Friday, November 30, 2007

Reading Update

With all the traveling, I have actually had a chance to read. It's a little bizarro in some ways that I got as much reading done as I did: I was traveling with a 2 year old after all rather than alone and we were, well, on vacation. Aren't we supposed to go DO things? Yes, we were and, yes, we did. The problem is taht we were traveling with a 2 year old and that means naps. Lyuda gets antsy and needs to run off to do stuff then. I am quite happy to grab a book and read. I need slow down time. My wife needs hyperkinetic speed up time to relax. Because Avrora needed her naps, I got it and so did Lyuda.

I read two books while I was in Hawaii while Avrora napped. One was about Mexico, but a bit dated. The other was only four years old and about illegal immigration. The former book, Distant Neighbors, has been cited by a lot of reviewers of other books on Mexico as something that all the newer books were trying to live up to. Even though it was published in 1989, it seemed like that would be a good place to start.

It was. Having been a Borderer for nine years, it turns out that I knew quite a bit about Mexicans. More so than I thought. Being a close neighbor, you pick up more than I would have thought. I rather liked the book though. Obviously some of the open ended questions from the book have been answered: would Mexico's political institutions survive the economic meltdown of the time? Yeah, it did. It's politics have changed, but its a recent one. NAFTA has had a huge impact and the illegal immigrant problem has taken wings of its own. I do recommend the book though as that it helps give a lot of the background of the politics of that past that you don't really absorb otherwise such as the origin and early evolution of PAN (the political party).

On the other hand, if you are a xenophobe, love Tom Tancredo, and adore the Border Patrol, please, read the book, Illegals. It will fit right in with your thought process. For myself, when I was going into this, I expected a book that was anti-illegal immigration. Indeed, I expected it to be alarmist and rather one sided. However, its fair to say that I was being naive. It was written in such a way as to not only be alarmist, but would imply combinations of dark conspiracies, the foulness of illegals on a deep innate level, and that the Aztlan Reconquista twits are not only more than twits, but are winning (while implying Washington DC wants it to happen). It was also, in my absolutely arrogant opinion, an outstanding example of how to lie with statistics. The book really outraged me, but not in the way that the author intended: I was outraged by the author's pure chutzpah in writing what he did. There was only one time that I agreed with the author at all and that horrified me that even that much agreement with the book happened: it was wrt the shredding of some 90,000 documents at the Laguna Nigel immigration office in California as a way to clear a backlog. I really didn't like the book and I really don't recommend it. I only picked it up - used! thank all that's good and light, because I am trying to read the different perspectives wrt immigration debate. I need a mental bleaching after this one. oy.

To that end, I am unsure what I am going to read next. I was thinking about reading either about Russia's Far East issues or about the evolution of the dinosaurs. I suspect that its going to be the latter. Most of my books to be read right now are about politics and Mexican history. I need a break after that last book. bleh.

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