MadamMayo: book reviews

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Top 10 Books Read 2014

#1. Finding George Orwell in Burma
By Emma Larkin
A splendid, intrepid, and thoroughly original marvel of a travel memoir. Most interestingly, in this day & age of facebookesque over-sharing, Emma Larkin has no web page nor author "head shot"-- such is the nature of her work. Dear reader, if you don't know who George Orwell is, get your 1984 here.
P.S. Emma Larkin on pen names.

#2. The Courage to Remember:
PTSD- From Trauma to Triumph
By Lester Tenney
This may not qualify as a "literary gem," but it takes stupendous guts and a heart as big as the world to offer up such a gift as this author, now elderly, did with his memoir. I would go so far as to say, don't depart Planet Earth without having read this book.

#3. River of Ink:
Literature, History, Art
By Tom Christensen
It was an honor to be able to give this one a pre-publication blurb:

Truffle-rich, cumin-exotic, from Mutanabi Street to Céline's ballets, Gutenberg and the Koreans, a winged sphinx and an iron man and Nur Jahan-- oh, and a beturbaned Sadakichi Hartmann-- these world-trotting essays make one groovy box of idea-chocolates.

#4. Demon of the Waters:
The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe
By Gregory Gibson
Read my post about Kindles and the Kindle edition of this extraordinary travel memoir / history, which has the strangest ending of any I can think of... (no worries, I won't give it away).

#5. Struck by Genius: How A Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel
By Jason Padgett and Maureen Seaberg
Deeply, wonderfully weird. Actually made me nostalgic for high school geometry, college calculus, and linear algebra, too.

#6. The End of the Sherry
By Bruce Berger
Read my post about this five star memoir of a soon-to-be Baja bohemian in Franco's Spain.

#7. Texas People, Texas Places
By Lonn Taylor
If you don't love Texas and Texans, you will at least be thoroughly charmed (I mean, "thuruhleh chahmd") after reading Lonn Taylor's latest collection of columns for the Big Bend Sentinel. Plus, he's knee-slappingly hilarious, in a southern-gentleman-historian kind of way.

#8. The Last Frontier:
Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
By Julia Assante
As those of you who have been following my blog know, I've crunched through a heap of Afterlife literature in researching my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I read Assante's book too late to include it in my bibliography, alas. If you're willing to explore this subject (and I know not everyone is) I would suggest that you first read Eban Alexander's Proof of Heaven: A Scientist's Case for the Afterlife, then, highlighter in hand, Julia Assante.

#9. A Gathering of Fugitives:
American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965
By Diana Anhalt
As a long-time expat living in Mexico City, I especially enjoyed this one. For those who know little about Mexico, this beautifully written memoir / group biography lights up some murky corners of Mexican and U.S. history. (It went at once onto my list of recommended books on Mexico.)

#10. A tie between

The Last of the Nomads
By W. J. Peasley
This is one of the most powerfully moving books I have ever read. It tells the true story of the 1979 rescue of an elderly couple, Warri and Yatungka, the last of the Mandildjara people, marooned in the vastness of Australia's Gibson Desert, starving and slowly dying of thirst.

and

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:
The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.
By Marie Kondo
A one-time Shinto shrine maiden, Kondo bases her "KonMari" method on the assumption that one's house and all the objects in it have consciousness but, boy howdy, even if you're a die-hard materialist, follow her method and you'll zoom to a wiggy new oxygen-rich level of tidy. I am not kidding.

Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

River of Ink: Literature, History, Art by Thomas Christensen

I've been a long-time admirer of Tom Christensen, and so I was delighted to receive a review copy of his latest, River of Ink, a collection of essays forthcoming from Counterpoint. Herewith my blurb:

Truffle-rich, cumin-exotic, from Mutanabi Street to Céline's ballets, Gutenberg and the Koreans, a winged sphinx and an iron man and Nur Jahan-- oh, and a beturbaned Sadakichi Hartmann-- these world-trotting essays make one groovy box of idea-chocolates.

