John Scherber's Blog

What’s in a Name?   One steamy afternoon a few years ago I was riding through Cairo with a driver. Even though I drive all over México, I’m not sure I would drive in that huge city. We were moving along at six cars abreast on a four lane street. I had arrived the previous […]

JOHN SCHERBER AN AMERICAN VOICE IN MEXICO     A PARTICULAR POINT OF VIEW   A woman I’d met only half an hour before, and hadn’t exchanged ten words with, leaned across the dinner table one evening and said to me, apropos of nothing in the prior conversation, “Aren’t you deeply ashamed to be an […]

 NORTHERN NEIGHBORS   For the United States, the entire nineteenth century was a period of explosive territorial growth. It was launched with considerable foresight by Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. He was shrewd enough to recognize that Napoleon needed money to finance his ongoing wars, and the Louisiana Territory, which the French […]

I had been thinking about terrorism now and then for a couple of years before I started this novel early in 2012. Any terrorist group has a logistical problem in getting their chosen elements of destruction across the United States borders. For the 9/11 plotters, the weapons were already in place–four commercial airliners. But that […]

PRELUDE: DARKNESS FALLS June 25 Nate and Tiny, two kids already at loose ends in early summer, hovered at midblock with their hands in their pockets, leaning against the white stucco back wall of the town’s only gas station, kicking at it with their heels. They were watching the meager midmorning traffic. The Marshy Flats […]

JOHN SCHERBER AN AMERICAN VOICE IN MEXICO OUT ON THE FRINGE In planning the promotion for any book the first question you ask yourself is, “Who is going to read this? Who cares what I have to say about bio-terrorism, governmental collapse, societal breakdown, and basic, trash-anybody-that-comes-after-your-food-or-gasoline, survival.” Plus, the moral and ethical implications of […]

 THE GUADALUPE CAPER          I have a certain fondness for art forgery, and while I’ve never passed my own efforts off as the real thing, I am a fairly good painter. There’s no better way of getting inside a painting than making a first-class copy of it. I’ve copied the work of […]

RETURN TO POZOS   Sometimes you have to get away, take a holiday from the neighborhood. A close parallel to a Billy Joel line, and a good one. Even when the neighborhood is San Miguel de Allende, a place a lot of people think about if they’ve not been too soured on México by the […]

UP AGAINST THE WALL   One lesson I learned in painting was that a picture that fought me every step of the way was likely to be a good one. It’s a process that doesn’t yield it’s inner meanings easily, and it sometimes requires that the canvas be set aside for a spell, sometimes even […]

Every Sunday is house tour day at the San Miguel de Allende Library. In its colorful past this building has been both a slaughterhouse and a convent, and now it houses both English and Spanish language book collections. It also has a theater, a restaurant, meeting rooms, and is home to our local newspaper, Atención. […]