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Lunes Libro for los Chicos Edition : Al Galope

10:00 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Books| children · No Comments

16 Nov 2009

9780761154150 This is Poroto’s (my toddler) new favorite book, the recently released by Workman Spanish translation, Al Galope! by Rufus Butler Seder.

Warning : blatant use of my kid ahead

Poroto Peeps Al Galope from VivirLatino on Vimeo.

What makes Al Galope! so much fun for the pre-school set (the ideal age for this book, in my opinion) is it features animals and what they do, adding a touch of a self-esteem in it’s final pages. But what sets this book apart and even had my 12 year old saying “that’s cool” is its use of “scanimation”, a mix of optical illusion and animation that makes the animals “move”. The author explains it best.

Al Galope! retails for $12.99.

A Cultural Revolution in Venezuela…through Books?

4:02 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Books| Controversia| Culture| Latin America| Venezuela · 5 Comments

14 May 2009

littleprince While conservatives here in the U.S. sling the word “socialism” around like an insult, in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is leading a crusade for children to learn all about it via books. Chavez’s “Plan Revolucionario de Lectura” (”Revolutionary Reading Plan”) is getting off the ground now, with the goal, according to Chavez, of “constructing the new man”.

Chavez says he’ll be doing this by encouraging the reading of “revolutionary books”, while at the same time ridding libraries of classics such as “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Cervantes’ classic Don Quijote for “ideological reasons”. I wonder what ideology he is referring to. No, I mean really…I don’t get what ideology is espoused in either of those books that he might disagree with. Maybe I need to read them again?

Chavez’s critics say he’s trashing lots of other books as well, citing that they must be thrown out because they are infested with mold or moths. According to La Tercera, among them are Hitchcock’s The Mummy, another one I don’t get. The books were allegedly sold to a recycling company for pennies on the kilo.

First it was RCTV, now it’s library books? Is this a harder push towards a cultural revolution in Venezuela? What do you think of what Chavez is doing? Let us know in the comments.

Via / La Tercera

Galeano Book Blowing Up on Amazon Thanks to Chavez-Obama Exchange

19 Apr 2009

The Eduardo Galeano book that Hugo Chavez gave President Obama yesterday, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent”, has gone from an Amazon rank of 54,295 to number 2 today. Hey, not bad in just over 24 hours, and if this gets Americans to understand the history of the U.S. and Europe in Latin America, all the better.

Check out the interview with Chavez above where he talks about giving the book to Obama and how apparently awesome his meeting with the U.S. president was.

Via / AP

What Colombia’s Like…Or Not

2:29 pm By Maegan La Mala · Bizarro| Books| Brazil| Colombia| Controversia · 3 Comments

14 Apr 2008

Next time you’re about to take a trip, you might want to think twice before you pick up a Lonely Planet guidebook. Apparently at least one guidebook author thought it was OK to write about countries he’d never visited, among them Colombia:

A former Lonely Planet travel writer who provoked controversy after he admitted he did not always visit the places he reviewed today played down the “hyperbole” surrounding his revelations.

Thomas Kohnstamm’s book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? contains tales of living with a prostitute, dealing drugs and in one case, writing about Colombia, without actually visiting the country.

“They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia,” he told Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating who was in an intern in the Colombian consulate.”

Kohnstamm told the paper he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including their titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, South America, Venezuela and Chile.

The author claims that as a writer, it just isn’t possible to visit all the places you are asked to write about because you aren’t paid enough. Lonely Planet is denying that similar white lies are being told in any of their other guidebooks.

Via / Guardian

Shameless Self- Promotion : Read La Mala in Book form inside Just Like A Girl!

11:48 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Books| Women · 1 Comment

2 Apr 2008

Girlchild Press has a new book out, Just Like A Girl, featuring the writings of some of the smartest girls/women out there and yes, myself included.

Through the end of this month, April, you can get your hands on this book at the sale price of $15 (regular price is $20). And no I don’t get money from sales, so it’s not going into my pocket but into supporting the words of mujeres.

Get your copy aqui.

