October 2013 Conversations with Las Comadres: Teleconference Series
Book of Cuba — Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
Golden Plague — Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
The Fight to Save Juárez — Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Length: 00:55:52 | Size: 10.05 MB
October 2013 Book of the Month
Book of Cuba
By Cristina Garcia
Published by Scribner Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1476710242
Vivid and alive, Cristina García’s new novel transports readers to Cuba, to Miami, and into the heads of two larger-than-life men—a fictionalized Fidel Castro and an octogenarian Cuban exile obsessed with seeking revenge against the dictator.
In King of Cuba, the National Book Award finalist and author of Dreaming in Cuban, writing at the top of her form with humor and humanity, returns to the territory of her homeland. El Comandante, an aging dictator, shambles about his mansion in Havana, visits a dying friend, tortures hunger strikers in one of his prisons, and grapples with the stale end of his life that is as devoid of grandeur as his nearly sixty-year-old revolution.
Across the waters in Florida, Goyo Herrera, a Miami exile in his eighties, plots revenge against his longtime enemy—the very same El Comandante—whom he blames for stealing his beloved, ruining his homeland, and taking his father’s life. Herrera would gladly “wear chains on his ankles, chisel stones for his remaining days, even become a goddamn Democrat for the gratification of personally expediting the tyrant’s journey back to the Devil, with whom he’d obviously made a pact.” With her masterful twinning of El Comandante and Herrera, along with the rabble of other Cuban voices that combine to create a chorus of history’s unofficial stories, García plumbs the passions and realities of these two Cubas—on the island and off—and offers a pulsating story that entertains and illuminates.
About the Author: Cristina Garcia
Cristina García is the author of six novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her recent young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, is set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s.
García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Recently, Garcia was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin as well as the University of Miami. Currently, she is University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.
October 2013 Book of the Month
Golden Plague
By Ila Monroe
Published by Padmore Publishing Group
ISBN-13: 978-1939866028
Unscrupulous minds controlling public health target the innocent and young by exposing them to deadly micro organisms that enter the body through open wounds. Unsuspecting citizens going about their lives are suddenly thrown into a volatile situation in which death is the most likely outcome.
Can Valeria and Mercedes, two latinas living in Chicago, directors of a marketing campaign for an international pharmaceutical, save the population when they are as oblivious as the rest of us?
Golden Plague, the new offering by Ila Monroe, sheds a light on the the frailty of our existence by sculpting one of our biggest fears, contagion, into a visceral nightmare; a nightmare that originates in a place where we seek solace and safety: a hospital bed. You won’t be able to put this book down!
About the Author: Ila Monroe
Ila Monroe became the editor of a respected health magazine at twenty-five years of age – the youngest editor ever at her employer’s offices: a woman’s magazine, business newspaper and general interest publishing house. She won the Excellence Award for Journalism from the American Medical Association, and also received recognition for her ability to write healthcare news in a provocative yet accessible style. She is also the winner of the Innovation Award for her interactive educational series: Heroes from our History, in which Monroe demonstrates her ability to be a versatile producer and writer.
By means of her editorial career, Monroe has also written a publication on pregnancy (which is still number one in sales lists for books at her publishing house), several short stories, essays, and children’s books. Her new collection of historical books for children will be published in autumn 2013, by Padmore Publishing Group. Golden Plague is her first novel, informing readers, in an entertaining style, about several medical enigmas that plague our modern world. Monroe currently resides in Florida with her husband and two children.
October 2013 Book of the Month
The Fight to Save Juárez
By Ricardo Ainslie
Published by The University of Texas Press
ISBN-13: 978-0292738904
The City of Juárez is ground zero for the drug war that is raging across Mexico and has claimed close to 60,000 lives since 2007. Almost a quarter of the federal forces that former President Felipe Calderón deployed in the war were sent to Juárez, and nearly 20 percent of the country’s drug-related executions have taken place in the city, a city that can be as unforgiving as the hardest places on earth. It is here that the Mexican government came to turn the tide. Whatever happens in Juárez will have lasting repercussions for both Mexico and the United States.
Ricardo Ainslie went to Juárez to try to understand what was taking place behind the headlines of cartel executions and other acts of horrific brutality. In The Fight to Save Juárez, he takes us into the heart of Mexico’s bloodiest city through the lives of four people who experienced the drug war from very different perspectives—Mayor José Reyes Ferriz, a mid-level cartel player’s mistress, a human rights activist, and a photojournalist. Ainslie also interviewed top Mexican government strategists, including members of Calderón’s security cabinet, as well as individuals within U.S. law enforcement. The dual perspective of life on the ground in the drug war and the “big picture” views of officials who are responsible for the war’s strategy, creates a powerful, intimate portrait of an embattled city, its people, and the efforts to rescue Juárez from the abyss.
About the Author: Ricardo Ainslie
A native of Mexico City, Ricardo Ainslie is an award-winning psychologist-psychoanalyst who uses books, documentary films, and photographic exhibits to capture and depict subjects of social and cultural interest. His books include Long Dark Road: Bill King and Murder In Jasper, Texas; The Psychology of Twinship; and No Dancin’ In Anson: An American Story of Race and Social Change. His films include The Mystery of Consciousness; Ya Basta! Kidnapped in Mexico; Looking North: Mexican Images of Immigration; and Crossover: A Story of Desegregation. Ainslie teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and also has a private practice with adult patients.