Yes indeed, River of Ink goes on my top 10 books read list for 2014. (Here's the Top 10 for 2013.)

P.S. Christensen mentions the Youtube video of Sadakichi Hartmann dancing. Here it is:

COMMENTS always welcome.

Literally Short Film Awards

For its 10th anniversary, Literal Magazine is holding a short film contest.

I am a big, big fan of Literal. Having edited my own literary magazine, Tameme, for a mere 3 issues, I stand in awe of all that editor Rose Mary Salum and her team have accomplished-- and continue to accomplish. I'll be posting a note soon about the latest anthology, a beautiful and path-breaking collection of Arab and Jewish short stories out of Latin America, Delta de las arenas.

PS Check out my latest book reviews in Literal:
*Making a New World and Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States by John Tutino
*Our Lost Border, edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso
*From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Crossing Borders by Sergio Troncoso

And an article, now ancient history: "Twitter Is"

Reviewed in LITERAL: Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso

Lurid television, newspaper stories, and cliché-ridden movies about Mexico abound in English; rare is any writing that plumbs to meaningful depths or attempts to explore its complexities. And so, out of a concatenation of ignorance, presumption and prejudice, those North Americans who read only English have been deprived of the stories that would help them see the Spanish-speaking peoples and cultures right next door, and even within the United States itself, and the tragedies daily unfolding because of or, at the very least kindled by, the voracious North American appetite for drugs. For this reason, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, a treasure trove of one dozen personal essays, deserves to be celebrated, read, and discussed in every community in North America. >> CONTINUE READING IN LITERAL

>More book reviews by Yours Truly
>Recommended books on Mexico
>Comments?

Top 10+ Books Read in 2012

1. Sara Mansfield Taber's Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy's Daughter
Lyrical, original, and profound. At once a memoir, a piece of American history, and an examination of the question, what does it mean to be American?
>Listen to my podcast interview with the author here.

2. Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
>Read my talk at Bellas Artes in Mexico City about this splendid book.

3. A tie! (Who says I have to decide?)

Natalie Dykstra's Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
One of those rare novelesque biographies that can change the way one thinks about a whole country, a whole century, and certainly about one city: Washington DC. Out of five stars I give this six, lit up in flashing neon.
>View Clover Adams' photo album at the Massachusetts Historical Society

Janet Wallach's Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

The life of a priviledged Englishwoman whose curiosity fired with boldness changed the world. Alas she was less apt in love and bureaucratic shenanigans. Fascinating reading. When I came to the end, which was too sad, I went to Egypt and rode a camel.

4. Bruce Jackson's The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories

Brilliant, worth a re-read or five.
>Read my mini-review here.

5. Lonn Taylor's Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy
Though a collection of columns as "The Rambling Boy" for the Big Bend Sentinel, this is far from the usual mashed potatoes newspaper fare. Taylor is a wise and lyrical writer with a background as a professional historian and his mammoth love for Texas is infectious. This is a book to savor in a rocking chair on a hot day with a tall glass of spiked lemonade at your side. Get ready to howl with the one about the in-law aunts's oodles of poodles.

6. Rubén Martínez's Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West
Another kind of Texas-- and New Mexico, Arizona, and California. ~~I'm preparing an overdue (rave) review of this one. Stay tuned.~~
> Read my review of this book in the Washington Independent Review of Books

7. Ruth Levy Guyer's A Life Interrupted: The Long Night of Marjorie Day
>Read my mini-review of this exceedingly strange story and how I happened upon it here.

