Mexican Design Style: The publications
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Mexican Details
In their sixth book, authors/designers Karen Witynski and Joe P. Carr travel through Mexico an...
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Six books by Karen Witynski and Joe Carr
These six wonderful books hit a real soft spot because I'm an ardent admirer of Mexican creativity as it exhibits itself so lavishly in art, architecture, the design of everyday objects and the bold approach to color. And I particularly enjoy good photographic books, which these essentially are.
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Zorro by Isabel Allende
There have been several versions of the Zorro story since its initial appearance in 1905 in The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley. When I did a search on Google.com I was offered several thousand references to the character. It's all new to me. It's not really clear to me why a novelist as renowned as Isabel Allende would produce yet another version of this oft told story.
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Treasures in Heaven, a Novel by Kathleen Alcala
Here's an interesting novel set in turn-of-the-century Mexico City. It's a story that's mainly concerned with women's rights, which were just about non-existent in those times, and the political turbulence preceding the Mexican Revolution. Estela, a rather attractive and spirited lady, lives in a small rural town with her infant son, Noé. We meet her at the point in her life when she is leaving her husband and heading for Mexico City. Essentially she's looking for her former lover, Dr. Victor Carranza.
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Bilimbique: A Story From Mexico by Peggy Brown Balderrama
One of the problems with reviewing this short but interesting novel is that the plot is based on a couple of surprises. To say too much about it would spoil the story. Once the action gets well underway the reader is presented with a surprising development involving one of the main characters. At that point the reader can even be forgiven for believing the story is essentially over. Read on however, and you'll find that Sra. Balderrama has another trick up her sleeve for the last chapter, a ploy that makes the experience of reading Bilimbique even more satisfying.
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Tears from the Crown of Thorns: The Easter Passion Play in San Miguel de Allende
"People unfamiliar with the Latin culture are curious, confused, and sometimes repulsed by the emphasis on suffering in religious figures. During Easter in North America, the focus is on the resurrection and the delights of spring. The event is concerned with the awe of transformation. There is resistance to facing the suffering that is a major part of this epic…."
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Mexican Folk Art from Oaxacan Artist Families by Arden Aibel Rothstein and Anya Leah Rothstein
There are hundreds of photos of all kinds of artistic output, from pottery to wood carvings, from basket weaving to candle making, and lots more but we're given a much closer look at the actual creators of all this work. We're treated to wonderful works featuring mermaids, clowns, devils, angels, fishes, skeletons, Biblical scenes, animals and birds of all kinds, and even ladies of the night. These are all used to decorate masks, bedspreads, candles, baskets, jewelry, furniture, statues, toys, pottery and clothing and much, much more plus some 87 brief biographies of each of the artists.
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Mexican Mornings: Essays South of the Border by Michael Hogan
Here's an interesting and entertaining collection of essays, mainly about Mexico, like "The Crawling Things of Paradise", a small tribute to all the crawling, flying, buzzing, poisonous, and non-poisonous insects to be found in the state of Jalisco. In the essay "Connections: Odysseus and the Gran Chingón" we find a quite learned investigation into the prevalence of machismo in Latin American society. On the more sober side there are copious references throughout - both critical and positive - to the Mexican natural environment, the economy and the Mexican character.
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Mexican Lives by Judith Adler Hellman
Ms. Hellman, who is a Professor of Political and Social Science at York University in Toronto, writes about fifteen Mexicans in all walks of life. They emerge as authentic and likeable people, coping with problems that you and I can scarcely imagine. The people she describes range from well-to-do agri-business people to maids; from industrialists to a coyote who has been successfully smuggling illegals into California almost every night of the week for the last few years.
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Frida: A Novel Based on the Life of Frida Kahlo by Barbara Mujica
"Although events in Mexican history and in Frida's life provide the general framework, many incidents and characters portrayed here are the author's inventions. Although many of Frida's biographers mention her younger sister, Christina, I have reinvented the youngest Kahlo girl to make her a perspicacious witness to Frida's life. My intention in writing Frida was to capture the essence of Frida Kahlo's personality, not to document her life. I was particularly interested in what it might be like to be the unexceptional sister of such an exceptional woman…."
