Cogan’s Reviews “The action never stops at the border. There is no other place like it on the globe. The international boundary stretches for almost two thousand miles, from the Pacific Ocean through the mountains, the deserts, the valleys of the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. The region is a vast world unto […]
Continue ReadingBefore we came to live here, I remember reading a newsletter about settling in Mexico. Three reasons were given by the writer for his satisfaction with the move he made to this country after he retired. The first was obvious — the climate. The second — although it is less of a factor today — […]
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Imagine a language course that starts off with the instructor giving a monologue that lasts all of sixty minutes, delivered almost entirely in Spanish. What our teacher, Hugo, gave us on that first day was a rundown, delivered at a normal conversational pace, on what we could expect in the next month. There were very […]
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Cogan’s Reviews A Mexico book by Harriet Doerr Only a sense of duty got me through this boring novel. I know that it comes with all kinds of recommendations and wonderful reviews from all the best sources. Harriet Doerr won the American Book Award in 1984 with her novel “Stones for Ibarra.” And “Consider This…” […]
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Cogan’s Reviews I’ll let you in on a secret about book reviewing. It’s simply this: it’s much more enjoyable to review a book you don’t like than one you like. Dishing out dirt is a helluva lot more fun than singing praises. When you really don’t like a book, it’s wonderful to be able to […]
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Cogan’s Reviews The title of this travel book sounds a bit odd to us now. But the question of whether Baja California was an island was in doubt for a very long time. In fact, as late as 1737, a map was drawn by a German Jesuit that showed the peninsula as an island. Now, […]
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Cogan’s Reviews A Mexico book by ‘Mexico Mike’ Nelson I’d love to have had this book five years ago when we first came to live in Mexico. It’s not that we ran into a string of problems then but it’s just such a useful source of information and opinion about living here it would have […]
Continue ReadingYou can find Karen Hursh Graber’s contributions in many places in MexConnect. She’s a regular contributor with her monthly cooking column, “The Mexican Kitchen”. She also contributes to the food department, “The Cuisines of Mexico”. And she also assists with the web-site’s Food Forum. Here, Kitty, (as she’s known to her friends) came out of […]
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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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