| | |  Entertainment | Books | March 2009 
March Book Recommendations from Mexico Book Club
 Ed Hutmacher - MexicoBookClub.com
| | For more information on these or other books with Mexico-related themes, please visit MexicoBookClub.com. | |
Spring is upon us, the season of renewal, which makes this a great time to refresh or satisfy your interest in Mexico and its people. Below are three good reads from our March book recommendations that we think you’ll enjoy.
Pancho Villa and Black Jack Pershing: The Punitive Expedition in Mexico by James W. Hurst (2007/Greenwood Publishing Group/Non-fiction) — In the early morning hours of March 9, 1916, some five hundred paramilitary forces under the command of revolutionary leader Francisco "Pancho" Villa raided the U.S. border town of Columbus, New Mexico. The nearby Army garrison was attacked, homes and stores were looted, the downtown business district was torched and eighteen U.S. civilians and soldiers were killed before Villa retreated across the border into Mexico. An outraged President Wilson dispatched a U.S. Army expedition commanded by General John "Black Jack" Pershing to pursue the marauding Villistas. Because Pancho Villa and his main force evaded Pershing's cavalry, the one-year "punitive expedition" has typically been described as a bumbling fiasco — popular history portrays Villa a wily and glamorous Mexican patriot and ridicules Pershing's "failed" excursion. Hurst presents a far different picture, however, arguing that Pershing's forces were experienced in counter-guerilla warfare, which in fact led to the capture of many Villistas. Furthermore, Hurst makes the point that Pershing largely succeeded in his primary mission of breaking up and neutralizing Villa's forces. It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. But with the passage of time, scholars like Hurst are increasingly presenting a more accurate, if contrarian, record of this celebrated historical event.
Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico by Hugh Thomson (2009/Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Non-fiction) — Perhaps best known for his research expeditions to Peru and award-winning film documentaries, British explorer Hugh Thomson is also a first-rate travel writer. It was in 1979 at the reckless age of 18 that Thomson first traveled through Mexico in a beaten-up Oldsmobile 98 he hoped to sell for a profit in Central America, despite having no license and not knowing how to drive. He eventually took his driving test in Mexico City where the instructor, at first offended by Thomson's blue eyes and foreign accent, passed him after a brief chat about the weather and the offer of a cigarette: "Amigo, it doesn't matter. No one in Mexico knows how to drive anyway." Thomson fell in love with the rowdy beauty of Mexico, "so moral when you needed help, so amoral when you wanted wildness." Tequila Oil reveals a more dangerous side of Mexico than that seen by packaged-holiday vacationers, taking the reader from the badlands of Chihuahua, to the wild capital of Mexico City and the mysterious jungles of the Yucatan. Thomson’s border-to-border Mexican Odyssey is funny, informative, thoughtful and an unashamedly personal story of adventure.
Zorro: The Novel by Isabel Allende (2006/Harper Perennial/Fiction) — Chilean-born author Isabel Allende is one of the most successful women novelists in Latin America. Her books, which sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realism" tradition, are especially popular in Mexico and consistently dominate the top-ten lists. She was initially reluctant to take on the swashbuckling do-gooder crusader Zorro, thinking the character timeworn and beneath her status as a serious writer. But good literary sense intervened when Allende recognized an untold back-story to Diego de la Vega's personality and the epic journey of how he became El Zorro ("The Fox"). Thanks to a handful of popular movies and Disney's long-running TV episodes, we know that Zorro is, by day, the dandy Don Diego, son of a Spanish landowner near provincial Los Angeles in the tumultuous days of the early 19th century when the dusty village was part of Spain's New World kingdom under the administration of Mexico City's vice royalty. By night, he dons his black mask and cape and fights for the poor and oppressed, leaving behind the saber-carved sign of the Z to mark his good deeds. In Allende's retelling, Don Diego is much more the complicated male figure that women readers today easily recognize: he is at once compassionate, ruthless, thoughtful, reckless, attention seeking, secretive, romantic, sexually provocative and possessed with at least a split or possibly multiple personalities. In the real world, you'd lock him up and throw away the key. In Allende’s novel, he’s absolutely irresistible.
Ed Hutmacher is Editor in Chief of Mexico Book Club. For more information on books with Mexico-related themes, please visit the website at MexicoBookClub.com. |
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