New West Book Review

Ski Bum Dad: Ken Wright’s “The Monkey Wrench Dad”

The Monkey Wrench Dad: Dispatches from the Backyard Frontline
By Ken Wright
Raven's Eye Press, 230 pages, $18.95

What happens to ski bums when they grow up? In his essay collection The Monkey Wrench Dad, Durango's Ken Wright provides his answer to this question. Wright moved from Boston to Colorado in 1983 for a season of ski bumming and never left. He managed to carry on with the usual adulthood rituals (he married a fellow ski bum and has two now-teenage kids) while maintaining the lifestyle that he moved West for.

New West Book Review & Interview

Rafael Chacón’s Biography of Montana Architect A.J. Gibson

The Original Man: The Life and Work of Montana Architect A.J. Gibson
by Hipólito Rafael Chacón
The University of Montana Press, 164 pages, $35

A.J. Gibson is one of Montana’s most beloved and famed architects. Paradoxically, he is – at least as far as the scant written historical record goes – also its most unsung. In fact, the only biographical material related to Gibson’s life published before September's release of Rafael Chacón’s The Original Man: The Life and Work of Montana Architect A.J. Gibson, was part of a multi-volume set released in 1914.

Rafael Chacón will discuss his book at Missoula's University Congregational Church of Christ on September 14 (11:30 a.m.) and at Fact & Fiction on September 16 (7 p.m.). The book will also accompany a traveling exhibition of the same title that features architectural models, facsimiles of drawings and photographs. Organized by the Montana Museum of Art & Culture, the exhibition will be on view September 18 through October 19 at the Holter Museum of Art in Helena.

New West Children's Book Review

Chupacabras Explained in New Children’s Picture Book

The Fairy and the Chupacabra and Those Marfa Lights
By James A. Mangum and Sidney Spires
John M. Hardy Publishing, 25 pages, $17.95

I've been interested in southwestern folklore ever since I was a first grader soaking up the frightening tales of La Llorona my classmates told out on the playground. Since then I've asked everyone to share their version of the La Llorona ("the weeping woman") story, including my Guatemalan guide in Tikal, who began his tale—as the best storytellers do—with: "My uncle saw her once."

Besides La Llorona, the most charismatic figure in southwestern folklore has got to be the Chupacabra, whose name means "goat sucker," and is described by Wikipedia as a "legendary cryptid rumored to inhabit parts of the Americas." In their picture book The Fairy and the Chupacabra (for children aged four to eight), James A. Mangum and Sidney Spires have portrayed the Chupacabra as a winged beast with green, purple-polka-dotted skin and pointy teeth who is "the most misunderstood of creatures."

New West Book Review

Desert Daze: Amy Shearn’s “How Far is the Ocean from Here”

How Far is the Ocean From Here
By Amy Shearn
Shaye Areheart Books, 307 pages, $23

Amy Shearn's surefooted debut novel How Far is the Ocean From Here transports readers to the "godforsaken fleabag" Thunder Lodge motel in the middle of a stretch of desert "somewhere between West Texas and East New Mexico," the last place you'd think the nine-month-pregnant protagonist, Susannah Prue, would want to be in high summer. In the time-honored tradition followed by those who've made a hash of their lives, Susannah is fleeing west. She is serving as the surrogate mother for a wealthy couple, and with the due date two weeks away, she impulsively drives out of Chicago and fetches up at the Thunder Lodge.

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Book Review: Greg Lemon’s “Blue Man in a Red State”

Three new battleground state have opened up in this year's election: Nevada, Colorado, and Montana causing pundits and prognosticators every where to question the long-standing convention wisdom of the Republican lock on rural America. Greg Lemon's new book, Blue Man in a Red State: Montana's Governor Brian Schweitzer and the New Western Populism, helps shed a little bit of light on the resurgence of populism in one of those states with a profile of its colorful governor.

New West Book Review

Land Art Rover: Erin Hogan’s “Spiral Jetta”

Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West
By Erin Hogan
University of Chicago Press
180 pages, $20

My husband announced one day that he and my daughter had been out making "land art." The next time I walked out back I saw what he meant: they had gathered dozens of dandelions and arranged them in a yellow streak flowing down a channel in a boulder, the sort of thing artist Andy Goldsworthy did in Thomas Riedelsheimer's beautiful documentary Rivers & Tides. I'm a little hesitant to admit this, but we're land art junkies. We've been to see Goldsworthy's work at the Storm King Art Center in New York, and we've made a pilgrimage to Dia: Beacon, the New York museum that is the hub of the Dia Foundation, which funds and maintains much of the land art in the American West.

But we haven't been to see Robert Smithson's famous "Spiral Jetty" in Utah, and we live only one state away from it, so we can't claim any real cred, unlike Erin Hogan, who braved endless miles, desert heat, poor directions, rutted roads, loneliness, and dubious bar company to take readers to the "Spiral Jetty" and beyond in her endearing first book, Spiral Jetta.

New West Book Review & Interview

“Montana Ghost Towns and Gold Camps” by Bill Whitfield

Montana Ghost Towns and Gold Camps
by William W. Whitfield
Stoneydale Press, 240 pages, $19.95

Bill Whitfield often thinks about what Montana must have been like for the plucky miners and homesteaders who lived during the flourishing heyday of Montana mining towns. Although these miners would probably have a hard time envisioning the world we know today, thanks to Whitfield’s pictorial guide Montana Ghost Towns and Gold Camps, it’s easier for us to envision theirs.

Brimming with more than 450 raw and blunt photographic recollections of mostly left behind and disremembered mining structures, relics, and machinery, Whitfield’s book provides us with the nostalgic insight to be able to better see and understand the mining world, and the satisfying luxury of visiting the places where the rough and ready lived, worked, fought, drank and died. These bare photographs evoke emotions —solitariness, desperation—or images of pioneers’ and miners’ struggles to survive uncivil but simpler times.

New West Book Review

“Still”: Robb Kendrick’s Cowboy Tintypes

Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century
By Robb Kendrick
University of Texas Press
232 pages, $50

The West's open range cowboy era that has been so romanticized in American myth, film, and books endured only for a short period during the 19th century, before fenced land became the norm, but photographer Robb Kendrick has devoted his career to capturing contemporary cowboys who look as though they've stepped right out of those legendary times. Kendrick doesn't costume his subjects to fit a role, unlike famous frontier photographer Edward S. Curtis (as Marianne Wiggins notes in her astute introduction), but he does have a great eye for men and women whose dress, faces, and demeanor make for an iconic look when he captures their image in a tintype, a photographic process that reigned in America from after the Civil War to the beginning of the 20th century.

New West Book Excerpt

“Blue Man in a Red State”: An Excerpt

New West contributor Greg Lemon is a Montana journalist specializing in politics, and he recently published his first book, Blue Man in a Red State: Montana's Governor Brian Schweitzer and the New Western Populism (Globe Pequot Press, 150 pages, $22.95). The following is an excerpt from the book, covering the time Schweitzer spent in the Middle East in his mid-twenties. Lemon will discuss his book at the Borders in Bozeman on September 6 (2 p.m.).

Montana's Gov. Brian Schweitzer knew in college that he wanted to see the world. Given the fact that he was a farm kid from Geyser, Mont., Schweitzer figured his best chance to see the world was through farming. He majored in international agriculture at Colorado State University and earned his Master's degree in tropical soils from Montana State University. His first job out of college at the age of 25 took him to the Middle East to work as an agronomist on the massive project to farm the desert for the Libyan government.