http://www.newwest.net/topic/main/C132/L/ New West Network: The Voice of the Rocky Mountains en info@newwest.net Copyright 2010 Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:30:31 MST Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:30:31 MST http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/from_missouri_to_montana_on_foot/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/from_missouri_to_montana_on_foot/C132/C132/ Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:30:31 MST Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains By Patrick Dobson University of Nebraska Press, 296 pages, $29.95 In Seldom Seen, author Patrick Dobson embraces Walt Whitman’s charge to “take to the open road.” He leaves behind a mind-dulling job in Kansas City, Missouri and sets out on foot for Helena, Montana, carrying only a backpack and possessing the resolve of a person who’s just made an abrupt about-face.  When this story begins in the summer of 1995, Dobson needs a change.  He’s doing odd jobs for a hotel, sometimes repainting the same concrete floors month after month.  But he has a vague sense that there’s something else out there for him, or at least something more to life than the one he’s been living.  Dobson spends a year saving money for his epic adventure, and then he finally walks out his front door with sturdy boots on his feet and an overstuffed pack on his back.  http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/mark_spraggs_bone_fire_returns_to_familiar_ground/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/mark_spraggs_bone_fire_returns_to_familiar_ground/C132/C132/ Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:00:03 MST Bone Fire by Mark Spragg Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95 Mark Spragg’s understated yet satisfying third novel, Bone Fire, takes several characters from his first two novels and binds them together in a story in which some of the people are struggling to find a way to leave the town of Ishawooa, Wyoming, while others are trying to return to it.  In Bone Fire, Einar Gilkyson and Crane Carlson, two characters from Spragg’s prior novels, have moved a bit farther down the inevitable conveyor belt that is life, declining in health while Griff, the young woman they both care about, flounders as she seeks direction. In 2004’s An Unfinished Life, Griff Gilkyson was a nine-year-old girl, named after her dead father, who found refuge from her mother’s flighty ways at her crusty paternal grandfather Einar’s Wyoming ranch.  Griff’s mother, Jean, ended up marrying the town sheriff, Crane Carlson.  Mark Spragg is currently on a book tour with Laura Bell, with stops in Boulder (Boulder Book Store, March 16, 7:30 p.m.), Bozeman (Country Bookshelf, April 20, 7 p.m.), Missoula (Fact & Fiction, April 21, 7 p.m.), and many more places in Montana, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and California. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/black_sheep_finds_her_place_as_a_wyoming_shepherd/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/black_sheep_finds_her_place_as_a_wyoming_shepherd/C132/C132/ Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:00:59 MST Claiming Ground by Laura Bell Knopf, 239 pages, $24.95 In her remarkable memoir, Claiming Ground, Cody’s Laura Bell offers up exquisite snapshots from her life spent working as a sheepherder, ranch hand, forest ranger, and masseuse.  Bell’s adventure began when she was a minister’s daughter just out of college, back home in Kentucky, and couldn’t think of what to do with herself but to pursue her “childhood’s private world blown larger than life, with a horse, two dogs, a rifle, a wilderness.” In 1977, she came west with her sister, whose husband was a paleontologist working on a dig in Wyoming, and she never left. Claiming Ground begins with an account of Bell’s early days spent herding sheep in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, where she was one of the only women in this occupation.  At one point she and the sheep are restless in the heat, anxious to leave for the higher ground of their summer pasture.  The man who tends Bell’s camp tells her the road up to the pasture is “a son-of-a-gun” and it proves to be a difficult journey with her horse and sheep.  Bell writes, “We’d made it, though not without false starts and backtracks to find the single spot of grace that might let us through.” http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/your_turn_choose_the_book_that_ill_review/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/your_turn_choose_the_book_that_ill_review/C132/C132/ Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:00:21 MST Every week, publishers and authors send me books in the hope that I’ll review them for New West.  I read pretty fast, but I can’t get to all of the deserving books, so some of them end up in my Book Cabinet of Guilt.  My daughter keeps her crayons in the same cabinet, so every time she wants to color and opens the cabinet’s door, little wafts of guilt escape. I review a book a week for New West, and cover many more through this column and author interviews.  