New West Book Review

Young Men and Fire: Timothy Egan’s “The Big Burn”

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America
by Timothy Egan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 324 pages, $27

In August of 1910, the largest fire ever to sweep across forests in the United States claimed trees, buildings, and lives across a stretch of three million acres in the Rocky Mountains.  Timothy Egan writes in his follow-up to The Worst Hard Time, his National Book Award-winning exploration of the Dustbowl, that this blaze was known as “The Big Burn,” and it stretched “from central Idaho, east into Montana, west into Washington, north into British Columbia.” The smoke drifted as far away as Chicago.  “It was as if a volcanic blast had disgorged the airborne remains of the forested northern Rockies into disparate parts of the United States.” Besides destroying several towns in the region, this fire had a lasting effect on the course of the country’s conservation movement, initiated by Theodore Roosevelt and his close confidant Gifford Pinchot, first head of the United States Forest Service.

Egan shows that many of the lessons derived from the Great Fire of 1910 were still followed by foresters a century later.  People on both sides of the conservation movement tried to use it to achieve their political ends.  To demonstrate the larger set of circumstances in which this fire played out, after a vivid opening chapter set in the midst of the fire, Egan steps back to February of 1899, when the 34-year-old Gifford Pinchot visits the Governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt, who invited him to engage in a wrestling match and a boxing bout.  This afternoon of roughhousing cemented their friendship. 

Western Book Roundup

Denver Writer, Formerly an Out-of-Shape Hiker, Wins the National Outdoor Book Award

The Denver Post reported this weekend that Denver writer Mark Obmascik‘s Halfway to Heaven: My White Knuckled and Knuckleheaded-Quest for the Rocky Mountain High won this year’s outdoor literature prize from the National Outdoor Book Awards Foundation: “The book is about climbing Colorado’s 14,000-plus foot mountains, all 54 of them, in one summer. The problem, though, as Obmascik points out in this humorous work, is that he’s completely out of shape.” Obmasik was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Columbine shootings. He will discuss his book at the REI in Boulder on November 30 (7 p.m.).

• John Jurgensen’s insightful interview with Cormac McCarthy ran in the Wall Street Journal last week in advance of the opening of the film version of The Road.  Their discussion ranges all over the place in subject matter, from the movie versions of McCarthy’s films, to fatherhood, to his writing process.  Jurgensen writes, “McCarthy shuns interviews, but he relishes conversation.” One subject that McCarthy cycles back to several times is the apocalypse, something that he frequently discusses with his friends at the Santa Fe Institute.

Also in the Roundup: Missoula’s Fact and Fiction adjusts to ebooks, Moscow, Idaho’s Joan Opyr celebrates her new novel with leftover turkey, and Denver’s Printed Page Bookshop offers free books in exchange for food donations for the needy.

From Wyofile

Mad Dog and the Pilgrim Booksellers

Sweetwater Station, Wyo.—If you blink once or your attention drifts for an instant on the two-lane highway between Muddy Gap and the Lander, Wyoming, you may miss one of the world’s great road signs, a weathered, wooden square flanked by an American flag:  “Old Books Fresh Eggs For Sale.”

And if you don’t stop and go inside the two-story, structurally-reinforced, climate-controlled book barn stuffed with more than 75,000 hardback volumes ranging from leather-bound Balzac to first-edition Beatrix Potter, you will miss one of Wyoming’s and the Mountain West’s hidden treats.

Owners Lynda “Mad Dog” German and Polly “The Pilgrim” Hinds moved their Mad Dog and The Pilgrim Booksellers from Denver to Sweetwater Station in 2000 after an unpleasant encounter with the Aurora, Colorado, Police Department.

New West Book Review

Spanish-English Kids Books from Cinco Puntos Press

Thanks to television shows such as Dora the Explorer, Maya and Miguel, and the trusty Sesame Street, many kids growing up in English-speaking homes can count to ten and say hello in Spanish. Cinco Puntos Press, based in El Paso, specializes in literature that straddles the U.S./Mexico border, and publishes a number of bilingual books for children that will help kids who are interested in Spanish take their language study further.

El Paso-based writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz‘s The Dog Who Loved Tortillas (36 pages, $17.95), with vibrant clay illustrations by Geronimo Garcia, will be a hit with any kid who has ever begged his parents for a dog.  In this story, told in Spanish and English with a clay squiggle dividing the two texts on the same page, Little Diego Domínguez (who previously appeared in A Gift from Papá Diego) and his big sister Gabriela simultaneously hit upon the idea that they should get a dog.  When they ask their parents for a dog a piece, the parents say they can have a dog, but only if they share. (As a mom, I was sort of rooting for the parents to demand more from Diego and Gabriela: fifty whine-free days and nights, cleaning, scullery work.)

Gabriela and Diego agree, secretly thinking, “But it will be more mine.” They adopt a puppy from the humane society, and work hard housebreaking him.  Diego discovers that the puppy, Sofie, will perform tasks in exchange for bites of tortilla.  Sofie becomes well known around the neighborhood as the tortilla-loving dog.  But one morning Diego discovers Sofie “barely moving,” and Mr. Domínguez says, “Her nose is dry and hot.  It’s supposed to be cold and wet.” A trip to the vet is on order.  Uh oh, I thought, maybe dogs aren’t supposed to eat tortillas? 

Book Review

Stay or Go? The Quandary of the Rural Brain Drain

A coworker once quipped that a good study is one where the researcher’s stand on the issue  is hard to determine. This coworker then offered up Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, an especially even-handed study of activist supporters and opponents of abortion, as a good example. An analogous measure of quality, I think, might be whether a researcher with little personal experience of the subject under study can observe and describe that topic sensitively and well.

