Salt Lake City News

Western Book Roundup

Brittany Anas recently wrote in the Boulder Daily Camera about the role CU professor Adam Bradley has played in publishing the second posthumous novel of Ralph Ellison (via Twitter.com/Boulderbooks).  Ellison published his classic novel, Invisible Man, in 1952, and although he worked on several novels for decades, he did not publish another one before his death in 1994, but as Anas notes, he left behind “27 boxes of manuscript for his second novel that included handwritten notes, typewritten pages and 460-some computer files.”

Bradley was born and raised in Salt Lake City.  Anas writes that Bradley became interested in Ellison’s work at a young age:

“As an undergraduate at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., Bradley became intrigued with Ellison, whose father died when he was a child. A character in Invisible Man tells the protagonist: ‘Be your own father, young man.’ The rich theme of father-son relationships struck Bradley, who was raised by his white mother and met his black father for the first time in his 20s.”

Also in the Roundup: Denver’s Bloomsbury Review turns 30, Copper Canyon Press holds a benefit with W.S. Merwin, and “The Montana Place Names Companion” is now up and running.

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Western Book Roundup

Narrative Magazine, a leading online literary journal, is currently offering some new work by prolific Montana author Rick Bass. Bass has published a number of stories and essays in Narrative, and currently you can hear Bass read his story “Eating” for free, or for twelve bucks you can order The Blue Horse, a new novella available only at Narrative.  It’s 56 pages long, and the price includes shipping.

Also in the Roundup: The “Literature and Landscape of the Horse” retreat in Wyoming, Denver novelist Carleen Brice holds a contest to benefit a local charity, and a new interview with Terry Tempest Williams.

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HERE, WE CAN REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE

During a bout of insomnia last night, I watched CNBC to see if any of the talking financial heads thought my retirement funds might stop disappearing, and there it was. Perhaps the biggest environmental, wildlife habitat and water quality problem we don't like to discuss. Yes, it's touchy, but that has never stopped me, so why start now.

We all need to stop buying fool's gold. 

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LET'S GET OUR WORDS STRAIGHT

Have you ever heard somebody say they prefer "multiple use" over Wilderness? I have what seems like a thousand times, and every time I hear it, I say, silently, to myself, wrong!

So, it seems like a good time to say it out loud because the words, "multiple use" have been lost in the Wilderness. 

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New West Book Review

Wisdom of the Last Farmer
by David Mas Masumoto
Simon & Schuster, 238 pages, $25

David Mas Masumoto‘s Wisdom of the Last Farmer will make you want to go out and pay a farmer more than the asking price for his produce at a market.  Masumoto grows organic peaches, nectarines, and grapes on his farm in California’s central valley, carrying on in the tradition of his family.  His grandparents emigrated from Japan over a hundred years ago with the dream of buying land.  Because they weren’t native born Americans, laws forbade them from purchasing land, so instead they worked in other people’s fields and suffered through internment in the Arizona desert during World War II.  But they persevered and eventually their sons established the 80-acre farm that Masumoto now runs with his wife and children. 

Masumoto is on a mission to preserve flavorful heirloom peaches that his family has grown for decades, varieties most farmers have abandoned because of supermarkets’ demands for harder, redder peaches with longer shelf life and transport durability.  Masumoto wants people to experience the “Sun Crest peach, a fat and juicy gem with a stunning, honeyed flavor.” If people could try it, he thinks, they probably wouldn’t settle for the fruit that’s sold as peaches today.

In Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Masumoto, a columnist for the Fresno Bee and the award-winning author of several previous books, discusses his father’s decline in the wake of a stroke, and how their hard work in pursuit of a perfect peach breaks their bodies and spirits down.  “Organic farming is not simple or easy,” Masumoto writes.  “It’s easy to want to be environmentally responsible, but it’s a damned hard thing to achieve.  I cannot replace tedious labor with faster technology or equipment when things go wrong.”

David Mas Masumoto will be in Utah to present his book in Salt Lake City at the King’s English Bookshop on Thursday, October 22 (5:30 p.m.).  On October 23 and 24, he will participate in the Moab Confluence “Eating the West” literary festival, and on October 25 he will visit Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, 2 p.m.) as a part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library reading series.

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Western Book Roundup

One of my fellow ex-Rocky Mountain News book reviewers, Dan Danbom, recently wrote in an email, "Now, instead of reviewing books, I've decided that a fast route to famine is to try to sell them." Along with his business partner, Nancy Stevens, this week the intrepid Danbom opened a new bookstore in Denver, Printed Page Bookshop, at 1416 S. Broadway. The shop is in a Victorian house, and features contemporary and vintage books. Printed Page's tagline: "Ask about our books on paper." Danbom notes that they will be "defiant and antiquated to the very end!"

To celebrate its opening, Printed Page will display a special exhibit of 50 banned books, and they invite patrons to guess which book among them has "never been the target of censorship on political, religious, social or sexual grounds." Four people who guess the right answer will win a shopping spree at the bookshop.

Christopher Cokinos, Utah State University professor and author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in honor of the annual Perseid meteor shower. In "Dust in the (Cosmic) Wind," he writes explains that "meteor showers are really comet dust" and that tiny particles of space dust filtering down to earth add a little extra crunch to everyone's vegetables: "As Donald Brownlee, an astronomer at the University of Washington who studies cosmic dust particles, has noted, 'If you had lettuce for lunch, you probably ate a few.'"

Also in the Roundup: Events for Margot Mifflin and David Knibb, a new Reading the West selection, and New West's Books & Writers page is now available on the Kindle. (Is it "the" Kindle?) 

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