I try to write about books in advance of their authors’ regional appearances so people can go to the readings if they’re intrigued, and I try to discuss most books as closely as possible to their release dates so people can check them out while they’re still in book stores.  (Books are shuffled in and out of stores in just a few weeks, these days.) But some books, as intriguing as they are, take a while to make it to the top of my review pile. I have one free slot in March for a book to review and a whole pile of interesting books languishing in my Book Cabinet of Guilt.  How can I choose?  That’s where you come in.  I’ll list four books below.  Between now and March 15, leave a comment on this post with your vote for which book I should review, and I’ll review the book that receives the most votes.  These books all look good to me, so I hope to review as many of them as I can eventually—but I can only cover one of them this month: http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/off_the_rez_toni_jensens_from_the_hilltop/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/off_the_rez_toni_jensens_from_the_hilltop/C132/C132/ Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:00:47 MST From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen University of Nebraska Press, 180 pages, $19.95 In Toni Jensen’s first story collection, From the Hilltop, many of the characters are Native American, some sharing the author’s Métis background, living in places where they stick out, such as West Texas, where a Blackfoot father and his Blackfoot-Comanche son run a hotel that the locals dub the “Powwow Hotel,” or in Minnesota, where we meet an adopted Blackfoot teenage girl who longs to be crowned a Dairy Princess at the Minnesota State Fair.  She’s interested in statistics, and enumerates her situation frankly: “I was almost a dairy princess, was runner-up in my county, which borders Canada.  The whole county has only 1,882 residents, 978 of them female, 143 who are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, the proper dairy princess age range.  Of those 143, all are white, except me; I’m an Indian, Blackfoot, the only one in the county.” Of the six applicants, the narrator lost out to a girl her mother calls her “arch nemesis,” and she heads down to the fair to see her rival’s head sculpted in butter along with the other county dairy princesses. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/revenge_of_the_saguaro_revels_in_southwest_tackiness/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/revenge_of_the_saguaro_revels_in_southwest_tackiness/C132/C132/ Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:00:50 MST Revenge of the Saguaro: Offbeat Travels Through America’s Southwest by Tom Miller Cinco Puntos Press, 228 pages, $14.95 My heart was hardened against the chimichanga early.  In my Denver public elementary school, the cafeteria ladies used to serve chimichangas for Cinco de Mayo and Día de Independencia on September 16.  (I wonder if the same individual is still in charge of holiday menu planning, as DPS officials recently caught flack for offering students “Southern Style” chicken and collard greens “in Honor Of M.L. King.") The chimichanga was meant to be festive, but it sat there like a lump on the tray, bathed in a thin, pinkish-beige sauce with chunks in it that so resembled vomit that the effect couldn’t possibly have been unintentional. But with his essay collection Revenge of the Saguaro, Tom Miller, a passionate chimichanga advocate, has convinced me to overcome my prejudices against the fried treat.  Miller’s book, which was originally published as Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink a decade ago, still offers fresh insights about some touchstones of Southwestern culture: chimichangas, saguaro cacti, bola ties, black velvet paintings, “La Bamba,” and more.  About the only thing Miller left out is an investigation of those brightly painted howling coyote carvings that used to be ubiquitous. Tom Miller will appear at the second annual Tuscon Festival of Books from March 13 through 14 on the University of Arizona campus. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/don_delillo_stares_down_the_american_desert_in_point_omega/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/don_delillo_stares_down_the_american_desert_in_point_omega/C132/C132/ Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:17:19 MST Point Omega by Don DeLillo 117 pages, $24 In his fourteen novels, Don DeLillo has investigated a wide array of subjects and characters, spinning gorgeous prose and inventive fiction from the story of a fictional rock musician (1973’s Great Jones Street), the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (1988’s Libra), and the preoccupations of a professor of “Hitler Studies” at a Midwestern university in his National Book Award-winning White Noise.  Throughout DeLillo’s diverse novels, certain themes repeat: terrorism, crowds, cult activity, and conspiracy theories, to name a few.  Following the publication of 1997’s sprawling Underworld, which many consider to be DeLillo’s masterpiece, DeLillo began to craft spare, novella-sized fictions, starting with The Body Artist in 2001.  His new Point Omega continues in this vein, but also breaks new ground for the novelist whose last five books have largely taken place on the east coast, in and around New York City.  