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New West Book Review

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America
by Timothy Egan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 324 pages, $27

In August of 1910, the largest fire ever to sweep across forests in the United States claimed trees, buildings, and lives across a stretch of three million acres in the Rocky Mountains.  Timothy Egan writes in his follow-up to The Worst Hard Time, his National Book Award-winning exploration of the Dustbowl, that this blaze was known as “The Big Burn,” and it stretched “from central Idaho, east into Montana, west into Washington, north into British Columbia.” The smoke drifted as far away as Chicago.  “It was as if a volcanic blast had disgorged the airborne remains of the forested northern Rockies into disparate parts of the United States.” Besides destroying several towns in the region, this fire had a lasting effect on the course of the country’s conservation movement, initiated by Theodore Roosevelt and his close confidant Gifford Pinchot, first head of the United States Forest Service.

Egan shows that many of the lessons derived from the Great Fire of 1910 were still followed by foresters a century later.  People on both sides of the conservation movement tried to use it to achieve their political ends.  To demonstrate the larger set of circumstances in which this fire played out, after a vivid opening chapter set in the midst of the fire, Egan steps back to February of 1899, when the 34-year-old Gifford Pinchot visits the Governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt, who invited him to engage in a wrestling match and a boxing bout.  This afternoon of roughhousing cemented their friendship. 

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FOLLOWING MY SHOTS 2

I used to play basketball, but not too much since the day my coach took me aside, patted me on the head, and said, “Bill, you’re short, but you’re slow, and you really need to follow your shots.”

Well, that was a long time ago, and I admit to never doing anything about the shortness or the slowness, but I have learned to follow my shots. And sometimes, they’re worth following. When I write my columns, I frequently hope something happens, and guess what sometimes it does. Check out these updates to past columns.

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New West Book Review

Thanks to television shows such as Dora the Explorer, Maya and Miguel, and the trusty Sesame Street, many kids growing up in English-speaking homes can count to ten and say hello in Spanish. Cinco Puntos Press, based in El Paso, specializes in literature that straddles the U.S./Mexico border, and publishes a number of bilingual books for children that will help kids who are interested in Spanish take their language study further.

El Paso-based writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz‘s The Dog Who Loved Tortillas (36 pages, $17.95), with vibrant clay illustrations by Geronimo Garcia, will be a hit with any kid who has ever begged his parents for a dog.  In this story, told in Spanish and English with a clay squiggle dividing the two texts on the same page, Little Diego Domínguez (who previously appeared in A Gift from Papá Diego) and his big sister Gabriela simultaneously hit upon the idea that they should get a dog.  When they ask their parents for a dog a piece, the parents say they can have a dog, but only if they share. (As a mom, I was sort of rooting for the parents to demand more from Diego and Gabriela: fifty whine-free days and nights, cleaning, scullery work.)

Gabriela and Diego agree, secretly thinking, “But it will be more mine.” They adopt a puppy from the humane society, and work hard housebreaking him.  Diego discovers that the puppy, Sofie, will perform tasks in exchange for bites of tortilla.  Sofie becomes well known around the neighborhood as the tortilla-loving dog.  But one morning Diego discovers Sofie “barely moving,” and Mr. Domínguez says, “Her nose is dry and hot.  It’s supposed to be cold and wet.” A trip to the vet is on order.  Uh oh, I thought, maybe dogs aren’t supposed to eat tortillas? 

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WE NEED YOUR HELP WITH BURLINGTON NORTHERN SANTA FE

Dear Mr. Buffett:

I read with interest and glee about your recent acquisition of the majority ownership in Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). Congratulations on buying a great company--investment wise, I should clarify, because BNSF is a not-so-great company on the public relations front.

Now that you own the railroad, you can change that bad image with one phone call and instantly make your new acquisition--and yourself, of course--a corporate saint out here in Montana.

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Western Book Roundup

Economic conditions and their implications for the book industry continue to be dire, and yet I have mostly good news to report this week.

• First, several prestigious literary magazines across the nation are facing budget cuts or conversion to online-only publication, including the New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, but in Boise, according to Idaho Review editor Mitch Wieland in an interview with Boise Weekly, “While other universities are cutting their budgets for their literary magazines, the administration here at [Boise State] has actually increased our funding in support of what we do.”

Wieland spoke to Bill English of Boise Weekly last month on the occasion of the publication of The Idaho Review‘s tenth anniversary issue.  It didn’t take long for The Idaho Review to vault into the top tier of literary magazines, with its stories and essays regularly winning national awards.  Writer and Boise State teacher Alan Heathcock told the Boise Weekly:

“The success of The Idaho Review is all Mitch Wieland.  Every journal in the country is writing letters to big name writers, asking them to send work. Mitch has some special charm that when he asks Rick Bass, William Kittredge or Ann Beattie, they not only send work, but they send great work. Ten years ago, Boise State didn’t even have a writing program, and now is known nationwide largely because of the reach and reputation of The Idaho Review.”

• My second bit of good news: Bill Husted, gossip columnist for the Denver Post, reported Sunday, “HBO is developing a movie based on Denver author Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.”

Also in the Roundup: How the boxer Rocky inspires writer Benjamin Percy, a vintage Cormac McCarthy ad in Dwight Garner’s Read Me, and how books by women were left off a key best-of-the-year book list.

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New West Book Review

Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 268 pages, $19.95

Best of the West 2009 is a welcome revival of anthology series that ran from 1988 through 1992, collecting outstanding stories set in “the Wide Side of the Missouri” that previously appeared in literary journals.  Unlike some recent one-off Western story anthologies, such as New Stories from the Southwest (also edited by D. Seth Horton) and Forge Books’ Best Stories of the American West, Volume I, the editors plan to make this an annual publication, and in the 2009 edition, the quality of the stories is just as high as those in the well-known national Best American Short Stories series.

In the foreword, Rick Bass tries to put his finger on “what constitutes a Western short story,” and although he notes, “Is it my imagination, or are there extra teaspoonfuls of loneliness in these stories, extra pinches of desperation?” and “a good many Western short stories tend to possess a kind of intensity or power of the felt physical senses,” he decides, “I’m not convinced there is a Western short story, yet.” Bass doesn’t remark on it, but in this year’s anthology, the overwhelming common theme is sex: the people in these stories might be lonely, but they manage to partner up pretty well.

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