Take the new book Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America by sociologists Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas. Admitted urbanites whose original research agenda didn’t include a detour through the country, Carr and Kefalas undertook an ethnographic study of youth pathways to adulthood in a pseudonymous small Iowa town, “Ellis.” But if you didn’t read their confession about not being rural residents themselves, you probably wouldn’t be able to guess it.

Western Book Roundup

Good News for Boise State’s Idaho Review and Denver Music Writer Steve Knopper

Economic conditions and their implications for the book industry continue to be dire, and yet I have mostly good news to report this week.

• First, several prestigious literary magazines across the nation are facing budget cuts or conversion to online-only publication, including the New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, but in Boise, according to Idaho Review editor Mitch Wieland in an interview with Boise Weekly, “While other universities are cutting their budgets for their literary magazines, the administration here at [Boise State] has actually increased our funding in support of what we do.”

Wieland spoke to Bill English of Boise Weekly last month on the occasion of the publication of The Idaho Review‘s tenth anniversary issue.  It didn’t take long for The Idaho Review to vault into the top tier of literary magazines, with its stories and essays regularly winning national awards.  Writer and Boise State teacher Alan Heathcock told the Boise Weekly:

“The success of The Idaho Review is all Mitch Wieland.  Every journal in the country is writing letters to big name writers, asking them to send work. Mitch has some special charm that when he asks Rick Bass, William Kittredge or Ann Beattie, they not only send work, but they send great work. Ten years ago, Boise State didn’t even have a writing program, and now is known nationwide largely because of the reach and reputation of The Idaho Review.”

• My second bit of good news: Bill Husted, gossip columnist for the Denver Post, reported Sunday, “HBO is developing a movie based on Denver author Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.”

Also in the Roundup: How the boxer Rocky inspires writer Benjamin Percy, a vintage Cormac McCarthy ad in Dwight Garner’s Read Me, and how books by women were left off a key best-of-the-year book list.

New West Book Review

West is a Sexy Place in “Best of the West 2009”

Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 268 pages, $19.95

Best of the West 2009 is a welcome revival of anthology series that ran from 1988 through 1992, collecting outstanding stories set in “the Wide Side of the Missouri” that previously appeared in literary journals.  Unlike some recent one-off Western story anthologies, such as New Stories from the Southwest (also edited by D. Seth Horton) and Forge Books’ Best Stories of the American West, Volume I, the editors plan to make this an annual publication, and in the 2009 edition, the quality of the stories is just as high as those in the well-known national Best American Short Stories series.

In the foreword, Rick Bass tries to put his finger on “what constitutes a Western short story,” and although he notes, “Is it my imagination, or are there extra teaspoonfuls of loneliness in these stories, extra pinches of desperation?” and “a good many Western short stories tend to possess a kind of intensity or power of the felt physical senses,” he decides, “I’m not convinced there is a Western short story, yet.” Bass doesn’t remark on it, but in this year’s anthology, the overwhelming common theme is sex: the people in these stories might be lonely, but they manage to partner up pretty well.

Western Book Roundup

Utah and Oregon Book Awards Announced and Hooray, I Sold My Novel!

As I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions over the years I’ve written the Roundup, when I’m not reading other people’s books, I’m trying to write my own, and after many, many years of effort, I have some good news: my first novel, The Ringer, will be published by The Permanent Press in 2011.  I am delighted about it.  Now I just need to edit the book and figure out how to convince people to read it.  (Beg?  Bribe?  Cajole?) Check out my new website for more information.

• The winners of the Utah and Oregon Book Awards were announced recently.  In Utah, the winners included David McGlynn in fiction for The End of the Straight and Narrow, Stephen Trimble in nonfiction for Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America, and in the poetry category, Craig Arnold won the award posthumously for his collection Made Flesh.  Ben Fulton of the Salt Lake Tribune wrote in greater detail about all the winners.

Also in the Roundup: Oregon Book Award winners, events at the Center of the American West, and Annie Proulx donates her papers to the New York Public Library.

New West Book Review

Barbara Kingsolver Tackles Epic Themes with “The Lacuna”

The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins, 464 pages, $26.99

Barbara Kingsolver worked her way up to becoming one of America’s Current Top Novelists the old-fashioned way, beginning by writing smaller, tightly-focused novels with some autobiographical elements, earning a loyal readership through word-of-mouth and independent bookseller raves in her former home base of the Southwest, then expanding her stories to globe-spanning epics such as her riveting The Poisonwood Bible.  Kingsolver has followed up her recent nonfiction bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family’s quest to eat locally-grown foods for a year, with her first novel in nine years, The Lacuna, a sweeping tale that follows a young man destined to become a popular American novelist in the years before and after he befriends Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky.  The Lacuna is another epic work, setting one man’s story against the grand events of early twentieth century history, and it’s also a bildungsroman and an epistolatory novel, for those AP English students keeping score at home. 

The Lacuna is one of a handful of titles which Amazon and Walmart, in their current book-price war, will sell for nine bucks, along with genre fiction juggernauts including the latest books by John Grisham and James Patterson.  Kingsolver’s novel is an ironic pick, because leftist politics are at its heart and its protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is a reclusive, mostly-celibate gay man who writes about Aztec and Mayan history, elements which would not normally cause the books that house them to fly off the shelves.  But The Lacuna will please Kingsolver’s plentiful fans because it is full of the qualities that her books have always contained—striking, precise detail, human passion, vivid language, snappy dialogue, and a singularly fascinating character in Kingsolver’s imagining of Frida Kahlo.