The main action of Point Omega takes place in the West, in the Anza-Borrego desert of California—if what happens in the novel can be described as “action.” Point Omega proves to be a beautiful, puzzling book, inverting the classic narrative of a troubled man coming to the desert to seek solitude and achieve clarity.  In this case, Richard Elster—a scholar and “defense intellectual” who consulted with defense department officials during the buildup to the Iraq war—brings company with him to the desert because he can’t stand to be alone.  He enters the desert a confidant man, expounding on his pet theories, but leaves it broken and unsure of what he believes after he experiences a disturbing loss. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/debut_novel_revisits_19th_century_idaho_murder_mystery/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/debut_novel_revisits_19th_century_idaho_murder_mystery/C132/C132/ Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:00:30 MST Deep Creek by Dana Hand Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $25 Dana Hand’s debut novel Deep Creek opens with an unforgettable scene.  In 1887, a small-town judge and his daughter go fishing in the Snake River in Idaho Territory.  The girl throws in a line and catches a man.  Soon, more bodies are bobbing in the flood-swollen river and the judge, Joe Vincent, has a mass-murder mystery on his hands. The corpses—shot, hacked, disemboweled, dismembered—are Chinese miners who have traveled deep into Hells Canyon where they met their fate at the titular Deep Creek.  Even though the body count rises to forty, law enforcement authorities and politicians in Lewiston (home to “fifteen hundred whites and five hundred Celestials”) are slow to launch an investigation. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/holt_prairie_saga_continues_in_eventide/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/holt_prairie_saga_continues_in_eventide/C132/C132/ Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:00:19 MST This month the Denver Center for the Performing Arts is presenting the world premier of “Eventide,” playwright Eric Schmiedl’s faithful adaptation of Kent Haruf’s novel, directed by Kent Thompson.  Two years ago Schmiedl turned Haruf’s beloved novel Plainsong into a winning play, and this time he works with darker material, but nevertheless manages to reveal the abundant humor in Haruf’s dialogue. “Plainsong” told the story of the McPheron brothers, two old bachelor ranchers living on the outskirts of the fictional prairie town of Holt, Colorado, coaxed into sheltering a pregnant teenage girl, Victoria Roubideaux, who had been thrown out by her mother.  They formed a strong, improvised family, and “Eventide” picks up on their lives a few years later, when Victoria’s daughter Katie is two years old, and the McPheron brothers are reluctantly preparing to see them off to Fort Collins, where Victoria will attend college.  Philip Pleasants and Mike Hartman return to reprise the roles of Harold and Raymond McPheron, respectively, that they played in “Plainsong,” and they once again prove irresistible, two elderly rural gentlemen adept in cattle rearing chores but startled by modern life, unaccustomed to dancing, socializing, and fielding the amorous advances of women.  Their interaction and dialogue, which closely follows that in Haruf’s novel, is hilarious. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/things_that_go_bump_in_wyoming_alyson_hagys_ghosts_of_wyoming/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/things_that_go_bump_in_wyoming_alyson_hagys_ghosts_of_wyoming/C132/C132/ Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:00:31 MST Ghosts of Wyoming By Alyson Hagy Graywolf Press, 192 pages, $15 Some places feel more haunted than others.  As Alyson Hagy explores in her new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, Wyoming is one of those places where the past seems to overlap with the present, where the rough frontier that she writes of in “The Sin Eaters,” set in 1889, seems to have plenty in common with the oil rig-riddled Wyoming of today, in which Hagy sets the story “Oil & Gas.” Throughout many of the stories, details about the Arapaho and other tribes that settled the area first set a somber tone underneath the main narrative.  Some of these stories touch on issues that are also raised in the work of Annie Proulx, Alexandra Fuller, and other contemporary Wyoming writers, but as with all good fiction, Hagy isn’t trying to convey a message.  She’s just telling some first-rate ghost stories. Only one of the eight stories, “Superstitions of the Indians,” is a ghost story in the classic sense, but they all have ghosts in them in the form of people who have died or characters haunted by the past.  One of the best stories is the lead-off, “Border,” which conceals its ghost until the very end in an effective twist that works as such endings should, not as a “gotcha!” moment but as a revelation that makes sense of and lends gravity to all the prior events.  In “Border,” a young man hitchhiking his way out of Wyoming, aiming for Denver or beyond, pauses in his journey to steal a collie pup in Meeker, Colo.