No comments about Mexico: Flying High.

1 comments about Motorcycle Journeys Through Northern Mexico.

1. Neal Davis' book is indespensable for any motorcycle trip through northern Mexico. It would be the first thing to go into my saddlebag. Mr. Davis details routes and stops in cities and pueblos down to restaurant menus and hotel phone numbers and rates.
   
   The book is full of detailed advice about border crossings, asking for directions, historical anecdotes and Mr. Davis' sociological observations on Mexican customs and habits including bartering and la famosa mordida.
   
   The detailed description of point to point travel and what can be expected in terms of road conditions and destinations is where the book really shines.
   
   I would have liked a little more on the performance of different motorcycles under off-road condtions; a little more of the nuts and bolts of dual sport riding.
   
   If you plan to tour northern Mexico. I highy recommend you do not leave home without Neal Davis' book.

No comments about Santa Fe and Taos: Under a Coyote Moon.

4 comments about Mexico By RV: A Step By Step Guide To R.V.'ing in Mexico.

1. Because of its abundance of maps and a strong emphasis on the need-to-know issues of daily life in another country, Mexico By RV: A Step By Step Guide to R.V.'ing In Mexico by Kathy Olivas is an extremely practical guide to vacationing, traveling, and exploring in Mexico while enjoying the comforts and mobility of one's own RV. From document requirements to cross the U.S./Mexican border; to necessary vehicular and medical insurance; to traffic laws and driving customs; to shopping (especially with regard to groceries, itinerary suggestions), and so much more, Mexico By RV is a superb travel book and enthusiastically recommended for all Mexico-bound travelers in general, and those with an RV in particular!



2. ...But less than I had hoped for. There is a lot of great info, but you get the impression that half of it is filler. For instance there are 12 pages devoded to street signs that could have been reduced to about two. Some of the suggestions are a little difficult to fathom - Pg 10, talking about the import permit for your RV "Keep the original permit in a secure place and keep only a copy in the vehicle. You will need the original..." Well, where the blank is a safe place with convenient access when I am in Mexico with only my RV???
   There are many interesting looking suggested itineraries for exploring Mexico, but the info is short on them. If you want to know about local sights, bring a regular travel guide with you. The trip from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, Baja has 12 suggested stops, with only one campground suggested in each city. What if they are full? Are the other campgrounds (none specified) NOT suggested? Of the 12 towns, only 2 have rudimentary maps showing the location of the suggested campground.
   With the experience of the authors, and a 2nd edition, I expected a fuller description of the available camping places and the facilities (or lack) available, and a list of dump sites, etc.. With the network of other RVers available to describe and rate places, this could be a GREAT book.



3. After receiving this book, my first impression was of disapointment. Seemed it lacked depth. But after going through it more thorougly, this book gets better and better. The itinaries section will really be useful along my "Guia Roji" map book. And yes, I will go to Mexico and bring it along!



4. The most worthless book I have ever bought. I pity the poor traveler who tries to navigate Mexico with this. I really don't know where to start. Twelve dumb pages of road signs. Six hundred miles below the border is Culiacan; two million people...not on your map.
   You are much better off asking for a map from your insurance man.

No comments about Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Introductions and Indices (Monographs of the School of American Research).

No comments about Santa Fe (Eyewitness Top Ten Travel Guides).

2 comments about New Mexico & Arizona State Parks: A Complete Recreation Guide (State Parks).

1. Don and Barbara Laine have done an outstanding job in this book. I live in New Mexico and we just bought a camper, so I went to the library to get some book on where to go camping. I borrowed a couple of guides for the Southwest, but this book is the only one that anybody ever needs. Every State Park is listed in detail, even little maps for each Park are included. Furthermore they tell you exactly what to expect from each park and what there is to do. This comes in handy when travelling with kids. Equipped with this book we already went to 2 State Parks and found exactly what the Laines had described. This book is a must have for anybody that wants to explore Arizona and New Mexico.



2. The National Parks are great, and they get all the glory, but it will repay you to visit some of the excellent state parks of the Southwest. This book gives the critical information to do so--How to get there, sketch maps of important routes and sites in each park, and brief summaries of the human and/or natural history that caused each park to be established. Recommended.

No comments about Enchanted Waters: A Guide to New Mexico's Hot Springs.

No comments about Built of Earth and Song: Churches of Northern New Mexico.

4 comments about Inherit the Land.

1. A moving essay about the families living on the dumps of Tijuana by a courageous and talented photographer. Every single photograph is testament to the photographer's commitment to bring us closer to the circumstances of their lives. The portraits are poignant, honest, and beautiful.



