Beetle hysteria has raised its head again, and I am not talking about the Fab four. A prominent article in the New York Times titled “Tiny Beetle Adds New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” quotes many foresters and others who suggest that beetle-kill trees across the West will create larger wildfires and by implications are “destroying” our forests.
For instance, Montana’s State Forester Bob Harrington said as much at conference recently, as in the article. While it may seem “intuitively obvious” that dead trees will lead to more fires, there is little scientific evidence to support the contention that beetle-killed trees substantially increases risk of large blazes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest otherwise.
At the heart of this and many other media reports are flawed assumptions about fires, what constitutes a healthy forest, and the options available to humans in face of natural processes that are inconvenient and get in the way of our designs.
New West Book Review
Ghost Ball: Rick Collignon’s “Madewell Brown”
Madewell Brown
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 213 pages, $23.95
Rick Collignon returns to the town of Guadalupe, New Mexico for his fourth novel, the quietly powerful Madewell Brown. The title character is a mystery man, long gone, who turns out to have been a talented pitcher for a Negro league team out of Illinois. Brown lived for seven years in a shack on the outskirts of Guadalupe, barely interacting with the townspeople, before he disappeared without leaving much of a trace. Guadalupe is a town that keeps its secrets, counts family loyalty above all else, and doesn't welcome newcomers, so if Cipriano Trujillo is to uncover the truth behind the ancient canvas bag stamped "Madewell Brown" that he finds after the death of his father, he's going to have to overcome the congenital reticence of the older townspeople who might know something. Collignon takes his time settling the reader into the story, told in spare, acute prose, mainly through flashbacks, and the novel gradually gains in momentum as the pieces fall into place.
Collignon begins the tale in South Cairo, Illinois, where an elderly former Negro league ballplayer, Obie Poole, encounters an 11-year-old orphan named Rachael Parish, whom he recognizes as the granddaughter of his old teammate, Madewell Brown. "You've got your granddaddy written all over you," he says.
Obie begins to tell her stories about the man he believes is her grandfather. "I played ball with a man named Madewell Brown my whole damn life and never did I see the likes of him. You put a ball in that man's hand and he'd turn bats into kindling and buckle a man's knees so bad he looked the fool." Rachael and Obie become friends, intensely drawn toward each other's company to ease their isolation, though they keep up a cranky patter with one another, never admitting their strong bond out loud. Obie's death, when Rachael is in her twenties, sets her to seeking information about her grandfather.
Rick Collignon will discuss Madewell Brown at the Main Santa Fe Public Library on June 1 (7-8:30 p.m.) and in Las Vegas, New Mexico at Tome on the Range on June 13 (4 p.m.).
New West Book Review
Robert Boswell’s “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
by Robert Boswell
Graywolf Press, 288 pages, $24
Robert Boswell's varied new collection The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards features some stories that pass by in a few pages while others stretch out to novella length, some that are light and comic, and others that are dark and death-obsessed, and still others, such as the title tale, in which death and comedy mingle. They are set all over the country, from a Colorado mountain cabin filled with druggie dropouts to a decadent Florida community inhabited by current and future divorcées ("No River Wide"). There's a bleak tale set in the North Dakota countryside ("A Walk in Winter") and a quirky one set in Albuquerque ("Miss Famous"), where a cleaning woman with artistic aspirations works for a fastidious client named Mr. Chubb who "was black, too tall to be a dwarf, too short to be normal."
It's impossible to guess what you might encounter next in a Boswell story, though every tale is realized with skill. Boswell, who teaches at New Mexico State and the University of Houston, could use his own book for examples to students of the myriad possibilities for the contemporary short story. But that would be a bit pompous, and one thing Boswell excels at is milking humor out of pompous displays, as in "In A Foreign Land," in which a divorced man attends a literary party thrown by one of his ex-wife's friends and simultaneously participates in and mocks the banter.
Western Writers
An Interview with Stanley Crawford
Stanley Crawford, born in 1937, is the author of five novels (Gascoyne, Travel Notes, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, Some Instructions, and Petroleum Man) and three non-fiction works (Mayordomo, A Garlic Testament, and The River in Winter), and has been writing and farming with his wife Rose Mary in Dixon, New Mexico, for nearly forty years. His novel, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine was reissued last September by the Dalkey Archive. A fantastical tale of a troubled husband and wife sailing the world on a raft of their own invention, its reissue has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as "a heroic homecoming...his novel is to marriage what Cormac McCarthy's The Road is to parenting."
I recently discussed the reissue of Log, his current work, and farming and writing in Northern New Mexico with Crawford via email.
