Cogan’s Reviews A Mexico book by Carlos Fuentes Here’s Fuentes at it again, publishing short stories and novellas under a single title and trying to interlink them into a cohesive whole as he tried to do in The Crystal Frontier. The connection here is the orange tree, the symbol of Spain. “Could any image verify […]
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Cogan’s Reviews This is an odd volume. I originally bought it because it advertises itself as “a gathering of some of the best travel writing ever” about Mexico. However, you quickly find as you dip into it that not all the articles are about travel. Also, very few of them have been written in recent […]
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Cogan’s Reviews 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. Twice I found myself interested enough in the setting to refer to my maps to find the towns in the desolate border area McCarthy writes about. […]
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Cogan’s Reviews In 1952, John Steinbeck won an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay of the movie, Viva Zapata! Many years later, however, a manuscript was found in UCLA Library in which it was discovered he had written extensively about his subject, other than simply the screenplay. It’s that document that makes up the major […]
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Cogan’s Reviews Readers of these reviews may remember that I was a big fan of Jenning’s previous work, Aztec . I gave it my highest accolade – five stars. And here comes the sequel, which is almost as good. The action in this one takes place 12 years after all the goings on in Aztec and concerns […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews Here’s a nifty idea for a book for both Spanish language students and for people interested in Mexico. Author De Mente has found an effective way to reach both groups with a volume that takes a studious and careful look at 130 key words in Spanish and has written a couple of pages […]
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Cogan’s Reviews Mexican immigration into the U.S., according to the author, represents “the greatest migration of people in the history of humanity.” She estimates that some 5 million legal Mexican immigrants reside in the U.S. plus there’s a further 2 million illegal immigrants also in the country. Those numbers actually seem low. They were produced […]
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Cogan’s Reviews As novelist and travel writer Tony Cohan says in his narrative about San Miguel de Allende: “My editor wanted me to write about life here in the region where we live. At that time, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato and Querétero ranked a page or two each in the guide books, day stops […]
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Cogan’s Reviews Here’s a rather odd novel from the author of “The Bridges of Madison Country” and “Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend”. I’ve always thought of Waller as a writer of romances, going only by the titles of his books, never having read any of them. This one, however, is a quite suspenseful “chase” story […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews It’s made up of some 48 items about the country taken from a wide variety of sources. And they’re almost all interesting. The topics cover the gamut of attractions and delights from a dissertation on mariachis to Carlos Fuentes’ essay on Mexico City’s main square. Nothing is more Mexican than the mariachis’ songs […]
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