The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport


Book Description

Award-winning journalist Tyche Hendricks has explored the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by car and by foot, on horseback, and in the back of a pickup truck. She has shared meals with border residents, listened to their stories, and visited their homes, churches, hospitals, farms, and jails. In this dazzling portrait of one of the least understood and most debated regions in the country, Hendricks introduces us to the ordinary Americans and Mexicans who live there—cowboys and Indians, factory workers and physicians, naturalists and nuns. A new picture of the borderlands emerges, and we find that this region is not the dividing line so often imagined by Americans, but is a common ground alive with the energy of cultural exchange and international commerce, burdened with too-rapid growth and binational conflict, and underlain with a deep sense of history.




The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport


Book Description

"There are other books dealing with life at the border, but none as intelligent, searching, objective or encompassing as Tyche Hendricks' vivid evocation of this region--its people, its landscape, its industry, its problems and its unique culture."—Peter Schrag, author of Not Fit for Society: Immigration and Nativism in America "This vivid, evocative book made me think of the Robert Frost line, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall.' Tyche Hendricks' multilayered portrait of the human communities that transcend the U.S.-Mexico border should remind us all of what an artificial thing barriers, fences and checkpoints are. Maybe, just maybe, someday we, like so much of western Europe, can do without them."—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains "This is an ambitious undertaking and Hendricks excels, finding stories along the way that illustrate the clash between, within and along that nearly 2,000-mile stretch of territory. Her reporting illustrates that for many U.S.-Mexico border residents, the international bridge is something you cross on your way to visit family, shop for groceries, get to a doctor or work."—Macarena Del Rocio Hernandez, University of Houston "Dear President Obama, next time you are at Camp David spend a couple of hours reading The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport. While the Health Care overhaul may well come to define your presidency, immigration will define the future of our country. In this marvelous book—rigorously grounded, smartly argued, beautifully crafted, Tyche Hendricks captures, in stories of biblical proportion, the contours of the magical line that at once unites us and divides us as Americans and as neighbors of our indispensable partner in the South. Ms. Hendricks's book, Mr. President, will remind you just what is at stake in getting immigration reform right. All Californians, Texans, and Arizonians, who think they know the border, should read this book. It is essential reading for our times."—Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Fisher Membership Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, and co-author of Latinos: Remaking America




You Don't Need a Passport to Move to New Mexico


Book Description

You Don't Need a Passport to Move to New Mexico By Debora L. Carr When an east coast 'Jersey girl' moves west to her new 'home on the range' in Albuquerque, it does not take long to figure out that 'they do things differently in New Mexico'. She finds she has moved from a state that has perpetually been the butt of comedian's jokes, to a state that is generally not even recognized as such by a large portion of the US population. A compilation of firmly tongue-in-cheek vignettes regarding life in New Mexico as viewed through the eyes of an oftimes bewildered transplanted 'Easterner', the reader is invited on a rollicking ride through a state filled with weird wonders from moss rocks to the 'mummy truck' and populated with a cast of colorful characters such as Tat2 Tammy, the Masked Man of Central Avenue and Jesus on a Harley, to name but a few. Born out of the humorous newsletters Debora wrote and sent to friends and family members 'back east', the book relates tales of crazy drivers, odd customs, and strange roadway sights amid a landscape straight out of a Roadrunner cartoon. All are part of the Land of Enchantment that is known as New Mexico. About the Author Debora Carr was born and raised in the central New Jersey area, graduating from Rutgers University with a BA in Art Education in 1980 and became a successful professional graphic artist and packaging designer. She chose to accompany her parents when they decided to relocate to and retire in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2003, where she continued her chosen profession of graphic artist, working as a one-person art department for a small print shop. She continued to keep in touch with friends and family members 'back east' by means of periodic humorous newsletters which she called her 'Albu-Quirky Journals' in which she detailed her perspective on life in New Mexico. These collected essays were developed from those early newsletters and are written in a tongue-in-cheek style, emulating those written by two of her favorite authors, James Thurber and Mark Twain. She has a penchant for collecting stories and photos of all things weird, odd and unusual and is delighted to find that her new home state of New Mexico is overflowing with them.




