Mexico Books

What's the difference between tequila and mezcal? This book explains it all. Cutler says it's not a travel guide, but sure make me want to go to Jalisco and Oaxaca and follow his easy to understand, detailed suggestions for tours, restaurants, shopping - the works.
Gene D.

Lance Cutler provides a witty, personal guide to tequila and mezcal - not just the drinks, but to the industries, the regions, the people and the cultures. Part travelogue, part research, the book meanders between serious study of the spirits, and playful retelling of his many trips into Mexico's heartlands. The inclusion of mezcal in the latest edition should help to open more eyes to the traditional liquor of Mexico. Very enjoyable to read and easily the best book on the subject. Highly recommended!

A real dandy.... What a great book on all things Tequila. This lady has taken her life experience's and capsulated them into a wonderful book that all will embellish.Recipes galore for your required taste and then some. I have alerted many of my friends as well as ordered this book for those most dear to me.

If you are into culinary delights this is the book for you and a great conversational book to share with friends.

The first "cookbook that I've read cover to cover! A wonderful combination of party recipes, information about tequila, stories of rural Mexico, and beautiful folk art, this book makes a wonderful gift and an indispensable addition for the library to anyone who likes to give parties. Reading this book will go a long way towards making you a connoisseur of tequila and margaritas (going out and sampling the wide variety of tequila will complete your education). The party recipes are intriguing and the suggestions for presentation and will help make your next "Mexican" theme party a great success. I heartily recommend this little gem of a book.

This book reads like poetry. It's been a while since I read it, but am thinking of reading it again...such a beautiful, if not sad look back on a long and rich life centered in a dry and dusty old Mexico.

Superlatives aren't powerful enough to describe this book by Harriet Doerr. I read Stones for Ibarra, liked it a lot, so rented The Tiger in the Grass from the library as an audio-book to listen to during a long car trip. Halfway thru, I was exclaiming out loud (all by myself in the car), `OMG, this is soooo good!' I liked it light years more than the Ibarra book, even. As soon as I got home, I bought a used copy on Amazon for 50 cents plus the usual postage, etc.
The first section of this lyrical, oh-so-beautifully written book is a loose memoir, a collection of impassioned memories that she wrote down for her children. She was already old when she published Ibarra, and I believe she was in late 70s or maybe her 80s when she wrote this one.
The rest of the book is composed of short pieces that are ethereal essays or somewhat longer semi-autobiographical short stories, vignettes of people she knew while living in Mexico - but all of them rise so far above the usual stuff we read that it's difficult to describe how powerful they all are, once gathered together. It's like, the individual parts are terrific, but put together, the whole is 100x greater than the sum of its part.
There's one story, I think it's called Low Tide, and it's a lovely memory of a day at the beach in 1939. The author is an adult with young children, but there's a hint of evil somewhere lurking - then we realize it's the rise of Nazism when the hamburger seller comments about bad times coming and `that German paperhanger.' At the end of the story, Doerr comments that she wanted time to stand still long enough for her to paint and frame Low Tide, a metaphor for peace and innocence. Lord, I get goosebumps all over again, just trying to paraphrase it for this review.
Buy it. Read it. Give it as a gift. Then read it again yourself, and again.
Wow.

William Henry Jackson was born in 1943 and lived until 1942. His life spanned the pony express to the railroad to the car...he was a good friend of Henry Ford, another Detroit resident, and he lived to see planes and other modern conveyances. He wrote in his diary every day and this made writing his autobiography easy at 90, when he also began doing watercolors from his photos. Many of his items can be seen at the museum in Scott's Bluff, Nebraska. He was at the battle of Gettysburg and was buried in Arlington Cometary. He ate bird nest's soup with the emperor of Japan, dog sledded across Siberia, and walked across Korea. Many of these exploits were written up in Harpers Magazine. After leaving the Hayden expedition as photographer he set up a portrait studio in Colorado. Many of his line drawings and photographs grace the pages of his autobiography.

A great outlook of the life in the American West!

In his quest for beauty and truth, Dr. Albro is obsessive. He relishes the former while the latter smacks of Immanuel Kant. A winning combination. As one of his mentors, George Straight, once observed, all his exes live in Texas. A short-lived though magical experience.

Another fine example of this scholar's work in Mexico. Albro leaves no stone unturned.

"The only reality I refuse to accept is life without magic." JFD

This is Dobie's finest book, with the possible exception of APACHE GOLD AND YAQUI SILVER, and one of his least known; it is also one of the finest books about Mexico ever written...each time I read it I can smell anew the woodsmoke from the campfires of the old vaqueros,and sense a magical spirit of that land which has forever vanished...the ancient animistic, pre-Christian spirit of Mexico in which every plant, rock, and animal is ferociously alive and not necessarily there for a paltry human's benefit! Dobie caught it in this book and you can feel it and live it for a while. For fans of Castaneda, not least because this may be the earliest book by an American to discuss the nagual at length; the book's character, the sorceror-vaquero Don Encarnacion,who relates a wonderful anecdote about the nagual spirit,could be considered a forerunner of Castaneda's Don Juan. One of those wonderful books in which the narrator, who probably never indulged in anything stronger than a good belt of tequila, manages to convey an authentic spirit of "altered consciousness." Recommended...

