A New Book I Can't Wait to Read

I first met the fascinating, gutsy, and apparently indefatigable Wendy Call at the Macondo Writers' Workshop, where we spent a great week together writing memoir. 

But I'd encountered her work before that, and probably so have you:  in her terrific co-edited volume Telling True Stories:  A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, which is full of practical, useful advice from nonfiction writers at the top of their game.

Now Wendy has a new book out that I can't wait to read:  No Word for Welcome:  The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy.  

No Word for Welcome explores the impact of global industrial development on the people, culture, and natural environment of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, offering fully rounded portraits of the teachers, fishers, activists, and farmers who are working to prevent the destruction of their world.  No Word for Welcome inserts individual human stories into the macro-story of economic globalization and opens a window for U.S. readers onto a beautiful, fragile part of Mexico.
 

Critics seem helplessly unable to stop loving this book.  Sven Birkerts calls it "an engaged documentary account that is at once informative and stirring," and the Iowa Review praises Wendy's "graceful movement between cultures." 

Sandra Cisneros calls No Word for Welcome, “Fascinating. Beautifully written. Deeply researched," and Phillip Lopate offers an unqualified endorsement:  "On every level, the work succeeds. She has merged an enormous amount of investigation with a graceful belletristic tone, ferreting out the subject’s contradictions and complexities.  It's a beautiful job." 

What's more, No Word for Welcome has been published by one of my favorite presses, the University of Nebraska Press, which seems to be racking up Nobel Prize winners right and left lately.  For me, their imprimatur has become practically a guarantee of smart, complicated, beautiful, and provocative reads.  You can read a short excerpt here.

As Sandra Cisneros points out, the story of corporate industrialization, environmental and cultural destruction, and resistance by la gente is "a story happening everywhere, including our own backyard."  This book is relevant to us all.

Bonus for Star City locals:  rumor has it that Wendy will be here in Lincoln near the end of October.  I'm hoping she'll give a reading somewhere in town (hint, hint, Indigo Bridge Books). 

If she does, I intend to bribe my new crop of graduate students into attending.  (Talented young people, consider yourselves warned.)