color, support the text. Perhaps the most interesting of all the mysteries is how the Anasazi fed themselves in this unpromising environment and a brief sidebar talks about Chaco agriculture -- although not enough.

The most interesting essay in the book is titled "The Chaco Navajos" and is about the coming of the Navajos, the Spaniards, and the Anglos to Chaco Canyon long after the Anasazi had disappeared. Included is a brief account of pioneer archaeologist, Richard Wetherill, killed in a gunfight with a Navajo in 1910. "Richard Wetherill Anasazi" by Frank McNitt is a fine biography of Wetherill, a character worthy of legend.

"In Search of Chaco" is an attractive, up-to-date look at current theories and thinking about Chaco. One suspects there's a lot more to learn. One quibble: I despise the politically correct term "Ancestral Pueblo" used by the scholars for the people who built Chaco. The old and romantic name, "Anasazi," is far preferable.

Smallchief

Chaco Canyon is in the middle of nowhere, a unexceptional canyon in the New Mexico desert where nobody in his right mind would try to make a living. All the more amazing is that this barren place was the center of the Anasazi civilization. The Great House of Pueblo Bonito is the largest pre-historic building north of Mexico, counting 800 rooms and constructed about 1,000 years ago.

Chaco is mysterious and this book of seventeen essays by authorities in several fields explores those mysteries. One is given the point of view of the scholars as well as representatives of the Pueblo, Hopi, and the Navajo Indians. Good charts, maps, and photos, some in color, support the text. Perhaps the most interesting of all the mysteries is how the Anasazi fed themselves in this unpromising environment and a brief sidebar talks about Chaco agriculture -- although not enough.

The most interesting essay in the book is titled "The Chaco Navajos" and is about the coming of the Navajos, the Spaniards, and the Anglos to Chaco Canyon long after the Anasazi had disappeared. Included is a brief account of pioneer archaeologist, Richard Wetherill, killed in a gunfight with a Navajo in 1910. "Richard Wetherill Anasazi" by Frank McNitt is a fine biography of Wetherill, a character worthy of legend.

"In Search of Chaco" is an attractive, up-to-date look at current theories and thinking about Chaco. One suspects there's a lot more to learn. One quibble: I despise the politically correct term "Ancestral Pueblo" used by the scholars for the people who built Chaco. The old and romantic name, "Anasazi," is far preferable.

Smallchief

Lisa Sandlin's new collection is worth two reads. I just reread it and love the world we enter. It's a place that's mystical and spiritual and filled with salt of the earth characters who are searching for more from life. I'm reminded of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez with their magical realism. Sandlin's third collection is beautifully written, deep and multilayered in complex characters and a joy to read and savor.Keep your eye on Lisa Sandlin. She's a writer worth knowing and watching. If you haven't heard of her, she has two other collections--The Famous Thing About Death and Message to the Nurse of Dreams--worth reading. Thank you, Lisa, for your stories. I'm sure you will give us another collection soon.

First, a disclaimer: I am acquainted with Ms. Sandlin, as she was once a colleague. But she's a fellow writer, so I was equally prepared to see, and to enjoy, either her failure or her success. That's two different species of enjoyment, however, and so I can say I was immensely pleased to read "In the River Province" for all the reasons that would do me credit.

"In the River Province" is Lisa Sandlin's third collection of short stories, each better than the one before it, and this one matchless in its artistry and its vivid depiction of the lives of Anglo and Hispanic inhabitants of New Mexico both contemporary and historical. Like some literary descendant of Chaucer, she uses the annual pilgrimage from Santa Fe to the village of Chimayo as the focal point of three stories ("'Orita on the Road to Chimayo," "Everything Moves," and "I Loved You Then, I Love You Still"); not surprisingly, while on their hegira the protagonists in those stories search their souls and rearrange the way they define themselves, but introspection never bogs the stories down and they stay vividly active in the colorful present moment of the pilgrimage and of their companions and their lives. Two other stories, likewise set in Santa Fe, round out the portrait of life in that city - "Night Class" contains a long passage about the terrors of teaching for the first time that everyone who has stepped in front of a class will readily identify with. "Another Exciting Day in Santa Fe" celebrates a long friendship between a man and a woman, a rare thing to see and a pleasure to watch unfold.

