Xeriscape doesn't mean ugly. This book will help you find plants that are pretty and that won't take up a lot of water. IT's a great book.

This is our reference book for when we are adding something to our yard. We have a full acre that we are working on (slowly!) and this book has helped us every step of the way.

The color pictures make it easy to see exactly what a plant looks like. The color pictures also help when you are trying to find the name of the tree in some yard that you thought was pretty. The information it has on each plant is very useful- it gives you the area it will grow best in (example: Albuquerque or statewide in the shade or statewide up to 800 feet elevation). The other thing that makes this book a good buy is the plant list for different areas. For example, there is a plant list for Gallup/Grants area. These lists give you trees, grasses, shrubs, flowers and more that will grow well in your area.

This is the best resource out there if you live in New Mexico and want to have a lovely landscaped area.

Keeping plants alive in New Mexico is very difficult. If you're thinking of buying this book you already know this. If you do buy it you'll find out how to solve all of your yard and garden problems. This book tells you everything you need to know to successfully surround your home with attractive plants instead of the tiresome and difficult to maintain bluegrass lawn or gravel pit one sees so often in New Mexico.

Most importantly, the book lists plants suitable for every inhabited part of New Mexico. If you've learned to garden in Gallup but want to know what to plant in Deming or Santa Fe, this book is for you.

The plant lists and photographs make this book an essential money and water saving gardening tool for the New Mexico gardener. Buy it for yourself and give a copy to to your new neighbors!

This is my all time favorite book. It is so real. The whole letter writing thing. It brings out the personality changes in Abigail when she relocates with her family out west during the civil war. Maggie her sister that she dearly loves changes too but in a negative way. In a way of being narrowminded and not understanding the selfless way that Abigail has become bieng on her own and working the harsh dry and hot land in New Mexico. The Mesa (mountains) are her love and she writes about them quite often to Maggie back home in the East. Not only does Abigail learn to fall in love with this harsh southern land but she allowed me to fall in love with it too and to be for her through the entire story. To want to jump into the pages and help her. Help her through the hard droughts and to feed her children that she bore alone in her hut on the land.
A great book for everyone.
A must read.

I read this novel in a day. It was a really captivating novel, and I think the idea of telling the story in letters worked well. Abigail is a woman whose home has been destroyed by the Civil War. She, her husband, and their young children leave the South to start a new life out West. Abigail writes back to her sister Maggie in Virginia of how she comes to love the harsh but beautiful New Mexican landscape. I am 13 and even though this was a novel meant for adults, I think teens who like historical fiction could enjoy it.

When I first moved to New Mexico in 1963, I became aware that many of the troops on the Bataan Death March came from New Mexico. They used to have an annual reunion here in Las Cruces, and I met a few of those men.

This book is by a professor of history at Eastern New Mexico University, who is I think a relative of one of the men on the march. The book entails the experiences of the 200th and 515th Coast Artiliary units, which were based in New Mexico.

I had always imagined that the worst part of their ordeal was the 60-mile forced march (and at war's end in 1945, I traversed that 60 miles in a jeep, a truly terrible ride in the Philippine heat and humidity). But far worse were the trips those heros made in the holds of enemy cargo vessels. They were put in the holds, so crowded that everyone had to stand, where the human urine and excrement simply dropped to the deck for everyone to stand in, and where people died standing up. The cruelty was worse than anyone could possibly imagine.

These units were the first to fire on the Japs and the last to lay down their arms when surrender came. And you learn of the espionage these guys performed when doing their slave labor in the factories and the mines of Japan and Manchuria. Such labor, and the treatment forced on the prisoners, were in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, of which Japan was a signatory.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The author is a superb writer.

Dorothy Cave has really done an excellent job of research and storytelling with this book. She was able to accuratly document the fate of many of the soildiers that were mobilized in 1940 in New Mexico.

I hope that Dorothy Cave will write a second book on the 200th and include more of the research material that would mean so much to the relatives and decendents of the warriers of the 200th Regiment.

Since I was born in Silver City NM and am now a member of the New Mexico National Guard, I request that all new Officers assigned to my Battalion to read Beyond Courage so that they may better understand the importance that history may place on their contirbution to New Mexico and the United States.

Mary Ellen Miller and the late Linda Schele put this book together in 1986. The field of Mayan studies is a fast-moving arena, and Mayanists already know a lot more now than they did when this book came out, but in my opinion this book is still the place to start if you want to begin learning about the Maya.

