Cogan’s Reviews I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guidebook specifically on Guadalajara and the surrounding area. There are plenty of such books on the Lake Chapala region, serving the many tourists, retirees and ex-pats who find their way down here. But I just don’t recall seeing a specific English text on Mexico’s second largest […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews Here’s a rather unusual volume that certainly took me by surprise. It’s a book about, of all things, ferns. However, as you get into it you soon find out it’s about much more. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about ferns but I have to add that I read this book in one sitting […]
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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 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 Here’s a book of travel essays from a man who obviously admires this country. He’s covered Mexico from coast to coast and from north to south in a criss cross journey that’s well described here. Thus we get informed accounts of places like Cuernavaca, Puerto Vallarta, Oaxaca, Mazatlan and so on, along with […]
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“Zacatecas is the town everyone wants to go back to,” a friend said to me when I mentioned that we were going there. If not quite true, at least I know what she meant. Zacatecas was the first town we stayed in the first time we came to Mexico, back in those days when we […]
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Cogan’s Reviews I suspect this may turn out more like a travel article than a book review. In late March we took a tour through the length of the Copper Canyon and I find it difficult to know how to write about this book without bringing in various aspects of the Canyon trip itself. It […]
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Cogan’s Reviews This is a wonderful mixture of fact and fiction about America, Mexico and baseball. The time of the story is the ‘40s when Mexico had great baseball teams and the Veracruz Blues “was the best ball club that ever was”. The story is about 1946, la temporada de oro, the season of gold. How come […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews Most of us think of the Baja Peninsula as a vast, sprawling, empty, underpopulated space on the Pacific Coast with hundreds of miles of desolate beaches. To a great extent, that’s what it is. For many, it’s a place to avoid, except perhaps for the resorts on the extreme southern tip – Cabo […]
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