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.

New West Book Review

Nancy Horan’s “Loving Frank”

Loving Frank
by Nancy Horan
Ballantine Books, 400 pages, $14

Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the protagonist of Nancy Horan's arresting debut novel, Loving Frank, faces the crossroads of her life in Boulder in 1909. In Horan's novel, which weaves imagined conversations and scenes into a framework of historical fact, Mamah has fallen in love with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the Oak Park, Ill. home she shared with her husband and two children. She takes a train to Boulder to support her best friend through a difficult pregnancy, having just confessed the affair to her husband.

Nancy Horan will discuss Loving Frank at the Boulder Book Store on July 31 at 7:30 p.m.

New West Book Review

Rick Bass’s “Why I Came West”

Why I Came West: A Memoir
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin, 238 pages, $24

Rick Bass' new book Why I Came West is subtitled "A Memoir," but it's more of a cri de coeur. Bass spends a few pages discussing his life, explaining how he came to move to the remote Yaak Valley of northwest Montana after growing up in Houston, and devotes the rest of the book to a philosophical reflection on twenty years spent as an environmental activist. His goal, simply put, is that he wants "the last roadless lands in the Yaak Valley to be designated as wilderness."

Although he thought this was a fairly modest aim when his quest began, he met vehement opposition or indifference from his neighbors, logging interests, and politicians. Bass never could have predicted the course his life would take when he left his job as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi and drove with his eventual wife west and north until they hit his "beloved supple landscape with its velvet folds and curves," a valley in which no species has gone extinct since the last ice age.

book review

A Perspective on the Russian Experience with Wolves

In 1965 an American working for the National Security Agency as a Russian linguist picked up a copy of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. Instead of a new found appreciation for the contentious canids, as Mowat’s book generated for so many of his generation, Will Graves found the book didn’t mesh with what he knew from 14 years of reading about wolves in Russia.

“His book is fiction,” Graves said Thursday over coffee in Missoula, taking particular aim at Mowat’s claim that in the far north rodents and small game comprise substantial parts of a wolf’s diet.

Alarmed by not just Mowat’s book, but what Graves perceived to be a trend of often inaccurate and misleading pro-wolf Western literature, Graves decided to set the record straight with a book of his own. Over the next 42 years, he meticulously clipped Russian-language news reports, translated popular and scientific articles, joined preeminent Russian biologists at international conferences on wolves, and traveled and talked with Russian biologists, game managers and hunters about the Russian experience with wolves.

New West Books Feature

Summer Books for the Western Reader

Summer is half over, but there's still plenty of time to fit in some reading. Here's a selection of some of my favorite books that I've reviewed for New West so far this year—I've picked a collection of short fiction, a book of photography and prose, a novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction narrative. Click the links to read longer reviews and interviews with the authors. Happy reading, and let me know what you think.

New West Book Review

Ron McLarty’s “Art in America”

Art in America
By Ron McLarty
Viking Penguin, 366 pages, $25.95

Ron McLarty's new comic novel Art in America begins by listing the "Selected Works" of its protagonist, Steven Kearney, a 48-year-old writer who, despite decades of diligent work, has never published a book or seen one of his plays produced. All his novels are epic in scope, topping 1000 pages, and his plays are equally ambitious and lengthy.

As the book opens in New York, Kearney has just lost his girlfriend and his apartment and a car grazes him as he lugs his collected works in two trash bags over to the apartment of his best friend Roarke, a lesbian theater director. A reprieve comes for Kearney in the form of an invitation to spend the summer in Creedemore, Colorado (a fictional town in the San Luis Valley that resembles Creede), where he will write and produce a play about the history of the town.

Ron McLarty will discuss Art in America at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on Wednesday, July 16 at 7:30 p.m.

Book Excerpt

We Shouldn’t Exist: Preliminary Notes from No Man’s Land

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published this month by AK Press. Edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, Red State Rebels is a collection of essays by people who hail from predominantly conservative states but consider themselves "political progressives."

We are not supposed to exist. According to the political Steinberg map of the nation, we come from no man's land, fly-over country, the unredeemable middle, where political progressives are as rare as a Hooters in Provo, Utah. We are children of the wasteland. The rural outback. Where folks carry guns and use them. Where fenced compounds and utopian communes exist side-by-side with a cyanide heap-leach gold mine. Out here cell phones don't work. Not yet, anyway. And some of us would like to keep it that way.

Frank grew up on the wheated plains of eastern Montana. St. Clair hails from the humid cornfields of central Indiana. These states span the glaciated heart of the continent, a region carved and ground-smooth by the weight of ice. From a distance, the terrain of the Great Plains appears homogenous.
From a distance so do its politics and demographics. You must look closer to discover the diversity, the radical nuances.