From Sonora Review:
The beginning of Anthropologies feels like something you’ve remembered before—a frail mother recounts stories for a middle-aged daughter. But then, the daughter is 18, and she wears bell bottoms and a black tee shirt and argues with the mother about a boyfriend. The argument ends and it is Colorado in 1968, and the windows fog as a young girl dries dishes with a young mother, and suddenly you aren’t remembering—you are living in a world so specific and complete you can’t have passed through it before.

      Beth Alvarado’s Anthropologies is a pile of perfectly ordered snapshots, so quickly and quietly stacked that soon the remembering becomes a world unto itself.   Alvarado is the daughter of Margaret, the niece of Dorothy, the younger sibling to a half-brother and half-sister born of a father who died in Saipan and a mother too early a widow. Margaret meets her second husband en route to a bridge game in Puget Sound, and Alvarado’s childhood ends when the family moves from Grand Junction to Tucson. “My father was a solitary man,” Alvarado says of her father. “How I hated him,” Aunt Dorothy says of her father, Alvarado’s grandfather.

      So is the fabric of a family created, through memories stacked one on top of each other.

--Link to the rest of the review by Megan Kimble in Sonora Review, September 23, 2011

From Publishers Weekly:
Sparked by her mother's deterioration into old age, Alvarado (Not a Matter of Love) has written a three-part memoir about her family life that approaches prose poetry. It is searing at moments, especially when she discusses her life as a junkie, but the narrative then becomes dreamy, even vague. Despite the loose structure—not even chronological order is respected—vivid portraits of her parents, children, in-laws, and especially, her husband ring true and sharp. A section focusing on her leaving her white, suburban upbringing to marry her Mexican husband and move into the home of his immigrant parents is particularly striking. Coming from a university press, this book risks being overlooked. However, readers should seek it out for Alvarado's distinctive and compelling writing. (Sept.)

From Kirkus Reviews:

Alvarado (Not a Matter of Love, 2006) follows her debut short-story collection with a memoir that also explores the intersection of Hispanic and Anglo cultures in the western United States. This highly personal work weaves together stories of her parents' lives as well as her own experiences with love, familial attachment, heroin addiction, motherhood, travel and her writing. "I have autobiography anxiety," she writes, explaining that she felt "no tenderness" for the self recorded in her adolescent journal. This may explain, to some degree, the wild deviation Alvarado takes from typical autobiographies. With no quotation marks and chapters averaging one page, she writes only in the present tense, from her perspective as a girl up to now, in her mid-50s. This somewhat jarring structure imbues the book with a strong, immediate voice, and it's easy to imagine it read aloud as something akin to spoken-word poetry. Her overlapping of the past and present illuminates her legacy and the connections between herself and, respectively, her mother and daughter. In examining her own secrets, she recognizes that, even if she doesn't know what they are, her children also have secrets. She wonders if they tried to confide in her and she failed. "Maybe," she writes, "like my mother, I shut my eyes, my ears, my heart." But her memoir stands as a striking rebuttal to that fear. She lays bare in these pages the many stories and details of her life and identity. Devoid of self-pity or nostalgia, Alvarado's voice is bell-clear.

From Tucson Weekly:
[W]hat happens when you combine memoir's TMI template with the poet's subtle craft, when you match a commercial-minded endeavor with a writer interested in exploring ethnic identity?

     The answer is Tucson professor Beth Alvarado's Anthropologies. In a series of short one-to-two-page vignettes, Alvarado explores her mixed family in a fashion that is distinctive. A middle-class white woman married to a Mexican American, the author delves into her relationships to better understand the connection between memory and personality, the world and the self.

--Link to the rest of the review by Jarret Keene in Tucson Weekly, September 29, 2011