The United States and Mexico struggled through volatile years of suffering and carnage to become unified nations. Michael Hogan’s thoroughly researched and passionately written "Abraham Lincoln and Mexico" is a thought-provoking read that covers part of that struggle from 1822, when Americans settlers first arrived on Mexican territory, to 1867, when Mexico finally freed itself from France’s intrusion into its territory. The nineteenth century was a turbulent period in American and Mexican history. read more

The title of Mikel Miller's new book, I Love Baja!, was inspired by locals who again and again told him, "I love Baja!". These same locals, reading this new edition of I Love Baja!, are probably saying, "I love Mikel's book," because it is written by a former resident who indeed knows and loves Baja... but it is also useful to those already living there and, in fact, fascinating to all Mexico aficionados... read more

Judy King's Living at Lake Chapala is a must have book for any expatriate living at Lake Chapala, and it is a very useful book for any expatriate anywhere in Mexico.

It is a book to keep beside the bed, or on the coffee table, or even on the car seat.

Arranged in six parts, the 76 chapters tell you just about everything you could want to know about living the Mexico adventure.

At the very beginning of Living at Lake Chapala, Judy tells us "This is the book I needed when I arrived in Mexico." It might be the book you need as well.... read more

The Girl from Veracruz is the twelfth and latest novel in John Scherber's Murder in Mexico mystery series. Like most of the others, it is set largely in San Miguel de Allende (although there is a trip to Veracruz).

It features the same team of detectives that we have come to care for in the preceding novels: Paul Zacher, age 40, a reasonably popular local artist; the lovely Maya Sanchez, his life partner (for the most part) and now head of the Paul Zacher Agency; and Cody Williams, a retired homicide detective from Peoria, Illinois. We also meet again Licenciado Diego Delgado, their contact with the San Miguel Judicial Police.

The story begins at the morgue... read more

Much of the novel, which takes place in 1982, is about the Huichols and Richter means "to introduce the reader to the Huichol people, their culture and religious life centered on peyote visions…."

For the Huichol, "the sacred and the secular are the same world, real and physical, enrapturing and mystical. Body, mind, and spirit; corn, deer, and peyote; nothing separates the idea from the daylight or the dream. It is all the same."

As in the finest of adventure stories — from The Odyssey to the present — Robert Richter´s protagonist, Cotton Waters, "Algo," is a seemingly ordinary man, not particularly successful in the eyes of the world, who for complicated reasons accepts a journey that has extraordinary challenges and that will change him forever...

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This little book is just the right size to tuck into your glove compartment or even into a large shirt pocket. Wildlife of the Yucatan Peninsula: The Explorer Family's Guide and Journal is a collection, divided into three color-coded sections, of fifty photos of marine life, mammal life, and bird life that you may encounter in the Yucatan Peninsula... read more

Do you remember that best seller several decades ago, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which author Robert Pirsig details (but gets lost in digressions) a motorcycle trip from Wisconsin to California?

David Bryen's new book, Riding off the Edge of the Map, is a much better book, detailing (and reflecting upon) a far more fascinating motorcycle trip — through Mexico's Copper Canyon.

What began as a pleasure trip metamorphosed into something else: "The highway had deteriorated from asphalt to terror..."

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As Tony notes in his Introduction, this is "not intended to b a comprehensive guide to all the possible day trips and longer tours in the region…. Rather, it is a personal, idiosyncratic collection of my favorite places in Western Mexico…." The book is filled with whatever Tony finds fascinating… interesting and curious details of history and geography and geology and flora and fauna, and art and architecture and archaeology.... read more

he year was 1916. Young Frank Holloway "got mercury poisoning working in the Silver Creek Mine in Mogollón, New Mexico." To recover his health, his doctor told him to get away and go have "an adventure."

And so… perhaps lacking judgment because of the mercury poisoning, Frank opted for danger as well as adventure. On Tosca, his beloved mare, he rode south, and fifty miles west of El Paso he crossed the border into Mexico.

