While World War I created havoc on the other side of the world, civil strife went on in Mexico for ten years in a war that became known as the Mexican Revolution. Those years saw a simple bandit become a revolutionary man whose name is today a Mexican icon - Pancho Villa - in a war fought between two sides supplied with arms by one same foreign outfit. It was also the time, says Frederick R. Andresen in his book Dos Gringos, when a Norwegian and an Irishman found themselves hired in El Paso, TX, to work at a gold mine in the town of Parral, Mexico
The adventures of Arthur Johannesen and Michael Flaherty, amidst gun fire and colorful country sceneries, are what Andresen describes in his book based on the tales told to him years later by his 70-year-old father - the Norwegian of the story.
Dos Gringos is an entertaining read presented in 28 short chapters. It feels familiar with the names of real towns both north and south of the US/Mexico border and by the use of, however sometimes grammatically imperfect, Spanish sentences within the dialogue. It is likewise a tale of immigration - Europeans who left their land to come to the Americas in search of work and tranquility and who married, worked, built, and made this continent their home and a home for their children.
The story in Dos Gringos is of particular interest this year as November 2010 will mark the centennial of the onset of the Mexican Revolution. The author, a current resident of Corona del Mar, California, is invited to talk and sign his book at celebrations planned at El Paso’s main Public Library and at the University of Texas beginning this October.
Dos Gringos is Andresen’s second book, his first one being Walking on Ice: An American Businessman in Russia, a collection of autobiographical essays written in the 1990s during his stay in Moscow.
To learn more about the author visit http://www.fandresen.com
Click here to purchase a copy of Dos Gringos
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