For one thing, the photography of the artwork is fantastic - the book is worth acquiring for that alone. Secondly, the commentary is by the greatest names in the field, including an introduction by Michael Coe. Thirdly, the book never strays from academic discipline, unlike a great deal of New Agey-type material written about the Maya. In fact, the book studiously avoids making any observations that cannot be substantiated - perhaps a reaction in the field of Mayan studies against the sometimes too pat assumptions that Eric Thompson made when he dominated the subject. Fourthly, it covers all the major cultural features of the Maya, providing abundant commentary on each piece of art portrayed. Last but not least, it tackles the thorny subject of Maya iconography. This is a field about which we already know a great deal more about now than we knew in 1986, but in fact if the book were written today there is probably very little that would actually be changed.

The book was printed in Japan, for some reason. No harm in that - the Japanese have a tradition, and a reputation, of producing quality bindings and excellent photographic reproductions, both of which are evident in this edition and which add to the quality of the book. I can't recommend it too highly to anyone interested in the Maya.

The Blood of Kings by Linda Schele and MAry Ellen Miller was written on the occasion of the Kimbell Art Mesuem's exhibition of Maya Art in 1986. The hope was to draw attention to the rich legacy of Maya art along with a book that would give texture to these artistic recordings of the singificant ritual events in the lives of the Maya. What better way, since art has been our keyhole to understanding the magnificance of there thought, language, science and culture? Schele and Miller do an incredble job of focusing on these artifacts to bring us inside the current understanding of what th experts perceive the maya ritual and life to be about-- including the deciperment of the syllables of the maya language.

The book begins with a history of the road to understanding the Maya culture, complete with its meadering and diversions. This "age" delights in knowing that the Maya are filled with blood, both their own in bloodletting and those of captives that they sacrifice, unlike previous interpretations of a more peaceful existence. Blood, the ooze of life, was offered to eh gods in hopres that they would continue to give their ooze of sap, rain and other life-sustaining things. The book is based on 8 sections of art and interpretation: person, accession rites, courtly life, bloodletting, captives, the ballgame, and death, and the kingship of the Maya Cosmos. Of note as weel is the colors on p.158 where one can get an interpration of what the colors might have been in the Classic period.

In this book Coe prefaces the book commenting on the profound understandng that the world of the Maya is filled with notions of death. But the myth of the Mayas is that the hero twins went to the underworld and by trickery defeated death and those rose to take their place in the Mayan night sky. Perhaps these indiscernible Maya have continued to trick us as well in our attempts to traverse the road of their culture-- and their greatest preoccupation, enscribed on their ceramics and reliefs ---is not death, but life, in all its oozing forms.

I want to correct the reference in the review to Harvard Skull and Bones to Yale Skull and Bones. Thank you, Carter Rila

Having met one of the authors of this work while mining some of the same sources in the files of the National Archives, I can say that I appreciate the shrewd and incisive way they have pulled together diverse sources from many depositories to cover some of the more obscure facets of the "Border Days". The books is an omnium gatherum of a number of articles published in various scholarly journals known mostly to specialists in the period. Much of the detail of the gun running and undercover operations was gleaned from files of the Customs, the Immigration, the Army, the Bureau of Investigation, and the State Department.
Of all the tales that needed to be told is the discovery of the famous saddlebags lost by the Villista forces during the Columbus Raid in March 1916, which raid triggered the Punitive Expedition commanded by John J. Pershing and indirectly led to Pershing's eventual field command in France of the American Expeditionary Force.
Later in June 1916 the entire National Guard of the United States was called up for border service. Thus again contributing to the US successful intervention in WW I. And the Army gained experience in motor transport and management. All of this has led to a current appreciation that Pancho Villa, in a moment of desperation, indirectly had a major impact on the defeat of the Central Powers.
The other major revelation herein, and the only story included which made the national papers, particularly USA Today, is the discussion of the carrying off of Pancho Villa's skull in the mid 20s, and the supposed deposition of that object in the clubhouse of the famous Yale University Skull and Bones secret society. (Some of the most prominent members of the society have been the George Bushes, father and son.) But the secret of Villa's cranium has yet to be confirmed.:) After all, that is the purpose of a secret society -- to keep secrets. So, if you have a scholarly interest or just a curiousity about the more obscure aspects of the border running days, this book is your meat. A husky meal of research and well written as well.

Once in a while a book attains benchmark status in the historiography of a particular subject. "Bound for Santa Fe," by Stephen G. Hyslop, might well do so. It has many of the necessary ingredients. Its palate is sweeping, and the author's handling of the story both complex and captivating. More than any other recent work of history on the Santa Fe trail and trade, it captures the essence of the story and relates it to an audience removed from it by some 175 years. Most of all, "Bound for Santa Fe" is an exceptionally well-written work of history, tantalizing in its depictions and seductive in the power of its narrative.

