Dateline New Mexico

by Toby Smith

Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. 1st Edition, so stated, Hardbound, 8vo (8.25 inches tall), 231 pages. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826306284
• ISBN13: 9780826306289
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 231 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

4.5 stars for one of the best New Mexico books I've read in years

I write a weekly newspaper and online column of strange New Mexico history and lore, and I've got to say, sometimes I get really sick of reading about my home state. Sick of reading about it, talking about it, going to classes about it, and thinking about it. I'm so immersed in the topic that it's inevitable that sometimes I just get fed up by it, that sometimes I start to think I've had enough New Mexicana for a while, thank you. That's kind of how I was feeling when I found this book, "Dateline: New Mexico," which as far as I can tell is not affiliated with the Ernie Mills/Mark Bentley radio show of the same name. This book was like a door opening, like a sudden arrival of cool, breathable air. The book is a collection of newspaper columns by journalist Toby Smith, circa the early 1980s, and each column generally deals with an interesting New Mexico resident--a woman in an isolated fire tower near Grants, young adult author Judy Blume in Los Alamos, one of only two residents of the microscopic town of Pep, a Cloudcroft-area con-man, and others. Some of the stories are really great, and overall the stories paint the picture of New Mexico as a very interesting place, where migrant workers still travel from onion harvest to onion harvest, where life goes on in a small town that Ansel Adams once immortalized in a photograph, and where the state's population is collectively revealed to be a very interesting group of people. I don't think this book is perfect, but I strongly recommend it. I enjoyed reading it more than I've enjoyed reading any other New Mexico book in quite a while. It made me like this state even more than I did, and it kept me turning pages until I'd read it all in only a couple of days.