Cogan’s Reviews It’s hard for a reader to know exactly what to make of this one. Is it fiction? Or is it biography? Or is it something in between? In an author’s note Ms. Mujica states: “Although events in Mexican history and in Frida’s life provide the general framework, many incidents and characters portrayed here […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews I started to read this book expecting to hate it. However, I’m not going to end up saying I read it, and then loved it. Despite some pretty obvious problems, it was a bit better than I expected. The good thing about “Mexico” is that Michener has done enormous research in order to […]
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Cogan’s Reviews This isn’t a book about Mexico. Rather, it’s about Mexicans in California right now. It explores the issue of illegal immigration by examining the lives of four characters – two very well-off Californians, Delaney Mossbacher, a nature writer, and his real estate agent wife, Kyra, and a Mexican couple, Cándido Rincón, and his […]
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Cogan’s Reviews Here’s a collection of stories with a rather unusual theme. Mexico isn’t just the place where the action takes place in these tales. Rather, it’s as if Mexico – sunny, exotic, mysterious and occasionally slightly dangerous – is yet another character in each of the tales. There are 18 stories here, by authors […]
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 I reviewed Chandos’s other book, “House in the Sun”, in MexConnect a couple of months ago and now I’m catching up on what was actually the author’s first book, published four years earlier. The later book covered his life in Ajijic, running a bed & breakfast and dealing with a mixed bag of visitors, as […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews Cynicism isn’t my favorite literary mode. It wears thin after a while. And John Ross is nothing if not cynical. For the first two chapters I wondered if I was going to make it all the way. However, the saving factor in his book, “The Annexation of Mexico” is that most of the […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews This is a novel about a couple of Americans who choose to leave San Francisco and live in a small, remote Mexican village. They are Richard and Sara Everton. Their purpose is to reopen a copper mine that was abandoned by Richard’s grandfather fifty years ago in the Revolution of 1910. The novel, […]
Continue ReadingCogan’s Reviews What a wonderful book this is for explaining some of the mysteries of Mexico. It’s not pretty stuff but one emerges with great admiration for the Mexican people and their ability to survive in a plainly rotten social and economic system. Ms. Hellman, who is a Professor of Political and Social Science at […]
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