H.B. Nicholson passed away March 2, 2007. I can state unequivocally that he was the most brilliant Meso-American scholar of his time. He retained his knowledge and clarity to the very end. There has never been another Archeolgist/Scholar who so loved all things Meso-American.

H.B. Nicholson was my father-in-law and my inspiration in my quest for my M.A. in Paleo-Indian Archeology. He is deeply missed.

With all of the books on Amazon purporting to relate "Toltec warrior wisdom," the teachings of Quetzalcoatl, and related New Age nonsense, this book is an important and much-needed breath of fresh air.

The author, H. B. Nicholson, is a distinguished, emeritus anthropologist at UCLA with more than 200 scholarly books and articles to his credit. Unlike many of the purported gurus one can encounter in "Toltec Wisdom" books and on the worldwide web, Nicholson has been steeped in the actual history, mythology and religious outlook of the Toltec civilization since long before Carlos Castaneda ever took his first anthropology course. (And, of course, it bears mentioning that Castaneda himself worked with a Yaqui shaman, not a Toltec one.)

Nicholson wrote his PhD thesis (Harvard University, 1957) on the many difficulties of understanding the fragmentary, frequently contradictory but nevertheless fascinating historical accounts concerning Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl -- a character whose actual historical exploits and philosophical tenets the later Aztecs and Maya would embroider with much myth and legendry, but who nevertheless continues to loom large as a kind of King Arthur of Ancient Mexico: "the once and future lord of the Toltecs," as Nicholson writes.

What set Nicholson's work apart from earlier treatments of Quetzalcoatl was that he laboriously sorted, classified and analyzed all of the historical documents surrounding this important figure, even making full translations of the Spanish, Nahuatl (Aztec) and Mayan accounts. But his dissertation was unfortunately never published, and for decades scholars had to rely on mimeographed versions of Nicholson's thesis to read his account of the exploits of Quetzalcoatl (or, as with this reviewer, had to sneak into Harvard's Tozzer library to make a clandestine photocopy of the protesting buckram-covered tome). But thankfully that is all in the past. This book is a cautiously-updated version of Nicholson's thesis (much of the new material appears in a foreword, and the largely unadulterated original text follows), and can be read with much profit by anyone with an interest in Toltec history, culture and thought.

I would particularly urge any and all Toltec "warrior seers" and "power stalkers" to take a long and earnest look at this important book -- that is, if they do indeed have any genuine interest in what the Toltecs (rather than a Yaqui shaman, as interpreted and channeled by Castaneda and latter-day devotees) actually thought about anything.

Item in as good or better condition than described, arrived promptly, very pleased with purchase, would buy again.

This book is a vibrant collection of over 140 stunningly beautiful and fantastically creative Painted Ponies as photographed by Eduardo Fuss. Created from the minds of some of the Southwest's foremost artists, the life-size horses serve as a publically accessible outdoor art exhibition, and ultimately as a unique vechicle to raise significant money for charitable causes. The vivid photography shows complete ponies as well as the fine detail work that make this art project the success story it has become.

Author Rodney Barker provides the context for the history and spiritual background that is the special inspiration of the Southwestern and particularly Native American artists who so far have dominated this ongoing project.

I find I can't stop paging through this fantasy world of horses painted with Southwestern landscapes, Native American imagery, contemporary and futuristic themes that run the gamut from surprising realism, emotional subject matter, patriotism and humor. Better buy two -- one to thumb through on a regular basis and one to keep pristine!

I love Maria Amparo Escandon. Her writing is real, full of life, and it touches you without being cheesy. This story made me evaluate my relationship with my father. It had never occurred to me that a father and a daughter could have as close of a relationship as one would expect from a mother and a daughter. You will enjoy this story from start to finish. Disfrutala mucho!

Me lleve este libro a mis vacaciones y no pude dejar de leerlo. Los personajes te atrapan lo mismo que las historias de Libertad Gonzalez, tanto en la carcel de Mexicali o mientras maneja trailers por los Estados Unidos. En esta novela la habilidad de Escandon como narradora de historias alcanza un nuevo nivel. Leelo y no te pierdas el sorprendente final.

This book has proven to be very interesting to our guests as they visit our new vacation home in Baja California, Mexico. They love browsing or reading it for insights into the country they are visiting.

In A Traveller's History Of Mexico, historian Kenneth Pearce provides the reader with an informative, engaging history that begins the prehistoric life of the region, and continues with the coming of the Olmecs and the Mayans (1150-1000 BC), whose cultures were subsumed into the Aztec empire. The reader is treated to a vivid account of Aztec life and its ultimate demise with the arrival off the Spanish conquistadors. The consequent greed, corruption, and oppression of Spanish colonial rule and the Catholic Church are covered in detail. Pearce then moves on to the 19th Century War of Independence which led to the founding of the Mexican Republic, the brief reign of Emperor Maximilian and the Empress Carlotta, the dashing Santa Anna (who led the siege on the Alamo); revolutionaries Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, and other influential characters that were caught up in Mexico's' often violent power struggles. Highly recommended for personal, school, and community history collections, A Traveller's History Of Mexico concludes with the last 70 years of one-party political domination, recently ending with an election of the opposition, and the contemporary social issues of an expanding population, drugs, pollution, corruption, and an oppressed indigenous population.