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Summary: The Wrong Side of Mexico
Comment: This book is a travel memoir of the author's trips through the Sierra Madre in Northern Mexico. Grant, a writer from Britain, developed a fascination with the area and decided he would travel through the region to see what he could see. He was not looking for scenic vistas, however, but death defying adventures. Along his route, he met drunks, drug traffickers, farmers and ordinary folk just trying to make a living.
I never heard of the Sierra Madre before reading this book, and I certainly have no desire to see the region for myself after reading Grant's description. Outrageously high murder rates, grinding poverty, almost no government. . . the region is not a likely tourist mecca. As an experiment in anarchy, or hands-off government, it lends support to the argument that even bad government is better than none at all. In any case, the book is well written and engaging, but I have no means to judge whether Grant's accounts are an accurate portrayal of the people and culture of the region.
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Summary: There are some places that you just shouldn't go....
Comment: One of the great cliches of horror fiction involves the character - often a reporter - who decides to go to a forbidden area. The place has a bad reputation and people warn him not to go, but he plays down the threats and goes anyways, only to find himself in over his head. When reading a horror novel or watching a horror movie, we often wonder if the guy is a bit of an idiot. What then, should the reader think of Richard Grant, the author of God's Middle Finger?
Grant decides to make an excursion into the Mexican region known as the Sierra Madre, an essentially lawless territory that starts just south of Arizona and New Mexico and descends through hundreds of miles of mountainous land. The Sierra Madre - perhaps most famous for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - is a place that is almost designed for outlaws and served as a hideout for Geronimo and Pancho Villa. The relatively sparse population is principally sustained by drug income, primarily by sales to its northern neighbor. Generally, it's not a place for the casual tourist.
Grant is aware of all this when he sets out for his trip and is constantly warned that as a white Englishman, he will be viewed with particular suspicion, which is not good in a land where suspicion can lead to murder. Grant, however, is reasonably certain that he can persevere, a feeling that will be challenged multiple times as he gets into more and more perilous situations, culminating in his being hunted for sport by some Mexican "hillbillies" (it spoils nothing to say he survives; after all, he wrote the book).
This is not a book that you're likely to see promoted by the Mexican Tourist Board. There is very little good that Grant has to say about the majority of the Sierra Madre population. As he portrays them, they are violent, constantly drunk, viciously sexist, cruel and superstitious criminals, while being ruled by a government that is both incompetent and thoroughly corrupt. There are a few good people in the bunch, and Grant learns that to survive in the Sierra Madre is more a matter of who you know than what you know.
Grant's writing is engaging, with humor intermixed with some rather dark scenes. Even if you question his wisdom, he does narrate a compelling tale, one that argues that the land can shape the way the people are even more than race or language.
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Summary: Sparks your imagination.
Comment: This book began as an inspiring romp into the last vestige of the old west. The canyon land of the Mexican Sierras was described for us gringos who've never gotten this far south of the border, and the culture, from an outsider's perspective, somewhat illuminated. However, somewhere around the middle of the book I began to find the author's account somewhat superficial and in fact, a bit dull. He promised us Hollywood style theatrics on the first page, but delivered neither these, nor a serious accounting of the people and the landscape. His statistics on the importance of the drug culture to the Mexican economy I did find illuminating. It seems that the access to easy money in the US has killed off the peasant culture, without providing any kind of reliable middle class ease in its place. The book is worth picking up, but I was left wanting a bit more, or a bit less.
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Summary: INcredibly entertaining
Comment: Rarely do I find a book that I won't read more than 50 pages of at a sitting, so as to save some of its goodness for further joy. This is one such tome.
Grant is a sensible British fellow living in Tucson who falls in love with the Sierra Madre and takes us with him on a cross-Madre jaunt that is often not so jaunty. He avoids the typical endless cross-cultural references and sticks mainly to the facts, ma'am.
There are so many funny, touching, harsh, and scary moments here that it becomes a phantasmagoria of nuttiness; the mind fairly reels at what a different universe is going on at this very moment just a few hundred miles from where I am writing this.
Grant's writing is simple in all the best ways, and his humor and humanity shine through at all times, as does his wanderlust and willingness to call himself on his own foibles. And if you want some insight as to why the USA is filling up with Mexicans, here's a fine place to start. Above all else, God's Middle Finger is just a plain fun read, a true page-turner that you can't help but marvel at and learn from at the same time.
I'll be buying copies of this for various friends, as great a tribute to a book as I can pay.
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Summary: Don't Try this at Home
Comment: Let me begin by saying that I enjoyed reading "God's Middle Finger". Travel books don't always read like a novel that makes you anxious to know what happens next. "God's Middle Finger" does just that and, except for maybe an early speed bump or two, it maintains that artistic energy throughout the book. I selected this book because "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" was one of the two or three best books I had read before I was 21 (and I suspect it still makes the top ten). I had a youthful fantasy for many years of going there to mine for gold. The brilliance of B. Traven long out-lived the imagined brilliance of gold and I settled into more practical pursuits as I matured. I looked forward to a slight reincarnation of those long lost dreams. However, I got a rather different set of impressions thanks to author Richard Grant.
Grant portrays my imagined heaven as a reality of hell. The scenery beckons but there's a "Beware of the Dog" sign posted at every entrance. How can people live in such a violent society where murder and rape are common place? As I delved further into the book I kept coming across seemingly normal people who had lived in various idealic locations in the Sierra Madre without having even once been murdered. There were Mennonites, Mormons, Scientists, Industrialists, social workers and the like whom I kept wanting to warn about their impending doom if they didn't leave the area immediately. Somehow, there were villages, towns and cities in which people lived their lives without knowing the evils that awaited them. Fortunately for the reader, our author and travel guide rarely met such condemned ignorants. He was always in the midst of the next drinking party interacting with the REAL inhabitants of the Sierra Madre. It seemed so strange when innocent tourists would happen by totally unaware of their pending doom.
OK, Richard Grant was up front about his love of various form of intoxicants. He chose to see the Sierra Madre through blood-shot eyes and, frankly, it made the trip all the more exciting sitting back in my room while he was taking all the chances. Along the way, he shared a lot of really interesting bits of information such as the last of the "wild" Apaches, Pancho Villa, the economic impact of the illegal drug business and the amazing Tarahumara Indians. The Tarahumaras and their incredible ability to outrun the rest of the world while taking beer and cigarette breaks along the way was the highlight of the book for me. Grant did spend some time with some sober people and he has some very significant observations to offer. I'm just going to have to get around to reading my copy of "The Labyrinth of Soletude" now that he's quoted it so often and so effectively. However, I think I'd like to read a "Tea-totaller's Guide to the Sierra Madre" (if there IS one). I mean, after literarily revisiting the Sierra Madre, I'd like to believe that I actually COULD go there.
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