8. Mitch Horowitz's Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret History of Our Nation

So what am I doing reading about the occult? I've spent much of this year reading and researching for an expanded and revised introduction to my translation-- the first into English-- of Francisco I. Madero's secret book of 1911, Spiritist Manual (a work vital for understanding the Mexican Revolution of 1910 since Madero, a Spiritist medium, was its leader). Earlier I'd seen Occult America but didn't pick it up because I (wrongly) assumed it was a bit of trade sensationalism. Then, on the Occult of Personality podcasts, I happened to listen to an interview with the author about the Theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott's profound influence on the revival of Buddhism in 19th century Sri Lanka. Start reading the literature on the occult and very soon one will appreciate, as water in the desert, an author who is at once knowledgable, objective, and articulate. Of course I immediately ordered the book. It's a masterwork of scholarship. Dear Mr Horowitz, if I had a Ouija board, I would salute you with it.
>Occult of Personality Occult America interview 1 (Publick Universal Friend et al)
>Occult of Personality Occult America interview 2 (Joseph Smith, Edgar Cayce, et al)
>Occult of Personality 48 (Life and Work of Henry Steel Olcutt)
>Mitch Horowitz's website

9. Sergio Troncoso's Crossing Borders: Personal Essays and novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust

>Read my double review in Literal magazine

>Listen to my interview with the author here

10. Mark Sundeen's The Man Who Quit Money
The superbly told true and head scratcher of a story.
>Author's website with link to mini-doc on the man.

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Of note, two crucial works on Mexico's second Empire were published this year:

*El ocaso del imperio de Maximiliano visto por un diplomatico prusiano: Los informes de Anton von Magus a Otto von Bismarck, 1866-1867, Edited by Konrad Ratz.

*Los viajes de Maximiliano en México (1864-1867), By Konrad Ratz and Amparo Gómez Tepexicuapan

+ + + + + + + + + + + + +

Over at Work-in-Progress, my amiga the novelist, short story writer and essayist Leslie Pietrzyk shares her list of top books read / reread in 2012, which, if you've been following her excellent blog, unsurprisingly starts with ye olde Great Gatsby. Which is, seriously, a masterpiece.

Alas, nothing on our lists coincides. This is why, in writing workshops, when we get to plot, I resort to discussing movies. Now if you haven't seen The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind or Gladiator, GHY. But plot in a movie compares to plot in a novel as cement blocks to fine woodwork.

So I just noticed I didn't read any novels this year. Oh well! I'm writing another travel memoir, that's why it's heavy on Texas and the West.

Lone Star Reviews

I suspect that one of the reasons most people who start writing a book never finish is fear of criticism. Book critics were never a cuddly group, but the denizens of cyberspace, whoa. Would you be brave enough to face this gauntlet?

(If all else fails, I guess you could hire someone from fiverr.com or some such to give you top stars, as many authors apparently do. Which would be sad, but not as sad as many things on this earth, I mean, like the plight of homeless dogs in Calcutta or something. Or having only such readers in your book group. I wasn't referring to the dogs.)

Sergio Troncoso's From This Wicked Patch of Dust and Cross Borders: Personal Essays

With permission from the wonderful bilingual Literal Magazine, herewith a reprint of my review -- in the current issue, on newsstands now-- of Sergio Tronocoso's two new books, a novel and a collection of essays.

Cross Borders: Personal Essays

By Sergio Troncoso

(Arte Público Press, 2011)

From This Wicked Patch of Dust

By Sergio Troncoso

(University of Arizona Press, 2011)

Este maldito terregal, this wicked patch of dust, is what SergioTronoco’s mother called Ysleta, their barrio in El Paso, Texas, and from this he takes the titles of his new novel and an essay which is included in the collection, Crossing Borders, both published in 2011.

Ranging from several lengthy and intimately personal essays about family, to lessons in literary politics, to a passel of posts from his blog, Chico Lingo, Crossing Borders provides a rich introduction to not only Tronoco’s new novel, but also his previous work, which includes the novel The Nature of Truth (Northwestern University Press, 2003), and the short story collection, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (University of Arizona Press, 1999), which won the Premio Aztlán for the best new book by a new Mexican-American writer.

Troncoso’s work, by his own admission, is not easy. In “Literature and Migration,” he states his position plainly:“Against much of popular American fiction, my stories are not primarily to entertain the reader, but to unmoor him. I want the reader to face through my characters perhaps what he will not face himself.”

