Selected Review Excerpts (Books)

Miami Herald, December 26, 1999. "A subtle yet striking collection of sepia-like photograhs depicting life in Cuba, coupled with the perceptive observations of a Cuban exile returning home for the first time in 36 years, make this (Cuba: Going Back) more than a coffee table dust-catcher...The result is a fascinating and even-handed book, yet sometimes harshly critical, word-and-picture view. While the information gathered and the pictures taken date to 1996, events of the intervening threee years have done little to alter this volume's timeliness. In fact, it may be even more relevant now.

People Magazine, January 25, 1993. "One cat picture is worth a thousand meows--at least, if the photographer is Tony Mendoza. Mendoza practically invented a genre in 1985 with his enduring Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir. Crawling around a New York City loft for two years in pursuit of a rambunctious black and white cat, Mendoza produced a remarkable study of catness... With a clever narrative written from Ernie's viewpoint, the book never got cloying, or is that clawing? Ernie proved so popular that Mendoza followed up in 1989 with Ernie's Postcard Book. But the greatest tribute to the Ernie books is paid by their imitators...

Eric Levin, People Magazine, June 29, 1987. "There are word books and there are photo books, but rarely do the twain combine in anything but a mismatch. A notable exception is Mendoza's mating of paragraphs and photographs to form a series of 45 humorous and surprisingly poignant stepping-stones through his life story...Mendoza's modesty shows in his self-deflating humor, as well as his book's friendly size and price. Don't be deceived. This funny little book is as sophisticated and original as anything you'll find in the bookstore."

Harvard Magazine, November 1987. "A different kind of book is Stories, by Tony Mendoza, an autobiography of captioned snapshots by a Cuban-American engineer-turned-architect-turned-photographer who has apparently never heard of angst, the tragic dilemma, the primal scream, existential loneliness, or resigned sadness. It is a serene book about a wonderful individual man set firmly within a sense of family and community...We've had Stories on our coffee table for a month. People come in, sit down, idly pick it up--and promptly drop out of the conversation."

Modern Photography, October 1987. "This (Stories) is one of the most touching and amusing photo books that has come around in a while...it succeeds triumphantly."

The New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1987. "Like all good autobiographers, Mr. Mendoza, a photographer of some renown, has constructed a persona. He's the outsider, a guy who uses his "aw shucks" naivetŽ and alienation to con people into laughing. He does it by writing short, self-deprecating, seductive sentences, the verbal equivalent of his photographs.

Vogue Magazine, January, 1986. "There is nothing cute about Tony Mendoza's cats. They are wonderfully feral. And they are perverse...The result of this toothsome collaboration--the text reads like a tongue-in-cheek artist model love affair--is Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir and it's bound to win the respect(if not the affection) of the most hardened ailurophobe.