Posts under ‘books’

Do you have a book or DVD about Latin America that is sitting on your shelf?
If so, you can mail it to me and I’ll send you a different book or DVD of your choice from the list below. In most cases, I’ve reviewed the item on Travelojos.
Think of it as a pay-it-forward lending library.
My [...]

Stephanie Elizondo Griest has mingled with the Russian Mafiya, polished Chinese propaganda, and belly danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures inspired her award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go.
She also edited Best Women’s [...]

“Challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness,” my guru tells me.
She introduced me to blogging, Facebook, and urged me to try Twitter and Stumble Upon.
Internalizing some of her catch phrases such as “enjoy the fun of failure” has prodded me to push beyond my comfort zone.
Who is the source of this wisdom? Gretchen Rubin, [...]

For me, one of the perks of blogging is having an excuse to read books about Mexico and other Latin American countries. While it’s always helpful to find out more information on the topic, I draw a considerable amount of inspiration from the authors.
Below is a list of books that I have written about on [...]

It’s 7 am in Nicaragua and the single mother next store has commenced playing the rock ballads that serve as her life’s soundtrack. The vocalized yearnings of Bryan Adams and Bonnie Tyler reverberate through the walls. Her neighbor reaches his breaking point after hearing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for the umpteenth time.
That is the [...]

A couple of weeks ago I cited a story that appeared in USA Today about Frommer’s first guide book on Honduras as an example of the tendency of the travel media to gloss over the negative aspects of the destinations they cover.
[UPDATE: USA Today's travel editor Chris Gray Faust commented:
Hi. Just want to point out [...]

There’s no question that Roosh Vorek, the author of South American travelogue A Dead Bat in Paraguay, is a “player” when it comes to the ladies. Before self publishing a memoir about his travels in Brazil and other countries, Vorek wrote Bang—“a collection of simple but powerful techniques, moves, and lines that [...]

In his new book Bicycle Diaries, former Talking Head’s front man David Byrne writes about his perceptions of cities throughout the world as viewed from his bicycle. One of the cities he rides through and writes about is Buenos Aires.
Although I haven’t read it yet, the book is on my radar screen because one of [...]

I read books for pleasure on a fairly consistent basis. My taste generally runs toward nonfiction. Since starting Travelojos in late December, I’ve read several books that involve some aspect of Latin America.
One exception was this summer when I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. But even there, I was pleasantly surprised [...]

Before I read David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, I would have told you that the piranha was scariest fish in the Amazon.
But Grann describes an even more fearsome fish–the candiru. It’s one of the few creatures in the world that can survive on a diet of blood. It feeds itself by burrowing in [...]