Though born the son of Mexican immigrants in a hardscrabble border barrio, and brought up Catholic, he was educated at Harvard and Yale and went on to marry a Jewish classmate who has since made a successful career in banking. Today they and their two boys, Aaron and Isaac, live in a doorman building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a world as exotic to Ysleta and Ysleta is to it. If the role of the writer is, as Tronoco argues, to be an outsider, his perch is priviledged indeed, for it has not always been easy to find his way in the northeast, nor, for all his experiences and Ivy League education, to revisit his childhood home. “On good days I feel I am a bridge,” writes Troncoso. “On bad days I just feel alone.”

There were some bad days during his tenure on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, which he recounts in the essay “Apostate of my Literary Family.” Not to be confused with the unrelated Bethesda, Maryland-based Writer’s Center, the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center is a short train ride from Manhattan into the tony Westchester subsurbs. Initially, Troncoso felt disrespected and treated as token Latino. He tired of “having to endlessly explain issues of literature to those who were not writers, [and] justifying the importance of Latino writers to those who did not read much literature (Latino or otherwise).” But in the end, he learned a valuable lesson: “whether, and when, to submlimate or redirect instinctual personal reactions into socially acceptable points of view and arguments. Perhaps this is a function of any family, to convert its members into socially funcional human beings.”

Family is the subject of most of the other essays, which include a trio of letters to his sons about their mother Laura’s terrifying and brutal struggle with breast cancer. Though clearly set in turn- of- the-21st century Manhattan, there is a timelessness to the story. The reader can imagine the two boys, once grown, and again, when they too have young children, and then again, decades later when their parents are elderly or perhaps no longer living, reading and rereading, mining ever richer veins of meaning in these heartfelt letters from their father. Laura survives and her husband writes, “We have more days and do not waste them. We do posses an eternal wound in a way, a wound that reminds us of the rarity and fragility of life. Our quotidian fantasy is now a new quotidian reality: vividly colorful days, days of curiosity, days bereft of many useless fears and petty ambitions, these days of wonder.”

The magnet of family flung into in a cultural, economic, political, religious, and geographic centrifuge is the focus of the novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which opens with Mexican immigrant Pilar and her husband Cuauhtémoc’s travails in building a house in the as-yet-unwired desert barrio of Ysleta in the summer of 1966. A dozen years later, their daughter Julia, a UTEP undergrad, is traveling through Italy, having spent the summer as a Spanish translator for the Sisters of Perpetual Charity. Meanwhile, in Ysleta, her parents listen to their old friend Carlos play Mexican love songs on the guitar, while the kids escape to another room to watch Charlie’s Angels. The centrifuge accelerates. Ismael, class valedictorian, earns a scholarship to the Blair Summer School for Journalism in New Jersey, while Julia, with a group from the Mexican-American Cultural Center, has traveled to Nicaragua, and taken a sharp turn to the left into liberation theology. “Mamá y Papá,” Julia writes, “do not be surprised if this letter has been read by someone in the post office in Ysleta or even by the FBI or CIA.”

Ismael goes to Harvard and finds a Jewish bride; Julia to Minnesota and a conversion to Islam. In late 2011, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ismael is in New York when his sister, now married and living in Tehran, calls to see how he is. Their conversation is so well-grounded in knowing detail that Troncoso makes what might seem fantastic, a brother and sister so far from Ysleta and so impossibly far from one another, both believable and moving.

Five years later, after the loss of a beloved brother who was serving in Iraq, Ismael, a writer now, presents their mother with a story, a narrative Ouroboros. “It’s about Ysleta. It’s about how we lived, how we tried. It’s about how we were together for a time.”

In the final essay in his collection, “Why Should Latinos Write Their Own Stories?” Tronocoso answers, “to define ourselves,” and “to challenge ourselves.” In his novel, he has done this brilliantly.

-- C.M. Mayo

---> Read more of my book reviews here.