Mexico Books

Having lived and worked in Mexico City for many years, I'm quite familiar with the sort of problems often encountered by foreign businessmen arriving here for the first time. I believe The American Chamber's Guide to Mexico Business (8th edition) is probably the most useful tool they can get their hands on. The guide has piles of sensibly organized information which covers every topic imaginable: from the cultural aspects of local business and living in Mexico to far more technical areas such as legal aspects, contact finding, and setting up shop. What sets this guide apart from others, in my view, is the insider information - each chapter is written by top-notch local experts in the field and not by a foreign writer trying to interpret unfamiliar information. Nobody has as much Mexico business experience as the people at the American Chamber and I have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone seeking a comprehensive guide to every aspect of working, doing business and living in Mexico - I only wish I'd got hold of a copy sooner!

I have been doing business in Mexico for over 15 years, and I have come to rely on this book for its information. For anyone who does business in Mexico, you know that information--hard facts--is the scarcest commodity of all. I have sat on the phone for hours trying to get clues and make contacts.

This book spells it all out, does all the legwork for you. It also gives advice on any step of the process you might need, from setting up a sales plan to going into a joint venture.

This book comes highly recommended by me personally. It is required reading for my staff.

As a New Englander, I need what sunshine I can get and this book has it with its marvelous range of the Gulf's Cuban/Italian/Creole/Mexican/Vietnamese flavors. I particularly love that the recipes are adaptable to what I can find here, and the beautiful photos are a plus (and an inspiration) as well.

I love to read cookbooks as well as use them. Gulf Coast Kitchens is engaging and fun to read. It is well researched with lots of interesting vignettes. The writing is colorful and lively. The recipes are a good mix of down-home and exotic dishes.

Easy fixings are a priority for me. Gulf Costs Kitchen's simple instructions with tips for advance preparation makes each recipe a dream.

I have already given several books as gifts. If you try it, you will love it, too!

While the collection of images included is not exhaustive of all work done by Baumann, it provides a thorough sampling of his life work and details the process by which he created his masterpieces. Excellent book. FYI, my understanding is that a new compendium will be done in 2008 that should be a good complement to this book.

A nicely crafted book that covers all bases in this artists career. Great reproductions of the prints, well-written text and a solid book to hold in your hand. History on Baumann covers beginning of career to the end with just a touch of the technical side of this art form. Certainly inspired me!

This is a well-written and technically, beautifully illustrated book. The author has provided a thorough narrative of the techniques Gustave Baumann used to create his magnificent woodblock prints. For me, the best parts are the several chapters that explain and illustrate, step-by-step and layer-by-layer, how several of Baumann's prints were painstakingly created, with the results of each pressing shown progressively toward the finished artwork. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the woodblock technique, Baumann, and Arts and Crafts printmaking.

This book and the companion book, Gustave Baumann: Nearer to Art, by Martin F. Krause et al (1993, Museum of New Mexico Press)detail the life and work of one of the great printmakers. Baumann's works are exquisite and this book details his working methods and graphically displays his multi block technique. I have read and re-read these books several times, if for no other reason than to know more about the life of a simple artist going about the straightforward work of making timeless and breathtaking works of art.

Being a Latina artist, I was very impressed at the uniqueness of these projects. Each one is a twist on a traditional method. They are easy to read and follow and offer a bit of history about where they came from. If I had any complaint it would be that I didn't have time to finish all the projects in one weekend! That's a good thing though, because now I can stay busy for quite a while ;-)

This book takes me back to the time I spent in Mexico a few years ago. It features a variety of decorative home accessory projects for people with different skills from sewing to woodworking. I love the vibrant colors and variety of designs offered here. The book is in full-color and there are step-by-step instructions, accompanied by photos, for each of the 20 projects. Conveniently there are templates and a resource list in back.

Some of my favorite projects include brightly colored circular woven table mats, a copper wire fruit basket, a decorative hot chocolate whisk, cactus pots, a tin wall border, beautiful cut paper candles, an Aztec floor runner and a mosaic heart and spiral pattern table top.

Three projects requiring basic sewing skills and a sewing machine are a cross-stitch table cloth (cross-stitches are painted), appliqued bath towels and drawn-thread curtain. Two others including pillowcases decorated with roses and a butterfly blanket require basic embroidery skill. If you wish to make a lime waxed shelf or a beautiful suede covered stool you will also need basic woodworking skills and power tools such as a jigsaw and an electric drill.

These projects require a little time and effort but none of them are too difficult and the instructions are great. They will make some spectacular and unique accent pieces for your home.

Living in the Southwestern Chihuahuan desert, I am always on the search for sources of information regarding local flora and particularly ethnobotanical uses of plants. This is an excellent guide originally published in 1947 and edited by Michael Moore who I consider to be an expert on herbal uses of native southwestern plants. For anyone interested in this subject, a fabulous resource to have in your library!

