Books like A Silent Fury — picked by fans

I first read this book while I was conducting anthropological fieldwork in the mines of Guanajuato, Mexico. Even though the conditions in the mines I visited were somewhat better, and even though I was in silver and gold mines and not coal mines, I was amazed by the continuity in mining practices and the kinds of conflicts that emerge, such as the danger caused when miners are paid by the amount produced since they don’t want to take the time needed to support the tunnels with wooden timbering.

I also love that it includes descriptions of women and girls as mineworkers, which very few books about mining do.  

This was one of my favorite books as a child and probably one reason I became an anthropologist of mining.

Though I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, I found it fascinating that in a place where everything is doing the same job, especially a highly dangerous and damaging job, other aspects of culture coalesce around that job and its meanings—things like religion, kinship, gender, leisure, ecology, etcetera. I was deeply moved by the description of the vast slag heap that slowly came to tower over the town, eventually engulfing the narrator’s small house. 

I love this book’s restrained, atmospheric description of the experiences of a North American couple re-opening an abandoned copper mine in Mexico in the middle of the 20th century. It is Doerr’s first book, which she wrote in her mid-70s, based on experiences with her husband earlier in her life.

Her spare, evocative writing style gives a vivid sense of place and of human relationships between the foreign managers and the villagers, creating a sense of tenuous but real connection across wide divisions of language, race, class, education, and religion. 

This is not only a great ethnography (a book based on long-term anthropological fieldwork) giving a splendidly detailed and deeply humane account of the lives of Bolivian tin miners and their families in the 1970s, but also one of the most effective case studies within the framework of “dependency theory.”

The title, which comes from one of the author’s interviews with a miner, captures the violence and misery of tin mining, but I also love the way the book portrays its protagonists as ordinary people living and giving meaning to their lives as best they can. 

I was interested that the book was set in Mexico and with a female protagonist, so I was happy to give a new-to-me author a chance.

From the very first description of the detectives’ office in Acapulco police station, there was a level of detail that made me think, ‘this author is writing from real life’. Carmen Amato was a CIA analyst who lived in Mexico for many years. She knows what she’s talking about, from police corruption to cartel crime, and the blatant misogyny of people who should be on the same side. 

I had no idea where the story was going; nothing was telegraphed, and it was as raw and real as you could wish.

Beautifully written, I wanted more, more, more. I chomped through the next 8 books in the series, and eagerly await book 10.

In this masterpiece of historical narrative, Paul Sullivan investigates the 1875 sacking of a sugar plantation (called Xuxub) and the murder of its American manager by Maya rebels. Located on the geographical frontier between “Ladino” and Maya society, Xuxub became a microcosm of all of the conflicts that haunted Mexico as it entered its “Guilded Age”: inter-elite rivalries, international competition in the wake of the U.S.-Mexico War, and the overwhelming fear that the nation’s Indigenous population would rise up against encroaching liberal capitalism. It all comes together in a murder mystery, written more like true crime than an academic text, right down to the final poetic twist. This is an immensely enjoyable read, so much so that I have read it no fewer than fifteen times. 

Texas schools do an incredible job of acculturating their students in Texas history. The school system starts by telling the story of true Texans. Unfortunately, some of those tales were what we called “stories.” 

In college, I took a course called The History of Mexico. The course book used by Professor Macias (if I remember his name correctly) was a small book, less than 200 pages, called The Compact History of Mexico. What a wonderful course and wonderful book. 

I have not looked at the book in years, even though I ordered a copy when writing this. I felt like a child reading the book, being told a different story than I had been told over the years, providing to me – a black student – the why and how history and both sides of a story are so important. Always feeling left out of the discussion, hearing a distorted… show more.

Known for her long and often book-length poems, Maria Baranda is a leading poet of Mexico. This book contains two works, "From the Natural History of the Rustic" and "From the Natural History of Atlantica."

The project was inspired by an artist friend who would collect objects in the forest for his artworks, but first, he would talk at length about them. Written with a light hand, the poem is a gentle spoof of the friend who also shares in his wonderment: “I think of white lilies at the height of lightning. My friend has taught me.”

Like Silverblatt’s book on native women in prehispanic and colonial Peru, this edited volume on early Mexico was and remains a gamer changer in bringing to light women’s work, including ways women accumulated and distributed wealth, their varieties of social and political identities they held, and their power and influence.

With chapters by experts in Aztec/Nahua women’s, social, and cultural history, the chapters represent a variety of approaches and methodologies to women’s and gender history even in areas where the documentation on women is sparser than in central Mesoamerica, especially for northern Mexico and Maya women further south.

It is often said that history is stranger than fiction and a disastrous French invasion of Mexico in 1862 to establish a European-style monarchy certainly fits the cliché. The then-French emperor, Napoleon III, rescued the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand Maximilian from a life as a dilettante in the shadow of his older brother, Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria. Maximilian was offered a throne propped up by French bayonets across the Atlantic. The only problem was that most Mexicans supported the legitimate president, Benito Juárez. After a vicious civil war and a desperate last stand, Maximilian was captured tried and executed in 1867. 

Months earlier, his wife, Charlotte, had broken down and lost her mind pleading for Catholic support in the Vatican before the Pope. Put simply, you couldn’t make it up and, for the most part, Fernando del Paso’s brilliantly researched and readable novel doesn’t. Having written my own non-fiction account… show more.