Cogan’s Reviews I’ve been heard a couple of times lately saying out loud: “What an absolutely amazing country this is!” We were in Patzcuaro a short time ago one Sunday morning when the town’s market was in full swing. An incredible variety of goods were on display. And with all that colorful activity around us, […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews It’s hard for a reader to know exactly what to make of this one. Is it fiction? Or is it biography? Or is it something in between? In an author’s note Ms. Mujica states: “Although events in Mexican history and in Frida’s life provide the general framework, many incidents and characters portrayed here […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews I started to read this book expecting to hate it. However, I’m not going to end up saying I read it, and then loved it. Despite some pretty obvious problems, it was a bit better than I expected. The good thing about “Mexico” is that Michener has done enormous research in order to […]
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Cogan’s Reviews This isn’t a book about Mexico. Rather, it’s about Mexicans in California right now. It explores the issue of illegal immigration by examining the lives of four characters – two very well-off Californians, Delaney Mossbacher, a nature writer, and his real estate agent wife, Kyra, and a Mexican couple, Cándido Rincón, and his […]
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Cogan’s Reviews Here’s a collection of stories with a rather unusual theme. Mexico isn’t just the place where the action takes place in these tales. Rather, it’s as if Mexico – sunny, exotic, mysterious and occasionally slightly dangerous – is yet another character in each of the tales. There are 18 stories here, by authors […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews In October I reviewed ” Miraculous Air” by C.M. Mayo, the story of one woman’s journey around the one thousand mile stretch of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Here’s another – which I enjoyed just as much – in that same ‘intrepid ladies’ genre, where Isabella Tree tells about her solitary travels to various parts of […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews “Mexifornia,” to quote the author, “is about the nature of a new California and what it means for America – a reflection upon the strange society that is emerging as the result of a demographic and a cultural revolution like no other in our times.” Thus Victor Davis Hanson opens his close examination […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews I reviewed Chandos’s other book, “House in the Sun”, in MexConnect a couple of months ago and now I’m catching up on what was actually the author’s first book, published four years earlier. The later book covered his life in Ajijic, running a bed & breakfast and dealing with a mixed bag of visitors, as […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews Cynicism isn’t my favorite literary mode. It wears thin after a while. And John Ross is nothing if not cynical. For the first two chapters I wondered if I was going to make it all the way. However, the saving factor in his book, “The Annexation of Mexico” is that most of the […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews This is a novel about a couple of Americans who choose to leave San Francisco and live in a small, remote Mexican village. They are Richard and Sara Everton. 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, […]
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