Review by Booklist Review
The Sierra Madre is familiar to readers because of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre0 and John Huston's film version of the novel, which starred Humphrey Bogart. Now comes Biggers' engaging memoir of this mountainous range in northern Mexico. Based on the author's year-long journey among the 80,000 Raramuri/Tarahumara, the book chronicles this indigenous culture. Biggers informs us that they are the last remnants of a pre-Columbian Mexico, spread out over miles of barrancas and forests. He describes the people and the villages; one was no more than a 250-year-old mission, a boarding school, a clinic, and a cooperative shop "plopped into the basin of a creek-forged valley of steep rock faces." Biggers visits their corn beer celebrations, Sunday gatherings at the mission plaza to attend mass and the judicial assembly that follows, caves in which some Raramuri still live, and their wood-chopping expeditions. He takes readers on an astonishing sojourn into a remote region. --George Cohen Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
