In the Sierra Madre - Hardcover

Jeff Biggers

3.73

37 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252031016 ISBN 13: 9780252031014

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2006

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"A stunning history of legendary treasure seekers and enigmatic natives in Mexico's Copper Canyon"

The Sierra Madre--no other mountain range in the world possesses such a ring of intrigue. In the Sierra Madre is a groundbreaking and extraordinary memoir that chronicles the astonishing history of one of the most famous, yet unknown, regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the Raramuri/Tarahumara, award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers offers a rare look into the ways of the most resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of Mexican mountaineers, and the fascinating parade of argonauts and accidental travelers that has journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters including Antonin Artaud, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo, and Pancho Villa, Biggers uncovers the remarkable treasures of the Sierra Madre.

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About the Author:

Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, radio correspondent and educator across the United States, Europe, Mexico and India. Winner of the American Book Award, he is the author of The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America.

From Booklist:

The Sierra Madre is familiar to readers because of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 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
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