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The Law of Love by Laura Esquivel
Even though the story starts out calmly enough, by the time you reach chapter two, you're in the middle of the wildest kind of fantasy, part new age and part sci-fi, complete with time travel, space travel, reincarnation, astrology and almost anything else you can imagine. The time span of the book stretches from the fall of Moctezuma to the 23rd century
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The Mexican Day of the Dead and The Skeleton at the Feast
This is a compilation of photos, drawings, essays, poems, letters, parts of novels and stories and other sources, all designed to shed light on this unique and enduring Mexican festival. I was also intrigued by the odd coincidence that I happened to read it on the actual Day of the Dead, November 2.
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Like Water for Chocolate
"Like Water for Chocolate" is a sort of combined novel and cookbook. Food plays a very prominent part in the narrative. The heroine, Tita, is a wonderful cook and we are even provided with her recipes along with the action. The story is set at the time of the Mexican Revolution - 1910-1920 - in Piedras Negras in Northern Mexico. And, like so many Mexican stories, it concerns a family. The story mainly concerns Tita, the youngest daughter, the remarkable cook and originator of all those recipes.
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Rain of Gold
This novel is a kind of Mexican "Roots" - a big family survival saga covering three generations of two families, complete with a large cast of characters. Author Villaseñor has based his complex, sprawling tale on the experiences of his own family members and his interviews with them. In fact, even though this is a novel, the author has included several actual family photos of the people he's writing about. It certainly lends a measure of authenticity to the narrative. Historically, the novel covers the period from the Mexican Revolution, around 1910, to the Prohibition era in California. The action takes place in many parts of Mexico and in many states in the U.S.
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A writer's education from the mean streets of Mexico City
Plaza Garibaldi, 2 a.m., and the mean streets are bopping.
Beers flowing. Flowing friends. Tequilas, too. Maybe a few too many.
What the hell. You'll get a taxi ...
You are a writer and this is a fi...
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Mexican Etiquette and Ethics by Boye Lafayette de Mente
"The key to understanding the ‘Mexican Way’ of doing business is to recognize that business management in Mexico has traditionally been an application of cultural attitudes and customs - not the objective, pragmatic function that is associated with management in the United States and other practical-minded countries."
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Consider This, Señora
The highly improbable plot concerns two characters, Sue and Bud, who come together on a dried up mesa where there’s a lake and a nearby town. Sue is an artist, trying to find herself in Mexico. Bud is on the run from the IRS for non-payment of taxes. The two form a highly unlikely union and purchase ten acres of land in order to set up a business building houses on the slopes overlooking the lake. The story covers a few years in the lives of Sue and Bud. Other characters appear, of course. A few people do buy the houses that Bud builds. Such as the elderly Ursula who seems to have come to Mexico to die. And then there’s Fran, another lady with Mexican connections who wants to build a home in this unlikely place as a way to hang on to her handsome Mexican lover. There are also some locals who move in and out of the plot - the town mayor, a young doctor, maids, gardeners, etc.
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Omerta
OMERTA
By Mario Puzo Random House; 316 pages; $25.95
Reviewed by Jules Siegel
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, July 9, 2000
"Omerta," Mario Puzo's posth...
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The Mexicans: A personal portrait of a people
Author Oster's portraits make this an excellent account of a timeless and yet changing Mexico. His approach is to focus on twenty varied individuals and use them as a reason to discuss the larger issues they represent.
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Cities of the Plain
What a disappointment! I really enjoyed the first two books of this trilogy: All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing. But this final volume is something of a letdown. McCarthy still has that great prose gift going for him, but, in this case, it's in the service of a rather tawdry narrative. The two heroes of the first volumes come together here. To refresh your memory, they're Billy Parham and John Grady Cole. The time: 1952. The place: New Mexico and various border cities of Mexico. Our lads are a couple of ranch hands in an area that is soon to be taken over by the government for nuclear testing. The times are a-changing and a way of life is disappearing.
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The Orange Tree
Society's fascination with the wild outsider
Immersed in the history of art and literature, weaved into the superstitions of the collective consciousness, and illumined by the silver screens of cinema, the Wild Man paradoxically basks in the ligh...
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Mexico City's "apocalypse" has come and gone: Mexican photographer Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
In the novel "Virtual Light," cyberpunk author William Gibson envisages a Mexico City of the near future where the air is a sooted ebon and the populace wears oxygen masks.
It might seem far-fetched, ...
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