Frank, "with a fool's luck, managed to pick his way… between horse thieves from both sides, the Texas rangers who pursued them, Pancho Villa's Dorados, General Pershing's 6,000 gringo troops who were chasing Villa after the raid at Columbus, New Mexico,... read more

In July of 1969, Bulgarian born artist-adventurer Dimitar Krustev, almost 50 years old, and his inexperienced young companion named Gary set off, in their folding kayak, to explore, traveling on its waters, the jungles of southern Chiapas, the still largely unknown land of the Lancandon Maya.

In 1969, this culture was already in decline, undermined by the relentless forces of what some still call progress.

Jungle adventures are always challenging. This trip was a very difficult one for Gary, his young companion, and although difficult as well for Krustev, the artist was generally of a calm and philosophically disposed spirit... read more

Let the Water Hold Me Down has the makings of a classic.

It is written with skill and with grace, and the old verities that are at the heart of being human are here: loss and grief, guilt and longing, loyalty and love.

Set in modern-day Mexico, it tells the story of Hank Singer and is also about his relationship with César Lobos de Madrid, whose "family was one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most politically connected in Chiapas, if not in all of Mexico."

Hank has arrived just a few weeks before the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, led by Subcomandante Marcos, who on January 1, 1994, declared war against the government and the military... read more

The story begins as Mark Sands, a successful money manager — after little people with grubby hands drug him and drop him over the parapet of his broad veranda — is falling twenty-seven floors to his death.

Feeling detached, perhaps defensively, from his plummeting body, Sands wonders, "How had the little people emerged from the painting over his buffet?

It was his Rafael Cantú masterpiece, The Last Supper, the prize of his collection. And they were the characters from the painting. He recognized the odd, ragged leather outfits.

Had he been murdered by these nightmare versions of Christ and the Apostles?" ... read more

Xtabentum: A Novel of Yucatan begins in 1906, in those tense years just preceding the Mexican Revolution. A woman in Merida is giving birth to a baby girl, who will be named Amanda Diaz, and who will be one of the principal characters in Xtabentum.

The young Amanda, with the help of her thoughtful father, begins to understand la Casta Divina, the Divine Class, and how most members of this class "considered themselves superior by birth and the lighter color of their skin." read more

The Theft of the Virgin is the ninth book in John Scherber's Murder in Mexico series. He tells a good story.

In The Theft of the Virgin, sixty paintings from the popular Vergruen Reference Collection of outstanding masterpieces of art — all forgeries — are on temporary display at the Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende... But are they all forgeries?

Paul Zacher, one of many talented artists in San Miguel de Allende, is our protagonist and for the most part our narrator.

Zacher suspects a scheme that is putting originals into the hands of very amoral and very wealthy collectors. read more

John Scherber's thoughtful and satisfying book, San Miguel de Allende: A Place in the Heart (2010), is a collection of stories about North Americans "who live here full time, as I do." San Miguel de Allende is their home.

The idea of the book originated when Scherber, after living in San Miguel for only eight months, began asking himself questions like: "What had I given up to come here, and what had I gained? What was my new role in the community? Was I an exile? An expatriate? Would I ever live in the States again? How did I react to Americans I saw here visiting? What had I done?" read more

All of his life, Bayley had listened to the stories told to him by his beloved grandmother, stories that usually were about her father, Bayley's great-grandfather Arturo (Arthur Greenhalgh, born 1874 in Tottington, England) who managed a cotton mill in western Mexico in those challenging years immediately preceding the Mexican Revolution.

Worried about life passing him by, in 1898 Arturo "kissed his sweetheart Mariah goodbye and set off on his Mexican adventures."

Bayley, over one-hundred years later, "was plagued by the same fear about life passing me by." read more

Gina is a "good deal older" than her circle of "newly retired women with educations, raised in the United States of America but now living in Mexico.

She helps her gardener with his English, takes pleasure in her garden, is fascinated by the old Mayan legends, grateful for the sacrifices of their gods, and holds sacred the food she receives.

