A House Far South in Mexico by Elaine Dandh
This is a reminiscence by Ms. Dandh about how she and her husband, Ken, retired and left their home in Massachusets and came and settled in Guadalajara. It's a month-by-month account of their first year of living in Mexico, getting to know the people and the place.
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Speaking Spanish like a Native by Brad Kim and Erika Dominguez
Here's a rather unusual approach to learning Spanish. It's not intended for beginners but rather for people who have already spent some time studying the language and want to go further, especially in the direction of becoming more adept at conversation. What Brad Kim has done here is to give us a collection of everyday expressions, exactly like the expressions we use when we speak English, which will enhance conversational skills. Start using a few and you'll sound more down-to-earth and impressive to your listeners.
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Only Once in a Lifetime by Alejandro Grattan
Here's a story that takes in a complete life, from childhood well into adulthood, and from rags to riches. It's a story that is of interest to we residents in the Lake Chapala area as it starts out in Ajijic and covers a fair number of years there - or should I say here. On page one we encounter ten-year-old Francisco Obregón, a homeless barefoot orphan outside the Old Posada on the Ajijic waterfront. It's 1940 and Francisco is hustling for odd jobs and tips. It's the only way he can manage to survive.
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Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya by Jeanine Lee Kitchel
This is the story about Jeanine Lee Kitchel and her husband, Paul, who made their first trip to the Yucatan Peninsula in 1985 and fell in love instantly with the place. They had visited various parts of Mexico before that and were quite taken with the country. But the Yucatan beaches were of a different order. It seems that almost from the very start they determined that they would like to build a house and live there.
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Midlife Mavericks - Women Reinventing their Lives in Mexico by Karen Blue
Here's an interesting collection of stories of nineteen women who came on their own to Mexico in recent years to settle in the Lake Chapala area. The book consists of eighteen interviews plus the story of the author herself. The women range in age from their 40's to their 80's. Their backgrounds and experiences and approaches to life are as varied as you can imagine.
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Brain Surgeon by William Wallace and Memoirs of the Future by Eduard Prugovecki
This month's column is a little bit different as I'm not reviewing one particular book on or about Mexico. Rather, I'd like to take the opportunity to pay tribute to some local writers here in the Guadalajara/Lake Chapala area. I recently had the experience of reading and enjoying four books, all within a very brief time span, and then realized that all four were written by local writers.
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Live Well in Mexico by Ken Luboff
What Luboff has set out here is all the basic information one needs on a host of topics relevant to moving to Mexico. You'll find details on acquiring residency documents, whether or not to buy or rent a house, working in Mexico, how to bring your car here, how to move your furniture here and so on. You’ll also find hints and tips on staying healthy, dining out, hiring help, what to bring on your first trip, road safety, the best ways to get from one place to another and much, much more. Indeed, there is hardly a page that doesn’t have some useful hint or tip on living here successfully.
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The New Oxford Spanish Picture Dictionary by E. C. Parnwell
The Dictionary is based on a rather neat and simple idea to help us learn new words in Spanish and for providing us with the names of hundreds of everyday products and articles.
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Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge by Joel Simon
There's no good news in Joel Simon's book. It's a catalog of the awful things that have happened in Mexico since the time of the Conquest.
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True Tales from Another Mexico by Sam Quinones
An odd mixture of very positive descriptions of the country along with some appalling examples of what can happen south of the border.
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Mexico Way by Robert Moss
Bob Culbertson, a Border Patrol chief, is chasing Mexican border crossers somewhere in Texas when a light aircraft in obvious difficulties flies overhead and then crashes in the scrub. Culbertson and his partner go to investigate and find two dead men and 40 or 50 bags of cocaine in the aircraft. One of the men has a satchel with a pouch in it. When he examines it, he finds a collection of government documents which he believes are CIA papers.
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The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes
The book consists of nine short narratives - stories, if you like - each one occurring in the hazy borderline between Mexico and America - what Fuentes chooses to call the crystal frontier.
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All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
You would be hard pressed to find a more Mexican novel than this one. Just about all of the action takes place in the state of Coahuila. I don’t particularly enjoy reading westerns but such is the power of McCarthy’s writing that I was drawn into those small researches simply to enhance my enjoyment of his book.
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Mexico Magico: Everything You Wanted to Know by German Estrada Navarro
This is a well-organized and clearly presented compilation of data about this country that any newcomers - and some old-timers, too - could use.
