by Rick Skwiot
October 26, 2010
Books
While Mexico’s present anarchy and violence along the border has cost thousands of lives, it pales in comparison to the horrors the country suffered under dictator Porfirio Diaz a mere 100 years ago, until the Mexican Revolution ousted him. The literal slavery, kidnappings, starvation, rape, torture, repression and peonage of millions of underclass Mexicans at [...]
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by Rick Skwiot
October 18, 2010
Books
Andrew Beahrs mines two of my favorite topics, Mark Twain and food, to produce an appetizing and thought-provoking new book, Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens. Appetizing because he seeks and finds some of Twain’s (and my) favorite American foods in their places of origin: shrimp, trout and [...]
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An Affecting New Novel on Love and Loss: “Becoming George Sand”
by Rick Skwiot November 22, 2010 BooksBecoming George Sand, Rosalind Brackenbury’s tenth novel, encompasses a poetic, dreamlike disquisition on love, sex and loss, sliding smoothly between the 19th century and the 21st and the lives of two formidable women trying somehow to manage their homes, their children, their men and their work as writers. The two women—famed French novelist George Sand, born [...]