Laura Curtin lived and worked among the curanderas and Native Americans of Northern New Mexico during the early part of the twentieth century. She fell in love with the plants and their lore, and later, at the prompting of a friend, decided to record them. Healing Herbs was first published in 1947, at a time when interest in traditional healing in Northern New Mexico was in decline. It helped preserve traditional information for a new generation -- when editor Michael Moore arrived in Santa Fe in the 1960s he found copies of Curtin's book as a prized possession in many traditional households. The book is unique in the literature of ethnobotany in that it was written essentially by an insider in the tradition, rather than by an observer doing interviews.

_The Heart of the Sky_ by Peter Canby was an enjoyable if a bit disconnected account of his travels among the Maya people, each chapter pretty much a vignette, a report of his encounters in a village or at a Maya ruin site, each story interspersed with information on Maya history, culture, religion, and the history of the study of these interesting people.

The Maya are a resilient and diverse people, still prevalent as a distinct cultural group despite centuries of attempts at forcible cultural assimilation and often quite cruel subjugation and oppression. Speaking over thirty distinct and mutually unintelligible languages, the Maya have lived in a roughly 100,000 square mile region for about 5,000 years, an area that stretches from the Yucatan in the north through Guatemala to Honduras in the south and from Belize and the Caribbean in the east through to the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico in the west, an area encompassing everything from dry scrub to dense tropical rainforest to near-alpine highlands. Canby never states their overall numbers, though he did mention at one time that some 4 million Maya live in Guatemala, which he said was more than half the total.

Though often lumped together in the popular consciousness with the Aztecs and the Incas, the Maya were quite distinct. They reached their peak in the 8th century A.D., some 500 years before the apex of the Aztecs or Incas. They never formed a true empire like them either, but were always a series of competing city-states. They were quite advanced; inventing the mathematical concept of zero, performing advanced astronomical calculations, and had the only true writing system in the Americas. They also proved considerably more difficult for the Spanish to subdue, owing in part to their decentralized nature and in part according to French researcher Tzvetan Todorov their possession of writing (Todorov maintained that the Incas, who had no writing, viewed the Spaniards as gods, the Aztecs, who had pictograms, saw the Spanish at first as gods but soon changed their minds, and the Maya, who could read and write, knew from the start they were men). It took 20 years to subdue the major Maya groups and 150 years before the last independent kingdoms were conquered.

Unfortunately, the Spanish (and later the Guatemalan and Mexican) authorities weren't satisfied with merely besting them on the battlefield. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, there was a systematic effort to erase Maya culture, language, and religion, as concerted efforts were made to find and burn all Maya books, impose Christianity upon them, and in short make them "into a compliant, Hispanicized peasantry." Combined with the devastating effects of European diseases and the desire to drive the Maya out of prime agricultural land (particularly for cattle and later for coffee), the Maya went from being a great urban culture, with cities that were compared at one time favorably with the cities of Spain, to a culture living in "sullen poverty" in the jungles and mountains, often times forced to work as seasonal laborers due to a lack of suitable agricultural land.

The oppression was still prevalent in Guatemala in the time of the author's travels (the book was published in 1992), as Canby vividly described the government's war on the Maya people, the discrimination and racism they faced, the destruction of their villages, and the internal refuge camps they were forced to live and work in.

Happily, the book is not all grim. Canby related many interesting facts about the Maya as asides during his travels, particularly when he witnessed Maya religious ceremonies, festivals, or visited Maya ruins and spoke with researchers. The reader learns that after an initial burst of missionary zeal in the 16th century, many of the more remote areas hardly ever saw priests (and still rarely see them today), resulting in many pre-Columbian religious practices surviving, sometimes barely disguised by a thin Christian overlay. One of the more interesting if not widely practiced ones involved introducing hallucinogenic substances obtained from the _Bufo marinus_ toad directly into the bloodstream via the colon walls (the drug administered by hollow-bone enemas).

Across the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala some seventy Maya towns till follow one or both of two concurrently running Maya calendrical cycles known as the tzolkin (a 260-day ceremonial year of 13 months of 20 days each) and the haab (a 365-day solar year of 18 20-day months plus five "lost days," days in which the sun is reborn and evil spirits from earlier creations are loose on the earth).

The basis of Maya agricultural, the milpa, small plots of land set aside primarily to grow corn, beans, and squash, is poorly understood in the West. Not only does milpa cultivation have very strong religious overtones not appreciated in the West, but it was not an example of crude slash-and-burn agriculture, as it involved (and stills involves in many areas) the complicated cultivation of also other plants, notably upwards of 80 different fast-growing trees and root crops, plants that when a field is exhausted from growing corn form what are known as "planted tree gardens," basically producing a useful orchard and a home for wild game. As complicated as the milpa system is however the great ancient Maya cities had a still more complicated agricultural system, one that entailed the use of raised fields built in swamps and river floodplains, using muck supplied from a system of canals.

He discussed at length the great efforts made to decode Maya hieroglyphics as well as the importance of the Popul Vuh, the "Book of Council" or "Book of Time," a colonial-era document written between 1554 and 1558 in a Spanish alphabet version of Quiche Maya, an extraordinary book that Canby compared to the _Iliad_ or the Ramayana and Mahabharata of Hindu literature.

