The Other Side

About the Book

Some forty scholarly works, written by historians on both sides of the Border, form the basis for this non-scholarly attempt to provide a short, simple story of events between the Spanish conquest of Mexico five centuries ago and Mexico’s dominance of itself since its independence of two hundred years. Better analysis of events here described in a factually chronologic way can be found in the writer’s historical sources. A reader knowing little of Mexico’s history can get a good start with this writer’s try to show what the large and beautiful land to the south has met and overcome on the way to what it has, and what it will become.

About the Author

Martin Lahiff can’t explain why he has spent over eighty years under what William Shakespeare might have called the Spell of the Muse. That spell continues to bother us, writers and readers alike, who waste valuable time looking for worth in a world that knows otherwise. His book, Iona, records the raids of the Muse over the course of his lifetime, from his early college enlightenments at a school by that name in New Rochelle, New York, through the civil rights and hippie movements of the Sixties in San Francisco, the misery of Communist Europe, the emergence of Moslems in the East, thirty years deep in Mexico due to another kind of spell that has lasted 53 years, and his job as a U.S. consul.