Santa Fe Reporter - Book Reviews http://www.sfreporter.com/articles.sec-21-1-book-reviews.html <![CDATA[Middle of Nowhere - One man’s spiritual journey takes him all the way to Santa Fe]]> A priest who escaped from Nazi Germany, Father John accepts an assignment to travel to Santa Fe around the time of his grandmother’s death, which symbolizes the loss of everything he knows and loves. However, tragedy is not the focus of Gil Sanchez’ Viva Cristo Rey, and neither is history. Instead, the book offers a sentimental view of the conception of the Cristo Rey Church, the largest adobe structure in the northern hemisphere.]]> <![CDATA[Freud or Fiction? - Cowboys, Crime Novels and the CIA]]> Michael McGarrity is a former deputy sheriff for Santa Fe County. For the release of his 13th novel, titled Hard Country: A Novel of the Old West, he asked Valerie Plame Wilson, a former CIA Operations Officer and author of Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House to interview him at Collected Works Bookstore.]]> <![CDATA[A New Home in Imagination - Native daughter brings Santa Fe experiences to Holocaust tale]]> Ramona Ausubel has found a way to let a story breathe while also giving great specificity to language—a rare trait among new authors.]]> <![CDATA[The Swedish West - Beautifully designed, photographed, written book misses opportunity]]> Promising to discover how people really live in our nation’s highly symbolic, deeply mythologized frontier, two Swedes venture to the American West with pen and camera.
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<![CDATA[Undoing the Myth - Writer-director John Sayles discusses a career on the fringe]]> Take the US annexation of the Philippines. Around 1898, the US touted itself as an anti-imperialist nation, home of equality, but then it invaded a foreign nation under the auspices of white Christian duty: Save the heathen islanders. This, according to John Sayles, who visits Santa Fe to talk about his work, including the book A Moment in the Sun. ]]> <![CDATA[Get off the Lawn - New book looks at the transformation of New Mexico’s plazas]]> Visit Santa Fe’s Plaza on any Saturday afternoon, and a diverse throng of locals and tourists, buskers and gawkers, buyers and sellers, and artists and lunch-eaters will be milling in and around it.]]> <![CDATA[Girly Bits - Eve Ensler brings teen monologues to Santa Fe]]>

In 1998, Eve Ensler published The Vagina Monologues, and suddenly a word that many viewed as vulgar became a powerful—and positive—force. This year’s V-Day performance in Santa Fe—a performance of Ensler’s new collection of monologues, I am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World—benefits the Santa Fe Mountain Center.

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<![CDATA[Present Tense - Margaret Atwood renders today's troubles into absorbing dystopian tomorrows]]>

In her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood describes a future in which humanity has all but obliterated itself through scientific hubris and indifference to the environment. SFR spoke with Atwood by phone from her hotel room in Chicago.

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<![CDATA[Mystery Man - Author Tony Hillerman's Legacy Lives On]]>

Tony Hillerman began his career as a journalist for The Santa Fe New Mexican and went on to author more than 30 books, most of which were mystery novels set in New Mexico—more specifically, Navajo lands. Hillerman died last October at the age of 83.

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<![CDATA[Book Review: The Mercy Papers - By Robin Romm]]>

In The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks, author Robin Romm has opened herself to the world in a courageous little book that chronicles the three weeks before her mother Jackie’s death. Romm tells stories of her childhood and young adulthood but manages to avoid the sentimentality into which many memoirs can easily fall.

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<![CDATA[A Touch of Memoir - SFR sits down with Santa Fe's newest literary starlet]]>

An interview with Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks.

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<![CDATA[Women's Words - Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks for women who can't speak for themselves]]> Since 9.11, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become one of the world’s most outspoken opponents of radical Islam, specifically the way Islam is used to justify the subjugation of women. She, along with Irshad Manji, discusses this topic in “Irreconcilable Differences: Two Women on Islam Today.”]]> <![CDATA[Read It - Rhymin' & Stealin']]> <![CDATA[Best Place to Go Dancing 2008 - Salsa, Hip-Hop, Line Dancing, Whatever!]]> 1 El Farol808 Canyon Road505-983-9912Venues may come and go in Santa Fe, but the ones that make it really make it. Take El Farol for instance. The restaurant and saloon first opened in 1835—yep,]]> <![CDATA[READ IT - What's that mean?]]> <![CDATA[DRUNK WITH POWER - A story of insatiable thirst and a Western water war.]]> A speculative novel of interstate water conflict in the near dark future.]]> <![CDATA[THE BRAND DIFFERENT - Selling Santa Fe without selling out.]]> At times, it seems as if Santa Fe’s current 1,800 people per square mile are caught in a temporal tug-of-war—half of them eager to embrace a modern city with a larger airport, a high-speed]]> <![CDATA[SHORT AND SWEET - Don't just rot your brain online.]]>