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Cancun User's Guide | 
| Author: Jules Siegel
Publisher: Lulu.com
Category: Book
Buy New: $14.99
New (2) Used (2) from $14.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 480692
Media: Paperback
Edition: Third
Pages: 204
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.5
ISBN: 1411639448
EAN: 9781411639447
ASIN: 1411639448
Publication Date: February 9, 2006
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
The Cancun User's Guide contains 204 densely packed pages of independent, honest advice, recommendations and cultural information about Cancun and Mexico by an American family living here since 1981. Written in a clear, popular style, and illustrated with photographs, drawings and maps, it will help you save money and have more fun when visiting Cancun. It's also funny and heartwarming, written by celebrated author Jules Siegel, whose works have appeared in Playboy, Rolling Stone, Best American Short Stories and many other publications. The Cancun User's Guide is the only independent locally-produced guide!
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| Customer Reviews:
Every reader will gain from it August 28, 2005
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW MEXICO?
By Kelly Arthur Garrett The Herald Mexico/Apr. 2, 2005
[Excerpts used by permission. The Herald Mexico is the Mexico City edition of the Miami Herald. --JS]
Here's all the praise needed to give Jules Siegel's refreshing 2005 edition of his "Cancun User's Guide" its due: Every reader will gain from it, but few will appreciate it more than those of us with little intention of ever setting foot in Cancun.
This is no garden-variety commercial tourist guide. Sure, neophytes get homespun advice on things like dealing with money (page 168) and pronouncing zanahoria (page 197). But they also get what amounts to a 200-page expanded essay on what's going on around them not just in Cancun, but anywhere from Chiapas to Chihuahua.
The bulk of it is the result of a decades-long writing project Siegel calls "The Real Mexico." A title like that sends up huge, flapping red flags, but Siegel's premise seems merely that the "real" Mexico is wherever Mexicans are, and not confined to picturesque folk dance settings. That's hardly a radical thought, but his choice of a prototype for such a place will raise some eyebrows. It's Cancun itself.
For those who have a hard time considering a recently carved-from-the-jungle wet T-shirt mecca to be a "real" example of anything, Siegel has a calm explanation. "Cancun is an excellent framework for seeing Mexico, as it is a microcosm of the country at large," he writes. "Its inhabitants have come here from all over the Republic to seek a better life."
He goes on to prove his point rather well, most effectively via a series of short oral histories on the lives of some architects, engineers and other workers who created Cancun over the years. These people are as real as it gets. And the list includes Siegel himself, who was lured to Cancun by a job offer from Fonatur, the Mexican tourist board that financed the resort's construction.
Siegel was a lucid chronicler of the unprecedented (and so far unrepeated) cultural outburst in the United States of the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably for Playboy in its prime. His writing has lost none of its fat-free clarity.
When your dinner party lulls, open the Cancun User's Guide up and read a paragraph or two at random. Since Siegel is incapable of writing a dull sentence, your guests will spend the rest of the evening discussing, debating and delighting in the endless supply of pleasure and enigma this bewitching country offers.
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