Despite breathless marketing-style blurbs crammed into every square centimeter of cover space ("Save money ... !" "Have more fun ...!" "Lots, lots more!"), this is no garden-variety commercial tourist guide. Sure, neophytes get homespun advice on things like dealing with money (page 168) and pronouncing zanahoria (page 197). But they also get what amounts to a 200-page expanded essay on what's going on around them not just in Cancun, but anywhere from Chiapas to Chihuahua.

It's a thoughtful and always entertaining essay by a veteran U.S. journalist and 23-year Cancun resident. But what really makes it worth reading is its originality. Chances are you've never read anything about Mexico quite like this.

THE TWO BANES

In fact, Siegel serves as a much-needed corrective to the twin banes of popular travel writing about this country. Bane One is the echo chamber of the commercial travel writing press, nourished by government tourist boards, travel section advertising, and free junkets. Some of it is quite good, of course, and often helpful. But it's basically entertainment, and necessarily superficial. As Siegel puts it, "Depth of feeling is a little out of place."

Bane Two, the other side of the coin, consists of rooted expat scribes with an attitude, whose contribution to crossborder understanding consists mainly of scolding the American visitor for not being as culturally savvy as they are. You can usually spot this crowd by their propensity to use the word gringo in every third sentence.

The scolders are understandably turned off by the snobbish presumptions of many tourists and the ethnocentric assumptions of even more. But they forget that the opposite of a snob is a snob, so their sniffy prescriptions for correct thought and behavior end up being guilty of the same insensitivity they profess to abhor only in reverse. The reader ends up getting messages like, "If you don't speak Spanish, you're morally suspect." Or, "If you're bothered by something here, you just don't get it and should go home."

Siegel's well aware of the value of shedding preconceptions about the Mexican heart and mind; that's what his book is all about. But his guiding message is 180 degrees opposed to the scolders'. It's right there on page 43: "Be yourself. Have a good time. Mexico loves you."

Indeed, one of the more salutary sections in the book runs under the subhead "In Defense of the Ugly American." Siegel bows to no one in his contempt for the boor who somehow feels that being on vacation entitles him to suspend any semblance of human decency. But the "Ugly American" charge is more often pressed against innocent boobs whose only offense is wearing black socks with plaid Bermudas, or occasionally forgetting their decibel-level control.

WARM FASCINATION

Those doing the pressing of these charges, Siegel astutely points out, are almost always other Americans, and almost never the allegedly aggrieved natives. Mexicans themselves, for the most part, view outlandish tourist behavior with either warm fascination or politely suppressed amusement. No harm, no foul.

The book is loaded with such counterweights to the prevailing orthodoxy. The bulk of it is the result of a decadeslong writing project Siegel calls "The Real Mexico." A title like that sends up huge, flapping red flags, but Siegel's premise seems merely that the "real" Mexico is wherever Mexicans are, and not confined to picturesque folk dance settings. That's hardly a radical thought, but his choice of a prototype for such a place will raise some eyebrows. It's Cancun itself.

MEXICAN MICROCOSM

For those who have a hard time considering a recently carved-from-the-jungle wet Tshirt mecca to be a "real" example of anything, Siegel has a calm explanation. "Cancun is an excellent framework for seeing Mexico, as it is a microcosm of the country at large," he writes. "Its inhabitants have come here from all over the Republic to seek a better life."

That's true. And he goes on to prove his point rather well, most effectively via a series of short oral histories on the lives of some architects, engineers and other workers who created Cancun over the years. These people are as real as it gets. And the list includes Siegel himself, who was lured to Cancun by a job offer from Fonatur, the Mexican tourist board that financed the resort's construction.

Before that, Siegel was a lucid chronicler of the unprecedented (and so far unrepeated) cultural outburst in the United States of the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably for Playboy in its prime. His writing has lost none of its fat-free clarity, and perhaps because of that "Cancun User's Guide 2005" is flush with jarring assertions.

To wit: "To me, the Aztecs were terrible. They were absolutely rotten. I feel the sympathy for Moctezuma is despicable. He got what he deserved." Or: "Wal-Mart is the real Mexico." Or: "In Mexico ... it is clear that the [colonial] priests were a strong force for the good."

Provocative? Of course. But never gratuitous. Siegel clearly did plenty of thinking before coming up with those zingers, aided by his ability to subordinate conventional wisdom to direct observation. Do yourself a favor and allow yourself to think outside your own box before wading into Siegel's book. You'll appreciate his insights more that way, even those you ultimately reject.

If you're like me, you'll find yourself alternately pumping your fist in righteous comradery and shaking your head in disbelief. I too, for example, lament the cold and even hostile customer treatment by much of Mexican small business. But is that really the reason "the big chains are wiping them up?" Isn't the main problem a little bit more, well, structural in the global economic sense?

The thing is, you can agree with everything or nothing in this book, but you won't be able to do either without reexamining all you hold as axiomatic about Mexico. For that reason, I recommend "Cancun User's Guide 2005" as a travel aid to the Cancun-bound, and as a coffee table book to everybody else.

To be sure, it hardly looks like a coffee table book. Put it there anyway. When your dinner party lulls, open it up and read a paragraph or two at random. Since Siegel is incapable of writing a dull sentence, your guests will spend the rest of the evening discussing, debating and delighting in the endless supply of pleasure and enigma this bewitching country offers.

I can't think of a more productive use of time.

kellyg@prodigy.net.mx