Sometimes you just want to read something that warms your heart. Something that is so rich and abundant with kindliness and warmth that you have to pause several times in your reading to ponder and absorb. The author must have been a very "nice boy." A nice boy with kaleidoscope vision and compassion.

Nothing fancy. Just plain home-cooking, albeit sometimes spicy, like the chilaquilas recipe in the book, which incidently, is wonderful!

I have never read a book about my hometown. This book took me back to my childhood days, and what it meant to grow up in a border town where everyone knew each other, everyone was friendly, there was no racism and you could sleep with the door unlocked, leave your keys in the car and it was safe. It also brought sadness at the same time, since Nogales is not the same Nogales of the fifties, sixties, seventies and even part of the eighties. It has grown extensively, has crime, and is no longer the little friendly town I once knew and loved.

Albert was at Nogales High School at the same time as I. He has truly written a BEAUTIFUL memoir of what my little childhood town was.I knew his family, his father married my husband and I and his mom pierced my ears. I was saddened by the fact that his father had passed away,(since we moved to culture shock California 10 years ago,I don't have much contact with Nogalians). But, believe me,you don't have to be from Nogales to enjoy this little marvel of a book.

I read 40+ pgs of this book in the bookstore alone. I just moved to Nogales, AZ in January and I have found this book to be very helpful in providing me a background of the Ambos Nogales areas. The book is very well written and keeps you interested from cover to cover. Living in the area and being able to directly relate to the book is a plus, however anyone interested in the US-Mexico Border would find this book to be a spectacular read. Enjoy!!

must also read Miriam Davidson's "Lives on the Line." Maybe I'm a bit biased since I live here in Southern Arizona twelve miles north of our border with Mexico. But Davidson writes such sweet, firsthand-experience prose about other realities I see here -- like the Mexican migrants who have, for decades, crossed the border to keep Americans fat and sassy. The risks they now are taking have become obscenely dangerous, with the US spending billions upon billions to protect-- futiley -- our southern border.

Davidson's book is the first one I've read from cover-to-cover in one sitting since I read Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." She's actually the better writer who shares the same themes.

But one does not have to live near the border with Mexico to understand that our friendly, much older, south-of-the-border nation's problems are really ours.

Besides, the Mexican border is now up in Minnesota -- isn't it, really?

This is a must read.

I found myself devouring each word and picture in this book while flying home from Madrid to my home, Tucson, Arizona, recently. It is beautifully written and eye-openingly informative for any reader. The descriptions are also accurate, about which I can attest as an active inhabitant of this fronterra, living in nearby Tucson and often working in Nogales areas. The pictures (a big difference from photographs) draw you into the experience of the subject in tender ways, while also being technically excellent quality. This is perhaps the best writing and photography to date by the increasingly infamous Hickey-Taylor team. bravo!!
Kathleen Williamson, J.D., Ph.D, CD - prose and song writer, musician, anthropologist, lawyer, etc.,

- (Planeta.com Journal) The creative team behind the wonderful book The Road to Mexico return to the border to sketch an intimate portrait of street kids who work and live in the drainage tunnels that connect the cities of Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona. "It is their story of themselves and of the border, and it is our story of them -- of getting to them -- and of the border as it appeared to us through their lives."

...because that's what you'll get. I've met John Duncklee and he's a charismatic cowboy who's lived more in his life than three men could fit in their's. His charm and sincerity translates on the page to weave a gripping narative of his experiences and revelations as he struggles to make a fortune doing what he loves, roping and wrangling. While the book is educational and engaging on the subject of ranching, herding, and spotting a cheat, it tends to lose the audience if they're not already absolutely fascinated with those subjects.
No one could write about being a modern cowboy better than John Dunklee, but the reader must be in love with cowboys.