The Smoking Diaries Volume 1


Book Description

When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. The Smoking Diaries was the result, in which one of Britain's most beloved and original writers reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining.




The Complete Smoking Diaries


Book Description

When he turned sixty-five, playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary in which he reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Bringing together the four parts of The Smoking Diaries (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer, The Last Cigarette, and Coda) this beautiful volume is filled with comedy and serious reflection, sharp observation and painful self-disclosure. A brilliant and moving account of life's unsteady progress, it takes the reader to the heart of one man's brilliant struggle towards some kind of personal truth.




As Far As You Can Go Without A Passport


Book Description

Homespun humor about the way we live, from the pleasant futility of salmon fishing and the joys of Halloween, to quiet afternoons with soap opera families and endless nights in pursuit of trivia Tom Bodett, humorist, radio star, and pitchman for Motel 6, lives and writes in Homer, Alaska, the little town in the blue Northwest where America stops, carwise. "If you got into your car in New York," he says, "and wanted to take a nice long drive, I mean the longest drive you could without turning around or running into a foreign language, this is where you'd wind up." It's a place of moose and salmon and spectacular sunsets, but, Bodett insists, it's also small-town America, a place not all that different from the Michigan town of his youth. That's why he's made it his home: it perfectly suits his contrary appetites for the extreme and the everyday, for the rigors of the outdoor life and the mundane joys of the family circle. As Far As You Can Go Without a Passport, Bodett's first collection of casual essays, contains pieces on everything from trapping, tree cutting, and halibut fishing, to soap operas, lost socks, and sleeping in. It's guaranteed to please both the renegade and the homebody in every reader.




Riding Behind the Padre


Book Description

Borderland immigration and drug trafficking are heated issues for most people living in the Southwest. But for Arizona rancher-author Richard Collins, who operates a 13,000 acre ranch near the Mexican border, they are a daily occurrence. Wanting to hear firsthand from those living and working in the middle of the action, Collins embarks on a horseback journey along the Arizona-Sonoran borderlands in Riding Behind the Padre: Horseback Views from Both Sides of the Border. In this true story, Collins joins up with a congenial group of Mexican riders retracing the pathways of Eusebio Francisco Kino, the pioneering Jesuit priest who explored the same borderlands three hundred years prior. The riders include a cross-section of Mexico's growing middle class, bonded by faith in the Catholic Church, love of family and their country, and dedicated to the cause of Kino's sainthood. They are also troubled by America's failed war on drugs and its outdated immigration policies, and they often wonder if the United States is their ally or adversary. Through their perspectives and insights, the reader comes away with a better understanding of borderland complexities and a difficult but workable road map for the future. With a passion for landscape, horses, and history, this modern-day cowboy adventure unfolds in the Sonoran Desert where the dangers are fewer than advertised, beauty far outweighs ugliness, and most people are still friendly and caring.




Why Walls Won't Work


Book Description

Traces the border's long history of cultural interaction







Illegal Immigration


Book Description

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: THE CONSEQUENCE OF MISPLACED TRUST ******** A Laymans Close, Hard Look at The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 Have you ever asked yourself some of these questions? Why has our government failed in its duty to protect our border with Mexico? Why has our government permitted the use of our ports of entry by millions of aliens who, once safely through the gates, disappear into the crowd and become illegal immigrants like those who steal across the border? Why is it that for the past 25 years our government has been seemingly quite incapable of preventing employers in our country from hiring illegal immigrants when that was the specific means by which that same government promised us an end to illegal immigration? Why must we have illegal immigration in the first place? Whats been the cause of it? If youve wondered about that and would like to know the truth about these matters, then you will find it here in this book. Answers that are clearly stated, fact-based and so logical as to be altogether unavoidable. Answers that, in addition, are almost certain to surprise you, since they are not the answers to these questions that we hear from our columnists or from our talking heads and certainly not from our politicians. The fact of illegal immigration stands in stark contrast with our countrys policies and its laws. In explaining how we came to be so afflicted with it, this book will open up a whole new world for you, a world of which youve likely been largely oblivious. Above all, this is an honest book, a book that you can trust, something youll discover for yourselfand by no later than in its first chapter.