Mexico Books

This book is the most thorough book on Acapulco that I have seen to date & its strictly on Acapulco unlike many others that begin to dive into other Mexican destinations...

The Guide was very helpful in getting our family oriented in an area where we had never traveled before. The resturant advise was right on as were the warnings about the traffic!! It was used by several members of our group to find interesting activities from surfing to fishing to ski boats.

I had a hard timing finding a road map of Guatemala. This is excellent, including being printed on paper that can get wet.

I am an eager map collector mainly of Guatemala and Central America and this is the best map of Guatemala available, it shows all the features like altitude, roads, natural sightseeing, maya ruins, points of interest, caves, air landing fields, etc. It is more complete than the ones developed locally. Great map ! No doubt

Out of the other reference guides, this is the one that is more down to the earth. I read it and then I decided to go to Mexico. It proved to be a great reference for my trip. It covered the most important attractions. It is a little bit outdated in pricing and some of the newest attractions, but it does not affect the quality of the information presented. The rest of the guides were not a representation of the reality of Mexico. This one is.

There is no other guide better than EyeWitness when you are travelling. Perhaps if you are doing backpacking, it will not solve your need to know bus stops, schedules, taxi fares, etc. However, it offers plenty of cultural info, colourful diagrams, suggested walking trips, and offers a good historical and social background for what you are about to visit. In this case, being a Mexican, I feel Eyewitness offers a very good idea of the Mexican social and cultural environment, not only for first-time travelleres, but even to natives as I am.

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.