Beginning with the earliest exploring parties from the United States into the Southwest, Hyslop takes the reader through the origins and development of the Santa Fe trade, using narratives from the trail as the centerpiece of a journey from Missouri to New Mexico. Along the trail readers meet the native peoples who had made the region their homes for centuries, the Santa Fe culture and its sometimes uneasy coexistence with Anglos from Missouri, and the unique world these various cultures made through their interactions.

At the same time, the interactions proved surprising to both sides. As only one example, Missourians expressed dismay at the mores of the New Mexicans, and that cultural divide never seemed to end despite years of close contact. When trader John Scolly hauled his Latina wife, Juana Lopes, before a Mexican judge for adultery the outcome was remarkably different to what Scolly had expected. Lopes did not deny the charges, instead offering the belligerent explanation, as reported in the court record, that "it was her ass, she controlled it, and she would give it to whomever she wanted" (p. 266). The judge told her to quit "roving" and stay with her family but stopped short of punishing her, as would have undoubtedly been the case in the U.S. Such cultural differences sprinkle this work, demonstrating the oddity and attraction of these two civilizations.

Hyslop completes his work with a discussion of American conquest of New Mexico in 1846-1848. He follows the path of the Army of the West under Stephen Watts Kearny, the experience of Alexander Doniphan and Sterling Price and their Missouri volunteers, the creation of a territorial government under Charles Bent, and the bloody Taos revolt.

In 1979 John D. Unruh Jr. published "The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60" (University of Illinois Press), unraveling the complex story of the overlanders on America's longest trail. Hyslop offers a work very similar to Unruh's in style and substance for the Santa Fe trail, and it may become a standard on the subject for many years.

This authoritative volume from Stephen Hyslop sheds new light on an important aspect of the American story. Well-written and full of interesting facts, analysis, and captivating stories, this book is no dry history, but a thorough work that should have great appeal beyond the academic market. It is a book all American history buffs should enjoy. I know I did.

This is a great study guide for the hardcover book. It contains numerous maps, questions, and vocabulary lists, BUT do not order this if you think you've found a much cheaper version of the hardcover-that is not the case.

BY RIGHT OF CONQUEST is a great book. It tells the story of a boy who is shipwrecked on a island where the people think he is a god. When Cortez comes to fight the people of the islands the boy is caught in the fray. This story is a great book full of excitment like in the middle of battles or running away in a boat. Even a point where the boy must escape from being sacrificed. This is a wonderful book which I encourage many to read.

I was scared and upset when I finally realized what the title of the book meant. I am a mexican-american, born on the U.S. side of the border. This book reminded me just how far away America is from Mexico, even though we are neigbors, we are worlds away. This book is blunt. Although it was a harsh reality check for me, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

We, as United States citizens take for granted all that we have and this book is a solemn reminder of all that we do have to be thankful for. Urrea gives character sketches of sorts on the impoverished families and orphaned children that live unseen by the world in their own world of the Mexican garbage dumps. A very sad tale about the suffering in Mexico that goes unnoticed. Thank you Urrea for opening my eyes and my heart to these children.

I love these small pocket size (really) Berlitz travel guides. So I was really looking forward to this one. And I will admit...I didn't blow up the cover of the book to see that the title was actually in Spanish...and I do read a smattering of Spanish...but I was NOT expecting a guide totally written in Spanish. As I said orginally, it appears to be a great guide...if only I was FLUENT in Spanish. Now...if I could just find this guide in English.....

It looks like this would be an extremely helpful book on Cancun and Cozumel. However, I couldn't say for sure because it is in Spanish. This was not posted at all on the site where it is ordered, so be aware of this before ordering! If you do read spanish, it looks like a great handbook, easy to carry, and lots of information

"We had a wonderful vacation using this guide book. Unlike another one that starts with "F," the Alive! guide is not full of upfront stuff that nobody reads.
It gets right to the point in telling what hotels have to offer, the best places to eat (it arranges them by cuisine and gives sample dishes) and devotes many
pages to shopping - in the malls as well as downtown. We got some good bargains as a result." Reader, East Coast USA

What a joy after reading some of the other guides to Cancun! This book covers almost everything, and is obviously written by someone with an intimate familiarity with the region. It offers helpful hints on each page, rather than just pointing out lists of places to visit (although it does this also). The Mexican to U.S. clothing size conversion chart is particularly helpful. The book dedicates 12 pages to shopping in Cancun, a topic restricted to 3/4 page in the other guidebook I purchased at the same time (and sent back). The coverage of places to stay, places to eat, and what to do is very objective and frank, unlike some of the guides which seem to be produced by the local chamber of commerce. As a lover of travel (and travel guides), I can't say enough about this one - it's as good a guide to a city as I have read.