Western Book Roundup
“Reading the West” Gets the Word Out About Regional Books
A few weeks ago I wrote about some creative ideas people are coming up with to support books in the midst of this changing media landscape. In keeping with that theme, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association recently launched the Reading the West program, with the goal of helping bookstores promote books that are set in the West or those written by Western authors. The first featured books are New Mexico writer Rick Collignon's Madewell Brown and Austin-based Jaqueline Kelly's The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. I spoke to MPIBA executive director Lisa Knudsen this week on the phone from her office in Fort Collins about the program.
Knudsen said that the MPIBA started the Reading the West program because "in these troubled economic times, we were looking for projects and programs that are free to our member booksellers and are a potential win win win—for the publisher, bookseller, and author."
"I shamelessly copied from my fellow regional bookseller associations," Knudsen said, noting that the Midwest and Great Lakes Bookseller associations sponsor similar programs. The Reading the West program makes advance copies of the featured books available to booksellers, as well as materials to use in their display and promotion. The authors are also available for readings at regional stores.
The MPIBA board hopes publishers will begin to send them information about relevant forthcoming books to be considered for the program, but for the first selections, the members discussed among themselves what good books of regional interest they knew were coming out.
"Rick Collignon is very popular in our region," Knudsen said, "and the committee was enthusiastic about his latest book. We also wanted to do what we could to promote independent publishers." Madewell Brown is published by Unbridled Books, an independent publisher based in Colorado.
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
Birdman: Rachel Dickinson’s “Falconer on the Edge”
Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West
by Rachel Dickinson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 220 pages, $24
In Falconer on the Edge, Rachel Dickinson gives readers an in-depth look at a subculture that many people may not be aware existed. Falconers are an intense, passionate, tight-knit group of bird-loving hunters, and they subdivide themselves according to the type of bird they fly, from those who favor hunting sage grouse with gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrids ("an überbird [with] stamina and speed and beauty") to those who fly hawks to catch squirrels and jackrabbits. The falconers Dickinson depicts remind me of a more athletic and outdoorsy version of Trekkies, with their conventions, cliques, private jargon derived from Norman French, and the way they are often misunderstood by outsiders.
Although falconry ("a loose term [that] refers to flying any kind of raptor or bird of prey") originated perhaps 3,500 years ago in the Middle East, spread through Asia and Europe, and didn't catch on in North America until the twentieth century, it seems a pastime tailor-made for the American West, as it requires a lot of open space and abundant game. With all the care and training that a bird of prey demands, not to mention the need for the falconer to be in top condition to run through fields after his bird, it might be the most labor and time-intensive variety of hunting, which is why so few practice it. Dickinson writes, "Today there are approximately forty-five hundred licensed falconers in the United States, and two to three thousand of them belong to [the North American Falconers Association]." Judging from the portraits in Dickinson's book, there are no casual falconers.
Western Writers
An Interview with Ron Carlson About “The Signal”
Utah native Ron Carlson has been publishing acclaimed novels and short stories for over three decades, and in recent years he's hit a stride, with two novels, Five Skies and the new The Signal back-to-back. Carlson directed the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University for many years and three years ago became the Creative Writing program director at the University of California at Irvine. The Signal, which Carlson wrote at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, is the action-packed tale of a divorced couple who go backpacking in the Wind River Mountains and run into all sorts of trouble, including some unfriendly meth-runners who poach elk on the side. I recently spoke with Carlson about his new novel, which he started because he "wanted to stand up behind [his] goddamn pickup truck again," and about how "camping is essentially about when things go wrong."
New West: Is The Signal just an elaborate way for you to scare other potential campers off of your favorite hiking trail?
Ron Carlson: You know, it has that. I didn't mean to scare everybody.
NW: In the front of the book, you advise people, "If I was going to go into the Wind Rivers today, I would use the Bears Ears trailhead and I would go before September 10." But after reading about all the perils that Mack and Vonnie face, nobody is going to want to go on this trail.
RC: I just wanted to make sure that no one went after then, because you can run into snow.
NW: I think I'd rather run into snow than some of the things that Mack and Vonnie run into.
RC: I don't want anybody to get snowed in the way I did, and I've written about that. What I really wanted to do was have my vicarious experience and write a little love letter to the mountains, which I'm not in enough. I just got on fire for that and wrote this outdoor book.
PLANNING IN THE WEST CONFERENCE, JUNE 17-18 IN BOISE
Adjusted Development: Saving the World with Sustainable Growth
Why should towns in the West change the way they grow? And why should planners design healthier, greener communities?
Because if they don’t, they’ll suffer and fail.
Dire as that answer sounds, it's sparked something worth celebrating: a planning revolution and a move to sustainability across the West, according to land-use and green planning expert Christopher Duerksen.
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.)
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…
Historian Colonel Bain- Author - Monk said: "hummmmm....Thumbs Up Jenny from de Colonel"