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.

New West Book Review

Lonely Hearts: Steven Wingate’s “Wifeshopping”

Wifeshopping
By Steven Wingate
Houghton Mifflin, 208 pages, $12.95

The men in Steven Wingate's engrossing, entertaining debut story collection Wifeshopping are looking not just for love, but for marriage. They're not adverse to commitment, but they are particular, seeking the ideal woman for whom to forsake their days of youthful flings. This ultimate woman never quite materializes for Wingate's protagonists, who reject their girlfriends and fiancées because they don't like used clothes or don't agree that they should get rid of a stranger's mementos found buried in the backyard. But more often, their women reject them for being too pompous, for proposing marriage too early or for trying to rush them out of their rituals of mourning for past loves. Wingate, who lives in Lafayette, Colo. and teaches at the University of Colorado, sets his stories across the country, from Denver to Thermopolis, Wyo., to Rockport, Mass., to Miami (and vividly evokes each of these varied settings), but the problems that plague his characters are the same everywhere—they're not-quite-perfect guys trying to create something lasting and meaningful with not-quite-perfect women.

Steven Wingate will discuss his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 30 at 7:30 p.m., and at Poor Richard's Bookstore in Colorado Springs on August 7 at 5 p.m.

New West Book Review & Interview

Carl Haywood’s Innovative Take on Explorer David Thompson

Canadian David Thompson is considered by some to be one of the shrewdest explorer-mapmakers to ever chart or trek a course. Following quickly on the heels of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Thompson is widely credited as being the first person to set up a commercial trading post in Montana, a northwestern business venture called Saleesh House. Several opinions have always existed relating to the post’s precise location.

Shunning foregone historical conclusions, Carl Haywood, author of Sometimes Only Horses to Eat ($24.95, Stoneydale Press), has not only raised serious questions about Thompson’s travels in northwestern Montana, but he has offered new interpretations of his own that certainly command confutation.

Carl Haywood will discuss his book at David Thompson Days in Thompson Falls, Mont. on July 4-5, at the Libby Public Library in Libby, Mont. on July 14 (7 p.m.), at The Corner Bookstore in Sandpoint, Idaho on July 19 (1 p.m.), and information on his other regional appearances is available on his website.

New West Book Review

Short Stuff: Daniel Grandbois’ “Unlucky Lucky Days”

Unlucky Lucky Days
By Daniel Grandbois
BOA Editions
122, $14

On his website, Colorado fiction writer Daniel Grandbois describes his first book, Unlucky Lucky Days, as a "collection of nonsense and absurdist tales" so I guess I should have known better than to go seeking the real-life inspiration for one story, "Mansion," about a turtle who is "an executioner in retirement" and becomes stuck in a mansion he was trying to execute (if that make sense, you've got a more agile mind than I do). Grandbois writes that a librarian decided to take the mansion as a paperweight, and "that's where you can find the executioner right down to this day—in the fish tank near the children's books at the Boulder Public Library."

Daniel Grandbois will read from his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 8. Munly and the Lepercalians will also perform.

Western Nature Writers

An Interview with David M. Armstrong

David M. Armstrong is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado and the author of several books, including the recently published third edition of Rocky Mountain Mammals (University of Colorado Press, $19.95), a guide to the mammals of this region and those in Rocky Mountain National Park in particular. Packed with photos and facts, the book is worth its weight to lug on a backpacking trip. I recently interviewed Professor Armstrong via email about the best way to spot mammals in the wild, the projected fate of the pika, changes he's observed in Rocky Mountain National Park, the dearth of Bigfoot sightings there, and how we should "honor [our] cousin," the montane vole.

New West: Have you noticed any changes in Rocky Mountain National Park over the years?

David M. Armstrong: The fauna of any place is a dynamic phenomenon, a “work-in-progress,” and changes are sometimes subtle. Obvious changes in recent decades have been the substantial increase in the number of elk in the National Park and vicinity, ups and downs in numbers (hence visibility) of bighorn sheep and beaver, the increase in the number of black bears in recent years, the establishment of moose in the National Park (from introduced population in North Park).

New West Book Review

On the Road with Boulder’s Queen of Shoes and Sloth

Queen of the Road
By Doreen Orion
Broadway Books, 293 pages, $13.95

Don't be fooled by the author photo in the back of Boulder author Doreen Orion's new travel narrative, Queen of the Road. It depicts her wearing sneakers and exercise clothes, smiling next to her dog at a scenic overlook to which they've presumably hiked. Although she looks like a standard REI-shopping, backpacking, Yoga Journal-reading, outdoor-worshiping Boulderite, she reveals her true nature early on in Queen of the Road, which details the year she and her husband Tim spent cruising America in a tricked-out luxury bus.