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 LECTOR
The Hispanic Book
Review Online Journal |
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ISSN 0732-8001
This
important journal reviews in English the most significant
English and Spanish language books recently published in
Latin America, Spain, Mexico and the United States, which
are of interest to U.S. Hispanics as well as the larger
population. LECTOR is indexed
by the Book Review Index. It reviews:
Literary monographs
of prose (novels and short stories) and poetry of the most
prominent and promising Hispanic writers of all Latin
America, Spain and the United States;
Popular Fiction,
such as mysteries, historical and contemporary novels,
science fiction and adventure;
Best Sellers and Classics,
Latin American, Spanish, Hispanic American and the world’s
best in translation. Social
science and humanities books,
except textbooks, such as sociology, history, women’s
studies, ethnic studies, politics, language and linguistics,
philosophy, and culture.
Juvenile
Young Adult Fiction and Nonfiction.
Reference,
such as dictionaries, bibliographies, biographies,
encyclopedias. General Interest
Books,
such as cook-books, how-to, citizenship; and art.
New Titles
NEW
Brotherhood of the Light: A novel
of the Penitentes and Crypto-Jews of New Mexico.
By Ray Michael
Baca. 0-915745-66-6 $19.95 Special low price for advanced
orders
A novel about the un-easy and often misunderstood
relationships of Crypto-Jews and Hispanos in New Mexico and their deep
common roots in Spanish history--conquest and colonization--and religious
faith and shared values.
 NEW
Mexican Illegal Aliens: A Mexican American
Perspective. By Rafael D. Canul, Ph.D.
Edited by John Cise, University of California,
Berkeley.
ISBN: 0-915745-62-3 $29.95
This book provides the first comprehensive socio-political,
economic and historical analysis from a Mexican American perspective of Mexican
illegal immigration to the United States during the last 50 years and how this
human influx impacts on current Mexican American politics and discourse.
BRING ME MORE STORIES:
TALES OF THE SEPHARDIM
By Sally Benforado ISBN
0915745674
$22.95 (pbk)
In these short
tales, author Benforado weaves together the oral history of a family of Sephardic Jews,
from their close knit home in Turkey to their new
lives in America. They are stories of a heritage
that spans the globe, of centuries-old traditions
transported to a different world, and of people who
held tightly to the ways of their ancestors, who,
like them, left their homes to settle in a strange
new land.
The Illegal
Alien: A Dagger into the Heart of America??
By
Raoul Lowery Contreras,
Floricanto Press. ISBN:
0-915745-61-5
Edited
by Andrea Alessandra Cabello, University of California, Berkeley, and Sohaib
Raihan.
Illegal
Alien is the most reasoned analysis to date of the most controversial of illegal
immigration and its growing impact on the American economy and way of
life. Mr. Contreras makes a historical comparison of immigration and a
well-documented scrutiny of the vocal opinions of well-known anti-immigrant
spoke-persons as well as those who seek unrestricted openness of our borders.
Remnants of
Crypto-Jews Among Hispanic Americans. By Gloria Golden,
Edited by Andrea Alessandra Cabello, University of California, Berkeley, and
Sohaib Raihan. Floricanto Press. ISBN:
0-915745-56-9
Hidden deep in the heart of the American Southwest among the larger Hispanic
population are descendants of the Sephardim, Jews from Spain and Portugal. Five
hundred years after their expulsion from Spain remnants of Judaism are still
practiced within Southwestern Hispanic communities. Often unaware of their
origins, conversos have revealed, through oral history, how the ancestral faith
of the Crypto-Jews has been passed on from generation to generation.
The Salvation of La Purísima.
By T.M. Spooner. ISBN: 0-915745-55-0.
Hard cover $32.95.
New Novel, The
Salvation of La Purísima,
explores an anthropologist’s struggle with professional
objectivity as he is drawn into a crisis in a Mexican village. The chilling
and dramatic events will significantly change him.
In the aftermath of a
death during a border-crossing attempt, a Mexican village desperately searches
for understanding and survival.
Compellingly
told and written – with tender regard for its characters.
T.M. Spooner’s debut novel,
The Salvation of La Purísima, reveals
the forces driving migrants north and the resulting impact on the communities
and families left behind. The journey north is no longer just an economic
necessity, but has evolved into a right of passage for so many of Mexico’s rural
youth.
The Cult of Jaguar. By Bonnie Hayman. Floricanto Press,
Mountain View, Ca. 2004.
ISBN:
0915745585 Hardbound
$39.95
Centuries
ago, in the darkest jungles of Mexico, a young boy named Xichantl witnessed
his father and most of his tribe follow the hallowed jaguar into the Graylands,
never to be seen again. Now, a divorced mother and her two daughters from the
United States go to Mexico for a summer vacation and stumble upon an ancient
box that transforms their lives and could change the world. Set in the sultry
and mysterious jungles of Mexico, the story revolves around several
interesting characters who are after the same thing-each for a different
reason. What happened to the ancient native civilizations of Mexico and
Central America, which disappeared without a trace? The Mayan and Aztec
cultures left important archaeological sites in Middle America before their
civilizations vanished from this earth. While various theories attempt to
explain these phenomena, nothing definitive has been proven, yet.