2. This book by Lueders-Booth was one of the 10 best of last year as rated by American Photo. I take their recommendations with a grain of salt, but this is really first rate documentary photography. Lueders Booth has such respect for his subjects who are struggling to live--with some grace--under the most difficult circumstances. He never
   milks the situation, which so many photographers do today. He's also a photographer's photographer. His way of relating people to their environment is informative, moving, and memorable. The images stay with you. This is a book to own and live with. I can't recommend it more highly



3. If it's true that one picture is worth a thousand words, then Jack Lueders-Booth presents us with a 69,000 word book that you can finish in less time than it takes to read the last night's box scores--or that you can linger over in wonder, page by page, giving yourself over to each, and to the stories implicit in each, for many minutes at a time.
   
   The border has become the topic du jour, and by now the very word border conjures up a reality apart from what, for most of us, is daily life. It's not a particularly evocative or unsettling image, the border, when referring to the dividing line between Italy and Switzerland, or Uruguay and Brazil, or even between two countries claiming, with occasional cross-border skirmishes to italicize those claims, each a piece of the other.
   
   But talk of the border here and it's one and only one you mean and you cross it, north to south, at your own psychic risk. Fictional characters have been discovering it as far back at least as D.H. Lawrence and as recently as Cormac McCarthy, and as actual characters have learned, and continue to learn every day.
   
   Ambrose Bierce was probably not the first and Jack Lueders-Booth will surely not be the last--but Jack's is just as surely as stunning a document of that mythic crossing as we're likely to get.
   
   Now, mythology tells us that heaven belongs to god, hell to the devil, and the borderlands, the wastelands, the shantytowns, the DMZ's, the dumping grounds, the scabby, toxic, orphaned frontier places neither flanking country will acknowledge as its own--these belong to neither the one nor the other but to the trickster.
   
   Call him Hermes. Call him Legba or Exu. Call him Coyote or Lord of the Crossroads. They are one and the same for all their many names. And the Tijuana dumps in "Inherit the Land" seem to have been the classic trickster crossroads for Professor Lueders-Booth.
   
   For it was here that the god unblocked the path to a reality other visitors, perhaps, have experienced, but whose visionary intensity no one's camera ever captured quite this splendidly before.
   
   McCarthy's border trilogy is a masterpiece of modern American prose. Luis Urrea's "Across the Wire," "By the Lake of Sleeping Children," and, now, "Inherit the Land"-is no less a masterpiece trilogy of modern American prose and photography.
   
   Now, we often hear photographers--those who poke their lenses into the sores of the world, that is--accused of aestheticizing their subjects. Yet the poet Rilke tells us that in beauty is the beginning of terror. And the formal beauty of these pictures serve, to my eyes at least, to expose, not distract from, the terror--the terror and the humanity both. And expose them not once, but time and again, keeping them, as only great art can do, fresh, the pain and the beauty just as revelatory on the twentieth viewing, or the hundredth, as on the first.
   
   Anything, however initially exotic or extreme, appalling or enchanting, becomes familiar over time. And while it doesn't necessarily breed contempt, familiarity usually breeds, even worse, complacency and indifference, even oblivion. Oblivion literally in that we forget what first surprised, engrossed, appalled, and bewitched.
   
   "What surprised, appalled, engrossed, bewitched me when I first went to live and work in Calcutta--yet another world," in the words of Luis Alberto Urrea's Introduction, "of stench and dirt and mangled dogs and untouchables--became old hat, hardly noticeable, six months down the line. Even three."
   
   It's up to the artist to keep the knife-edge of perception, reaction and emotion sharp. And that knife's edge is as sharp, in "Inherit the Land," as the light of Mexico itself.



4. A quick impression of the photographs by Lueders-Booth might cause one to remember conversations about 'colonialist gaze' and other such Postmodernist concerns with the representation of foreign cultures. The photographs, however, are much to powerful and engaging to be defeated by such narrow arguments. They present the people of Tijuana, Mexico, living in and around the large municipal dumps that surround their town. Children play, adults search for valuables or burn wood, while makeshift cemeteries are created from scraps and a broken baby crib.
   
   There is a sense in all of these images that there is nothing foreign here at all. In truth, Tijuana is but a stone's throw from the U.S. border, and there is little about these people or their lives that cannot be found inside our borders. They are the faces of poverty, of destitution, and their representation here makes them doubly powerful as symbols of repressive capitalism and the victims of economic oppression.