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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Holy Guacamole,
By Stitchymom (El Paso, TX) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Holy Guacamole! (Culinary Food Writer) (Paperback)
This is a light and fun book. One of the references used is from a book written by one of my family members. El Paso is a little known city in Texas. It is actually the 19th largest city in the nation, and the largest on any part of the U.S border. This book gives us a glimpse El Paso's culture, climate and ambiance. The recipies included are from some of the finest restaurants, serving the best Mexican Food this side of the border. There's lots to learn and new food to try.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
All hail Macbeth, di Scozia re!,
By
This review is from: Holy Guacamole! (Culinary Food Writer) (Paperback)
This is an unassuming, yet amusing mystery. Its protagonist is a woman with an admirable propensity for taking up arms against a sea of troubles while tossing off historical tidbits and Texas-oriented recipes along the way. I have no qualms about recommending this book to anyone with a taste for contemporary foodie whodunits. Part of the book, however, deals with a local university's production of Giuseppe Verdi's opera, "Macbeth," and I have a mind to offer a comment or two on that.
The producer-director of the opera, we are told by the heroine-narrator, has taken diabolical liberties with the piece, liberties enough to rile her and everybody else in the audience into a state of sputtering indignation. These liberties are even offered later in the book, albeit half-heartedly, as sufficient reason why the aforementioned producer-director so soon takes on the new role of First Murder Victim. As far as I can see, just three specific liberties are set out for the operatic "Macbeth." First, the setting is changed from 11th Century Scotland to contemporary El Paso. Second, the protagonists are no longer nobles embroiled in a civil war over Scotland but gangs embroiled in a civil war over turf. Third, the witches, whom Verdi had made into a chorus of women, have been converted into a trio of individual singers. (This third change is regarded by the narrator as a GOOD THING.) Speaking as an opera fan, one who has been assailed by productions of Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" set in a Brooklyn diner, Verdi's "Un ballo in maschera" placed in a latrine, Rossini's "Barber of Seville" transported to Baghdad, and Wagner's "Ring" plunked down in heaven knows what twisted and incoherent universe, these "Macbeth" liberties seem awfully mild. That everyone in the theater would find them appalling is a concept that strikes me as hilariously unlikely. It must be remembered that a substantial portion of any paying audience at an opera house regards all music drama as merely an interval between periods of serious drinking. That portion neither knows nor cares. Then, there is the segment of the audience that takes any new twist, no matter how bizarre, no matter how irrational, no matter how inappropriate, as a stroke of genius, and they will loudly trumpet their own open-minded appreciation for it. Another portion just comes to hear the diva sing; they couldn't care less about her surroundings. Some come just for the music and regard all physical stage production as intrinsically flawed. And the rest of us just look, groan and mumble that it might have been worse. In fifty years of opera attendance, I recall only five performances that I found faultless--and three of those were in the 1960s. As for the liberties taken with the opera in the book, a struggle between thuggish nobles is not so different from battling gang lords; a turf war is a turf war. Between Scotland and El Paso--well, blasted heaths are not exactly unknown in either place. And as for the weird sisters, whether chorus or trio, they are still le sorelle vagabonde who on un giorno non vidi mai so foul and fair greet Macbeth to hail him di Glamis sire, di Caudor sire, and king that shall be.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
serio-comic who-done-it,
This review is from: Holy Guacamole! (Culinary Food Writer) (Paperback)
After traveling through several American states and quite a few foreign nations solving homicides along the way, Caroline finds a murder investigation in her own back yard in El Paso. They are attending the opera seeing a contemporary version of a Macbeth dealing in modern day illegal drug trafficking. Many are appalled at the changes artistic director Vladislav Gubenko made to the Bard's classic.
After eating tostados with guacamole, Vladislav leaves for home ignoring his irate critics. The next day his next door neighbor and former vice cop Luz finds Vladislav dead. The police think he choked to death in his vomit, but Luz believes otherwise; she feels a killer used a pillow to smother him. Luz and Carolyn try to learn who the killer is and why he murdered him. In the course of their investigation, they kidnap a Juarez based drug dealer and take him to the States for the bounty, rescue students from white slavery, and get men abusing their authorities by illegally jailing women for personal use. However, the Gubenko killer remains at the top of the list. Many Americans and Mexicans see El Paso as a border town, but to Carolyn it is a cosmopolitan center with many of the good points that large cities contain with the additional influence of the borderland culture. Luz and Carolyn make a great crime fighting team who hopefully will continue to clean the streets from those felonious varmints. Nancy Fairbanks has written a serio-comic who-done-it in which Carolyn's trivial historical sputtering adds humor to the witty and exciting pursuit of a killer. Harriet Klausner
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