My only complaints are his darting from one site or village to another (the book's various chapters didn't really flow into one another) and the lack of photographs.

What a great introduction to a vigorous culture that many of us had erroneously assumed no longer existed! I feel that a whole new part of the world has opened up before me, thanks to Peter Canby's excellent research and intrepid reporting. Mr. Canby includes information that he gathered from anthropologists, epigraphers, naturalists, textile experts and other people who have lived their lives immersed in one aspect or another of the Maya world. He also obviously did a lot of background reading which adds further depth to the portrait his book presents of the past and present Maya phenomenon. In addition, the author reports on his own travels in the region, from the Yucatan to Chiapas to Guatemala. His firsthand experiences bring vividly to light the Maya world as it is today. I found it very enriching to learn from this highly readable book about the ancient, yet evolving universe of the Maya.

This book lived up to its billing as beautiful and informative. Visitors and friends are drawn to it. With the skyrocketing price of tequila and mezcal it's good to have a quality publication dealing with the history and culture. A good insight to a part of Mexican culture.

Menuez combines beautiful photographs and informative text to paint a picture both of a region and an industry. From the darkly provocative picture on the cover (of naked men working in pits of agave pressings) to those of the people and landscape of the region, he creates a sense of Jalisco (the province where all tequila is produced) that draws the reader in. For those who know only that tequila is what goes in a margarita, the text enlightens the reader regarding the complexities of tequila and the culture that surrounds it.

My compliments to M. Yofre who wrote a reader's review of this fascinating work. I knew virtually nothing about the author, Salvador de Madariaga, but Yofre filled in some blanks.

In any event, this book was one of my primary sources in my research for my two novels on the Conquest of Mexico, "Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God". In that I've underlined excerpts on almost all pages I found this book to be useful, indeed.

Any biography is necessarily subjective, especially one in which the principle has been dead almost five hundred years. Cortes, however, left a long shadow and Madariaga has expertly arrived at conclusions well past the bare outlines of a remarkable life. Cortez is portrayed as neither hero nor villain but as an extraordinary man of in which faults became virtues. At the same time, Cortes led one of the most lop-sided victories in history in which thousands died and millions were subjugated. It is a mistake to judge the past by the standards of the present day but Europe's moral code was shifting as epitomized by Las Casas criticisms of Cortes and his conquests.

Cortes understood men and used them against themselves. They fought and died for him but, in the end, he cheated them all and became one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Still, courage is a quality unto itself and who can question Cortez' courage? Who else--facing an overwhelming enemy force--would destroy his ships so that his troops had no retreat? "Victory or Death!" cried Cortez and, there can be little doubt that is exactly what Cortez meant. He intended to get rich or die. For him there never was a middle path. Unfortunately for at least half his men, they paid the full price for the Caudillo's determination.

Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God" on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

I have read the Spanish version of this book, so I can't open judgment about the translation but yes about the opus itself.

To fully appreciate this book is necessary to know who his author was.
Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978) was a polyphasic Spaniard, graduated as engineer at Paris he soon turned into a journalist and essayist. He then followed his career as university professor and later as a notable Spaniard diplomat (ambassador to the United States and France). When the tragic Spanish Civil War erupted he went into exile from 1936 till Franco's death in 1976.
He has authored many historical books and novels, notably the present one, biographies of Christopher Columbus and Simon Bolivar and his famous "El Corazon de Piedra Verde" ("The Green Stone Heart").

When writing "Hernan Cortes" he combined a strict logic with a rigorous analysis of different historical fountains (not following only one as many other writers do).
What is more important for the reader, he doesn't leave his cogitations in the darkness of his cabinet but expose them in footnotes where he explains why and which author he chooses to believe on each controversial issue.
He writes without denying neither his liberal ideology nor his condition of Spaniard yet he doesn't leave them blind his historical judgment.

The reader will see Cortes from his boyhood till his death and be able to follow his complex and strong personality thru all the conquest of Mexico.
Many controversial issues are described by the author and inkling into the Conquistadores' ethos and pathos is shown dramatically.

A great stuff to read for historians, students or casual readers. Enjoy!!!.

Reviewed by Max Yofre.

The author has experienced many paddling adventures all over the West Coast of North America and down into Mexico. A fantastic photographer, Rogers jams this book full of beautiful and inspiring photographs along with interesting narrative. From the pounding surf off the Washington coast to warm, quiet lagoons in the Baja, Rogers takes you along for quite a trip.

I am so bummed that this book is out of print. I read it in the summer of 1995, while houseboating at Lake Powell. Even though I'm not a kayaker, I love being out on the water, and this book really made me want to take up kayaking. The pictures are fabulous, the stories are wonderful! I especially remember the stories about kayaking with the ships off the coast of California, and with the orcas in Alaska. If this book ever comes back into print, I want a copy of it. In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep watching the used book stores!