Boise News

New West Book Review

Forget Me Not
by Jennifer Lowe-Anker
Mountaineers Books, 256 pages, $24.95

In Forget Me Not, Jennifer Lowe-Anker chronicles life with her first husband Alex Lowe, who was thought by many to be the world’s best mountain climber before he was lost in an avalanche in the Tibetan Himalayas in 1999. Her memoir, comprehensive and faithful, does his life of achievement great justice, and is surprisingly upbeat even as she attempts to answer some of the darker questions associated with his vocation. As she examines Alex’s childhood as well as their courtship—when his profession as a mountain climber first took shape—she wonders how Alex became such an intense leader and climber, risking his life again and again, and, in his case, even with a family waiting at home.

At the beginning of the book, Lowe-Anker writes of Alex’s heart, that it was “frequently and most definitely in conflict with itself.” And at the end of the book, Lowe-Anker states that the writing of this memoir has been cathartic. Though her main aim is to memorialize the grandness of Alex’s success and scope, she also ends up describing the troubling fact that she was often left alone to raise three boys. She grapples with why she was attracted to such a life in the first place, and then why she was so understanding—so much so that Alex himself dubbed her “Saint Jennifer.”  

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The latest salvo against the nation’s agricultural-industrial complex is on the big screen.

Food, Inc., a documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner, is a forceful indictment of concentrated cattle ghettos, squalid chicken factories and cornfield deserts. At the film’s core is this thesis: the way we eat has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000, and not for the better.

Sure, our shopping cart loads are getting cheaper, but our health, the environment, the animals and the people who handle them pay the price, Kenner argues.

“We spend less of our paycheck on our food than anytime, but it comes at a heavy cost,” Kenner told a crowd at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas Festival, after a screening of the film. 

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Guest Column

Fueled by $180 million in federal stimulus money, the National Security Agency will build a one-million square foot data center outside of Salt Lake City. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:

Hoping to protect its top-secret operations by decentralizing its massive computer hubs, the National Security Agency will build a 1-million-square-foot data center at Utah’s Camp Williams.

The years-in-the-making project, which may cost billions over time, got a $181 million start last week when President Obama signed a war spending bill in which Congress agreed to pay for primary construction, power access and security infrastructure. The enormous building, which will have a footprint about three times the size of the Utah State Capitol building, will be constructed on a 200-acre site near the Utah National Guard facility’s runway.

Congressional records show that initial construction — which may begin this year — will include tens of millions in electrical work and utility construction, a $9.3 million vehicle inspection facility, and $6.8 million in perimeter security fencing. The budget also allots $6.5 million for the relocation of an existing access road, communications building and training area.

Officials familiar with the project say it may bring as many as 1,200 high-tech jobs to Camp Williams, which borders Salt Lake, Utah and Tooele counties. 

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By Chris Blanchard, Guest Writer, 7-02-09 | comments (1) | email story | print story

GOP BLUES

For the first time in a century, the mountain West has more Democratic senators, and more Democratic congress members, than Republicans.

That’s part of a shift across the region and the nation, say a pair of Stanford University professors, that has the Republican Party in crisis.

“There is no silver bullet for Republicans,” says Doug Rivers, professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “For the short-run, the news is pretty bad.” 

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THE LEGACY OF KENTON CARNEGIE

Anything wolf makes big headlines--and, it seems, is never old news.

For fourteen years since conservationists and the federal government brought the wolf back to the northern Rockies (plus several years leading up to the reintroduction), anything and everything about the Big Dog has been, to say the least, controversial.

But something hasn't happened yet that could make it much more contentious. 

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Guest Column

The passage of the Waxman-Markey Climate bill is a historic, bold step in the right direction in terms of embracing innovative and sustained business practice.

Hailed globally as a “sea of change in U. S. policy on climate,” this legislation will reshape energy policy by capping greenhouse gas emissions for the first time, boost production and investment in renewable electricity, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and tend to our cherished natural resources. Concurrently, the bill will create jobs here in the United States and help businesses and communities hardest hit by these new changes.

We commend our forward thinking leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives and say job well done. 

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