A principle she lives by is this: "be thankful and say so regularly." She feels in her heart that this religious attitude is "much easier to grasp than the more intellectual, less sensory religions…." read more

I like the Moon Handbooks and I own several of them — well used, I might add. They are sturdy, easy to read, compact and therefore easily packable whether in luggage or purse or large pocket. This latest, a first edition, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato & The Bajío, covers one of Mexico's most popular tourist destinations.

A resident of San Miguel de Allende for several years, the author, Julie Doherty, writes both with affection and enthusiasm about the Bajío — a vast central plain that includes the states of Guanajuato and Querétaro.

She concentrates on two lovely towns, San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato, but she also offers us a glimpse of Querétaro City, Tequisquiapan, San Sebastian Bernal, Dolores Hildalgo, Mineral de Pozos, and the large manufacturing city of León. read more

This book really does tell you about everything you need to know if you are planning to move to Lake Chapala, one of the most popular retirement sites in the world for North Americans.

Alejandro Grattan-Dominguez, Editor-in-Chief of El Ojo del Lago, has this to say: "I found it highly readable, most comprehensive, and flawlessly organized. I think it's the best book of its kind that I have read, and I have been down here for 25 years."

Is the information current? You bet! Why? Because Lisa Jorgensen only moved here this past spring. read more

Bill Frayer just can't stop cranking out poems based on his two favorite themes: his new life in Mexico and his old life — particularly family memories — in the States.

Migration is his third book in a little over three years. Now collecting belongings has been replaced by collecting experiences, and collecting memories of past experiences.

I am reminded a bit of one of my dad's favorite tee-shirts, which reads: "The less you own, the more you have." read more

The title announces that it is a history of "Ajijic: 500 Years of Adventures," but in fact, most of the book is a pleasant and satisfying collection of various articles, memoirs, interviews, about fairly recent life in Ajijic including Jocotepec and Chapala. This charming little book, put together by the Thomas Paine Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was compiled by long-term Ajijic residents Alexandra Bateman and Nancy Bollenbach. read more

For decades now, the Pints — who live in Zapopan, Jalisco — have wandered off-the-beaten paths in search of the beautiful and the mysterious and the interesting.

And in this book they have gathered articles they have written about rivers and canyons, caves, volcanoes (both active and inactive), hot (and cold) springs, waterfalls, petroglyphs, pre-Columbian tombs, circular pyramids, boiling mud pots, even poltergeists, and exotic flora and fauna… all within a few hours of Guadalajara. read more

Flirting in Spanish is not a "how-to-do-it" book. It is the true story of Susan McKinney, the 33-year-old daughter of former NBA coach Jack McKinney, who moved to Mexico to write, but soon met and "fell hopelessly and utterly in love" with Carlos, a poor Mexican teenager.

The story began in 1992 in San Miguel de Allende. Susan, in Mexico less than three months and having "decimated whatever savings I once had," supplemented her meagre but easy-earned modeling income by teaching English.

Carlos, the poor Mexican teenager, was indeed wise for his years; after her first class was over, he alone "remained, still seated at the second desk in the middle row, watching me." read more

Our protagonist Jonah crosses the border at Nuevo Laredo — the year is 1996 — and heads over to the coast and down to Mazatlan.

"He found a cheap room at a dive called Hotel Milan in Old Town — the historic center of a coastal metropolis split into neatly demarcated districts of progress and poverty on a peninsula snaking up the coastline of Nayarit."

In Mazatlan he joins up with three New Zealanders, harmless jerks, introduces himself "and played at acting the chum." In San Blas — "on a spit of white land divided by estuaries, surrounded by jungle" — they buy some cheap dope, but the transaction turns out to be a set-up read more

Frank Dolezal, fighting for Pancho Villa during the Mexican revolution, was captured by some of Venustiano Carranza's troops, taken before a mockery of a trial, and was charged with "Treason against the legitimate government of Mexico." With fifteen other prisoners he was taken to a clearing, offered a final cigarette, and then shot. Miraculously he survived. read more