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Atticus: A Novel by Ron Hansen
Atticus Cody is a 67 year old Colorado rancher. He’s a very successful straight-shooting kind of guy. He has a son, Scott, who is a painter, evidently talented. He has gone to Mexico and is out of touch with his father. Atticus cares: Scott doesn’t seem to be concerned. When the story opens, Atticus has learned about Scott’s death, by suicide, in a place called Resurrección, near Cancun. Atticus goes to Resurrección to pick up his son’s body and return it to Colorado. There he meets up with the cast of characters who knew Scott, most of whom are, at best, hippies and bohemians, at worst, drifters and fugitives.
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Live Better South of the Border by 'Mexico Mike' Nelson
I’d love to have had this book five years ago when we first came to live in Mexico. It’s not that we ran into a string of problems then but it’s just such a useful source of information and opinion about living here it would have cut a lot of corners for us at the time. As the author says, this book is written for people of all ages who want to live in Mexico and Central America, from retirees to baby-boomers who want a new life to artists and writers who want a stimulating and less expensive way of life.
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The Dark Side of the Dream by Alejandro Grattan-Dominguez
The story begins in 1941, at the time America went to war with Japan and Germany. It concerns the Salazar family, poor farmers in Chihuahua. The grandfather, Sebastian, knows he is dying and he advises the family to move to the United States. He reasons that because of the war the Americans will want lots of people to work in their country as their men go off to fight. Their farm is a ruin. Only expensive fertilizer could bring it back to life. And they don't have any money.
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House in the Sun by Dane Chandos
As the legend goes, Dane Chandos came to Ajijic and made his house into an Inn and, in the process, met a mixed bag of people who also visited the place, which the author describes as "nestling between the lake and the paws of the mountains." There's a full-blooded Mexican Army general and an interesting French countess who arrives alone, wearing a mink stole who makes extravagant demands on the establishment. And there's a pedantic German professor who feels compelled to explain everything he encounters in scientific terms….and many many others.
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A Mexican Odyssey: Escape to Paradise by William Reed with Sylvia Garces de Reed
William Reed tells us his own personal story and what a tale it is. Most of the action takes place in Puerto Vallarta where Reed has lived since his move to the beach in '72. He seems to have met everyone who ever went there - including some very well-known ones, such as actor Richard and Elizabeth Burton, Peter O'Toole, Xaviera Hollander and many, many others. Two people who figure most prominently in the story are movie director John Huston and Johnny Weissmueller (Tarzan himself). In the struggle for Huston's affections, William Reed was the loser. It all adds up to quite a story.
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Village in the Sun by Dane Chandos
I reviewed Chandos's other book, "House in the Sun", in Mexico Connect a couple of months ago and now I'm catching up on what was actually the author's first book, published four years earlier. We're given a good long loving look at the various events that mark a typical year in a Mexican village - like The Day of the Dead, the Day of the Cross, Navidad, birthdays and the other festivals that are customarily celebrated. It all adds up to an attractive narrative.
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Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico by David Lida
Lida's writing and his choice of material cast a powerful spell.
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The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle
This isn't a book about Mexico. Rather, it's about Mexicans in California right now.
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Inside Mexico: Living, Travelling and Doing Business in a Changing Society by Paula Heusinkveld
This is a very useful book for explaining Mexicans to the rest of us North Americans. Professor Heusinkveld has set out to cover Mexican attitudes to business relationships, social interactions, culture, customs and values and has largely succeeded in describing our neighbors in understandable ways. I would like to have read "Inside Mexico" four years ago when we first came here to live. However, perhaps it's only now, after four years' experience in the country, that I can really appreciate the people.
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Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr
This is a novel about Richard and Sara Everton, a couple of Americans who choose to leave San Francisco and live in a small, remote Mexican village. Their purpose is to reopen a copper mine that was abandoned by Richard's grandfather fifty years ago in the Revolution of 1910. The novel depicts their arrival and their integration into Ibarra.
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Retire in Mexico: Live Better for Less by Dru Pearson
Author Dru Pearson has done an excellent job of researching and compiling almost everything anyone needs to know about adopting this country as a place to spend one's leisure years, either part-time or full-time. I can't think of any important topic that isn't covered here. Also, while it isn't the first book of this type to become available, I think it's the first - to my knowledge, at least, to be strictly computer accessible.
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