Poll: Conservatives don’t read books

3:23 pm By Maegan La Mala · Books| Culture| Politics · Comments Off

21 Aug 2007

While we know that conservatives do read — as evidenced by the hundreds of comments we get from them here on VL — a recent poll shows that they aren’t exactly devouring books.

The AP-Ipsos poll found 22 percent of liberals and moderates said they had not read a book within the past year, compared with 34 percent of conservatives.

Among those who had read at least one book, liberals typically read nine books in the year, with half reading more than that and half less. Conservatives typically read eight, moderates five.

By slightly wider margins, Democrats tended to read more books than Republicans and independents. There were no differences by political party in the percentage of those who said they had not read at least one book.

Racist book ruffles feathers in the UK

3:49 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Books| Controversia| World| race · 2 Comments

13 Jul 2007

PF_1034570~Tintin-Au-Congo-1931-Posters.jpg Since we’ve covered Americans calling Brazil the Congo this week and racist books in the past, it’s only relevant to call attention to a book that’s raising controversy in the U.K. Some of you might be familiar with Tintin, a series of children’s books that have been around for over half a century now. They tend to chronicle the adventures of the main character in various parts of the world, with good, clean fun. But it seems Tintin’s latest adventure took a racist turn for the worst:

Borders is removing “Tintin in the Congo” from the children’s section of its British stores, after a customer complained the comic work was racist, the company said Thursday.

David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterized as racist abuse.

Mexico City makes commuters read

12:28 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Books| literature| mexico · Comments Off

5 Jun 2007

There’s nothing like the Mexico City metro: hundreds of miles of sweaty commute, neon green seats and beggars and entertainers of all sorts. Idle time is often spent fending off gropers and the occasional organ grinder, but Mexico City’s local government is giving riders another way to while away the hours: reading.

250,000 editions of an anthology featuring Mexican writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Juan Villoro will be distributed throughout the city’s green line, the longest trajectory running from the north to the south of the huge metropolis. Metro users can pick up a book when they get on, read it during their trip, then return it before hopping off at their destination.

The program, called “Para leer de boleto” looks to make non-readers into readers,”encourage reading among those who occasionally read, and provide reading material to those who cannot afford books.” I wonder if train riders are really going to choose a literature anthology over sexy comic books or revista Alarma.

Via / Terra

Image: jornada.unam.mx

Walt Whitman loves Latinos

3:17 pm By Maegan La Mala · literature · Comments Off

30 Aug 2006

Well, I don’t know if he does or not. All I know is this is going on in a few hours:

Wednesday, August 30th @ 6pm

Walt Whitman: South and North
An Evening of Contemporary Latino and Hispanic American Poets, plus
North Americans with connections to Latin America.

Join us as we conclude the weeklong tribute to the poetic legacy of
Walt Whitman. Slated to read: Fish Vargas, Lidia Torres, John
Murillo, Tara Betts, Aracelis Girmay, Diana Marie Delgado, and Diana
Gitesha Hernandez. And fiction writer, Marco Fernando Navarro. Hosted by Rich Villar and the crew from the Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase

The Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street
between Bleecker and W. 4th Street (near 6th Avenue)
A, C, E, B, D, F & V trains to W. 4th Street Station
$6 (includes free drink)

Image via / infoplease.com (LOC image)

No more Spanish books for a Georgia library system

3:03 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Books| Georgia| language · 4 Comments

21 Jun 2006

Thinking of heading out to the library to pick up a couple of books en español? According to AP, if you live in Gwinnett County, Georgia, think again. The library system in the heavily Latino county has decided it won’t be purchasing any more non-children’s books in the language of Cervantes:

Last week, the library board in this fast-growing county of 700,000 people eliminated the $3,000 that had been set aside to buy Spanish-language fiction in the coming fiscal year. It offered no explanation, but the chairman said such book purchases would lead readers of other foreign languages to demand the same treatment.

I can see it now. All those French residents of this Georgia county taking to the streets to demand original versions of the works of Baudelaire and Victor Hugo.

“We can’t supply pleasure reading material for all language groups, so we’re not going to go down that road,” said Lloyd Breck, chairman of the library board.

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