Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands

Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands
Paper Over Board, 7.25 x 10.25, 248 pages.
ISBN: 9781597145794.

By Lawrence Downes , Linda Ronstadt

In Feels Like Home, Grammy award-winning singer Linda Ronstadt effortlessly evokes the magical panorama of the high desert, a landscape etched by sunlight and carved by wind, offering a personal tour built around meals and memories of the place where she came of age. Growing up the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a descendant of Spanish settlers near northern Sonora, Ronstadt’s intimate new memoir celebrates the marvelous flavors and indomitable people on both sides of what was once a porous border whose denizens were happy to exchange recipes and gather around campfires to sing the ballads that shaped Ronstadt’s musical heritage. Following her best-selling musical memoir, Simple Dreams, this book seamlessly braids together Ronstadt’s recollections of people and their passions in a region little understood in the rest of the United States. This road trip through the desert, written in collaboration with former New York Times writer Lawrence Downes and illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs by Bill Steen, features recipes for traditional Sonoran dishes and a bevy of revelations for Ronstadt’s admirers. If this book were a radio signal, you might first pick it up on an Arizona highway, well south of Phoenix, coming into the glow of Ronstadt’s hometown of Tucson. It would be playing something old and Mexican, from a time when the border was a place not of peril but of possibility.

Reviews

"A celebratory, sentimental, political volume likely to be especially meaningful for those of us who live in and around her hometown." Edie Jarolim, Tucson Foodie
+ Show all reviews
Category Memoir

About the Authors

Lawrence Downes

Lawrence Downes

Lawrence Downes is a writer and editor in New York. For more than thirty years, he worked in newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday, and the New York Times, where he was an editor and member of the editorial board, specializing in issues about immigration, New York City and state politics and government, disability rights, veterans affairs, and the environment.

Linda Ronstadt

Linda Ronstadt

Linda Ronstadt, the great-granddaughter of Friedrich and Margarita Ronstadt of Sonora, Mexico, is one of the world’s most acclaimed singers. Her six-decade career encompassed rock, folk, country, light opera, Mexican songs and American standards. She has sold more than 100 million records, won 12 Grammy awards and is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, directed by Rob Epstein, just won a Grammy for best musical film at the 63rd Grammy Awards on March 14, 2021.

Ronstadt is writing a new book that has been acquired by Heyday and is set to release in Fall 2022.

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