New West: Dalkey Archive's reissue of The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, originally published in 1972, has garnered an impressive amount of critical attention. You have said that the novel was, in part, your response to the tumultuous atmosphere you found upon returning to the U.S. in 1969. Do you think that the current national mood, forty years later, has anything to do with the sudden revival of interest?
Stanley Crawford: Yes, but I hadn't re-read the book for many years, perhaps decades, until Dalkey decided to reissue it last year. I came to think of it as an apocalyptic novel, which I suppose it is, but to a lesser degree than what I had come to imagine. It may be this, or the "freedom" from institutional and political constraints that the Unguentines seem to have attained that readers are picking up on, but reviewers have focused more on the relationship, the marriage, the interpersonal—or their pathological aspects. And the times are very different: 1968 and all that had to do with a younger generation trying to elbow its way into a society that was perceived as being repressive and controlling and murderous. Today, I think people are trying to find, or imagine, places of refuge during this slow-motion collapse. Perhaps the barge offers a sort of refuge.
New West Book Review
The Mightiest Rock: Tom Zoellner’s “Uranium”
Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World
by Tom Zoellner
Viking, 337 pages, $26.95
In his new book Uranium, Tom Zoellner follows the trail of an element that was considered useless until less than a century ago, when scientists discovered how to unleash its power, and is now one of the most coveted and feared substances in the world. In the course of telling the story of uranium, Zoellner travels across the globe, visiting mining operations in the Congo, the Czech Republic, and the American West, and investigating how this rock has influenced people's behavior in Japan, Australia, the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere. The result is a detailed, alternately entertaining and frightening account of how uranium has affected the world to date, and how it is shaping the future.
Zoellner writes that he became interested in researching uranium when he was camping at Temple Mountain mesa in Utah and discovered mine entrances there: "The valley floor had that ragged and hard-used look common to many other pieces of wilderness in the American West that had been rich in gold or silver in the nineteenth century. A braiding of trails was etched into the dirt, and the slabs of an abandoned stone cabin and shattered lengths of metal pipe were down there, too, now almost obscured in the dust. The place had been devoured quickly and then spat out, with a midden of antique garbage left behind." He discovered that during World War II, uranium for nuclear weapons had been mined there.
Tom Zoellner will discuss his book in Tucson at Antigone Books on Friday, April 17 (7 p.m.) and he will give the keynote address at the U2009 Conference in Keystone, Colo. on May 10 (12 p.m.)
Western Book Roundup
Man Gives $20,000 to Help Golden’s Clear Creek Books
Lisa Knudsen, director of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association recently wrote in the organization's newsletter about the fate of a couple of Colorado bookstores. Craig Johnson, the owner of Clear Creek Books in Golden, Colo. was having trouble keeping his business afloat. After some media attention about the store's pending closing, the folks in Golden rallied around the bookstore, and according to Knudsen, one anonymous donor wrote Johnson a check for $20,000. Johnson hopes to keep the bookstore running, but says he won't succeed unless people in Golden start shopping there instead of "stopping off at the Barnes & Noble after work in Denver or ordering from Amazon at 3 a.m."
Meanwhile, the owners of the Book Rack in Fort Collins will close their current shop on March 31 and move to a new location, opening in Old Town Fort Collins as Old Firehouse Books in April. (Via Shelf Awareness.)
The people at Unbridled Books say they have a Southwestern treasure on their hands in writer Rick Collignon. According to publisher Fred Ramey, "There's a great deal of cultural significance in what he's doing." Unbridled has published several of Collignon's books, and the latest, Madewell Brown, is due to hit shelves May 5. To spread the word, Collignon and Ramey have embarked on a pre-publication "The Author As Artifact Tour," with stops across the Southwest, including a visit to Denver and Boulder earlier this week. The goal is to introduce the author to booksellers and readers who may not have heard of him before. They will be at Moby Dickens in Taos today, and tomorrow they'll travel to Collected Works and Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe and Bookworks in Albuquerque.
Ramey has uploaded the first entry in his video diary of the tour here, and you can follow his travels with Collignon on Twitter @FredRamey. (By the way, I'm Twittering these days, too.) Watch for my review of Madewell Brown in May.
Also in the Roundup: The Tucson Books Festival, the passing of poet Bill Holm, ABA Indie Choice Book Award Nominees, and this year's John Burroughs Award winner for Best Published Nature Essay.
Matthew Koehler said: "Treehugger: Far as I can tell, the final environmental impact statement for the Clacy Unionville project was issued in 2000. Apparently the decision was successfully…