But the highest peak in this Sangre de Christo range is far and away the novella entitled "The Saint of Bilocation," a marvelously ambitious, moving, and suspenseful account by a New Mexican priest who has been called back to Spain in 1630 to interview a nun who claims to be traveling miraculously to Santa Fe without transporting her body, where she allegedly works wonders, converting the Indian population. Based on historical documents by Fray Antonio Jimenez Vera, who worked with New Mexico's indigenous peoples for decades, the novella follows his fictional representation as he arrives in Spain properly skeptical yet willing to concede the possibility of the nun's miraculous claim. The story poses a vivid contrast and tension between practical religious practice and mystical faith, between reason and the imagination, and it speaks to our time very well. Lisa Sandlin makes Fray Antonio's mission itself a suspenseful undertaking (is the abbess Sor Maria de Agreda a saint or a charlatan?), and a brilliant coda to the story is slyly and meaningfully ambiguous.

Edith Warner's own words exceed in beauty and simpicity anyone else's account of what her experiences were like in Northern New Mexico during the era of the making of the atomic bomb. Captured for the reader are the feelings of an anglo woman being accepted by Native Americans, the difficult life a woman making it on her own, and her intense feelings about how the war affected pueblo people.
Editor, Patrick Burns, has done a fine job of editing and staying true to the spirit of these wonderful writings!

Edith Warner came to New Mexico from the East in 1922, seeking a place to regain her failing physical health. Rather, she found a place ideal for her spiritual health, an ancient land where she felt at peace. She settled into a little house beside the Rio Grande at a lonely railroad siding called Otowi, where she supervised the off loading of freight. Ironically, in that out-of-the-way location, fate placed her at a crossroads in time, to live between the pastoral life of the neighboring Pueblo Indians and the frenzied pace of nearby scientists ushering in the atomic age at Los Alamos. In the midst of these different worlds, Edith completed her personal journey and touched the lives of everyone who passed her way, from sheepherders and potters to world-renowned physicists. Her story has been presented in two previous books, THE HOUSE AT OTOWI BRIDGE, a memoir and southwestern classic by Peggy Pond Church, and THE WOMAN AT OTOWI CROSSING, a fictionalized and altered version of Edith's life by Frank Waters. Now, IN THE SHADOW OF LOS ALAMOS offers the story through Edith's own writing, with a preface to set the stage.

As a reviewer, I am suppose to tell you whether or not you will enjoy this book, but such a prediction would be based solely on opinion. What I can tell you is that Patrick Burns, the book's editor, was passionately dedicated to his project on Edith Warner and that his admiration of Edith, despite never having met her, shows through in his work. Burns pursued lost documents in dusty archives, salvaged old letters that were about to be destroyed, and talked with Edith's friends and relatives from around the country to gather and preserve this record of her writing, which includes published and unpublished articles, letters, and surviving portions of her journal. IN THE SHADOW OF LOS ALAMOS is the result of years of in-depth research into a remarkable woman and a place in time. Edith's story leads the reader to wonder what might have become of her had she stayed in Pennsylvania, never having found her little house by the river, but we will never know because Edith recognized that she was right where she was suppose to be. She pursued her destiny. Through this book, she continues to inspire others to do the same. My opinion? You will more than enjoy IN THE SHADOW OF LOS ALAMOS.

This book was perfect for my adventure loving 6 year-old son. I am looking for more titles by this author. The puzzles really make you think!

Jack's Time Machine is a delightful book suitable for young and old alike! It follows a magical and beautifully illustrated journey of a young boy and his trusted friend Scruff to the land of the Aztecs. The book contains five challenging conundrums, which have been skilfully integrated into the story as to make the reader feel that they are assisting Jack and Scruff in their quest. However the author has been kind enough to supply all of the solutions at the back of the book, just in case!

Dan James has once again proved that he is a man of many talents, a puzzle setter, author, and above all, a fine artist. The full-page illustrations are truly captivating and make it quite impossible for me to pick a favourite. To that end, it will ensure that Jack's Time Machine will remain a firm bedtime favourite for many a year to come.

There is however one puzzle who's solution still eludes me .... "Why has this book only been published in the States and Canada, when Mr James is British?" Thank you Amazon for bring this book to my attention!

Readers seeking a fast-paced thriller with a different flavor will relish Janus Deception, a story of international intrigue and a chemical weapons program gone awry. When Commander Jake discovers mysteries surrounding a sick soldier's murder, he teams up with beautiful agent Kaci to probe the depths of a program which has caused the death of an entire Mexican village, and which threatens the world. Fast action and unpredictable twists make this hard to put down.

John Bayer's The Janus Deception is a thrilling novel with a deep inner message of faith. Lieutenant Commander and recent widower Jake Madsen feels he has little left to live for, when he discovers a conspiracy to test chemical weapons on U.S. soldiers. He must fight against faceless computers and a human mass that has abdicated responsibility both without and within, and hold close to his steadfast faith as a Christian. The Janus Deception is far more than just another action/adventure novel; it is also a cautionary tale of the perils that await humanity should it forsake morality for money.