Tina Modotti's Mexico: A Tale of Love & Revolution, by
Bonnie Hayman. Edited by Andrea Alessandra Cabello, UC
Berkeley. ISBN: 0-915745-40-2 $39.95 Hardbound
Hayman situates Modotti
(1896-1942) profoundly within her social period from her emigration to San Francisco to a full-fledged member of the intellectual wing
of the Mexican Communist Party. She became the lover of Cuban revolutionary
Julio Antonio Mella and when he was murdered, Modotti became the main suspect.
When the Mexican president was assassinated, she was accused and deported. She
returned to Mexico many years later and lived alone in a small cottage until her
mysterious death in a taxi at age 46. Octavio Paz claimed that Modotti belonged
“more to the history of passions than to the history of ideologies.”
Love & Riot:
Oscar Zeta Acosta and the great Mexican American Revolt.
With
Preamble by Diego Vigil with the assistance of Richard E. Vigil,
Nome de guerre, Mangas Coloradas.
Edited by Andrea
Alessandra Cabello. $39.95 Hardbound
By Burton Moore
August 29, 2002 --
ISBN: 0-915745-29-1 $39.95 Price for class use $28.95
Brown Buffalo, as he was known in the
barrios
of Los Angeles among
street people,
at the height of the riots in in the late 1960’s
and 70’s, was the epitome of the Movimiento. He was smart, rebellious,
unpredictable, occasionally high on drugs, but terrifyingly honest to himself
and the world. This is the story of the rage and fury that swept
LA
during the gestation of the Movimiento Chicano
and of the remarkable life of Oscar Zeta Acosta—a radical
civil-rights
lawyer
who defended Chicano
activists,
won new rights for Latinos,
and challenged the LA establishment.
LATINA HEALERS: LIVES OF POWER AND TRADITION
Oliva Espín. 2003 173 pgs. (pbk) Ser.: La Mujer Latina. 1996 ISBN: 0-915745-38-0
Includes biblio and table. $35.00 Price for class use $23.95
"Latina Healers casts new light on the centrality of gender and migration status on
the lives of Latina women. Encompassing the idiosyncrasies of individual decisions and the
social context of the healers' lives, this book presents an original analysis of the
relationship between gender, power, religious beliefs and social status. It brings the
scholarship on life narratives together with understandings of the impact of migration and
traditional beliefs on the lives of these women. Heralding women not as passive victims of
social forces, but as active and creative agents of their lives, the book's findings are
valuable for mental health practitioners, feminist scholars, and all interested in the
lives of Latinas."
Borrowing Time: A Latino Sexual Odyssey. By Carlos
T. Mock, M.D. Edited by Andrea Alessandra Cabello, UC Berkeley.
ISBN: 0-915745-54-2 $39.95 Hardbound
“Whatever your orientation, no matter your
ethnicity, you’ll never be the same after a journey through this odyssey. A
vivid and visceral portrayal of a sexual and political coming-of-age in today’s
America—and beyond.” Laura S. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett University
Professor, DePaul University; Columnist, Chicago Sun-Times
“Gay literature is rich in so many areas, yet we still have a need for strong
stories from the world of Latino culture—about family, about youth, about coming
out, about creating adult relationships, about AIDS. Now, Carlos Mock give us a
strong Puerto Rican story that deals with all these isues.” —Patricia Nell
Warren, author of The Front Runner and The Wild Man.
In Borrowing Time: a Latino Sexual Odyssey we get a glimpse of the different
manifestations of AIDS: the fear, the shame, the regrets and the final victory.
The “AIDS” crisis has been an opportunity for the homosexual community for
growth, for strengthening ties, for reclaiming rights from the government, and,
above all, for reflection. The AIDS epidemic can be seen by many as a curse, and
for others, as the opportunity to bring out the best in you.
THE DRUGLORD.
Neissa, Peter A. 2004 210 pgs. (pbk) ISBN: 091574526 $32.95
It is the true life story of Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the drug lord of the Bogota
branch of the Colombian Drug Cartel, this historical novel offers a factual and
knowledgeable Colombian perspective that well connected Colombians have known
for years: the real Drug Cartel, a group consisting of over two-hundred drug
traffickers, met for the first time in 1976, not to discuss drugs, but to devise
a solution to the kidnapping and murders inflicted upon them by the Marxist
guerrillas. This led to cooperation on other matters --like cocaine.
NOCHES DE ADRENALINA\NIGHTS OF ADRENALINE
Ollé, Carmen. 1996 ISBN: 0-915745-46-1 Ser.: La Mujer Latina. English/Spanish
bilingual parallel text. $25.00 Price for class use $17.95
"CAUTION: Nights of Adrenaline is a text of intense, incisive, and extreme
violence--but also, paradoxically, and at certain moments, of an almost innocent
tenderness. The obsessive exploration of the feminine condition, exploration of body and
mind and of their unstable and intermingled overlappings, as well as of a woman's
conflictive social placement in a world made neither by nor for her, yields a tension that
is highly explosive in a poetry that relinquishes nothing: not the banal, not the
quotidian, not the obscene. Carmen Ollé is one of the most important Latin American poets
of the twentieth century." Antonio Cornejo Polar, University of California at
Berkeley and Universidad de San Marcos, Lima
For More Information Contact:
Inter American Development/Floricanto Press
650 Castro St, Suite 120-331, Mountain View, California 94041
Tel: 415-552-1879
FAX: 702-995-1410
Internet:
info@floricantopress.com
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