http://www.newwest.net/topic/main/C132/L39/ New West Network: The Voice of the Rocky Mountains en info@newwest.net Copyright 2008 Thu, 22 May 2008 11:27:00 MDT Thu, 22 May 2008 11:27:00 MDT http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/buffalo_molly_tracey_e_ferns_buffalo_music/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/buffalo_molly_tracey_e_ferns_buffalo_music/C132/L39/ Mon, 19 May 2008 07:00:00 MDT Buffalo Music by Tracey E. Fern Illustrated by Lauren Castillo Clarion Books, 32 pages, $16 Last year when I was reading Michael Punke's excellent Last Stand, one detail about the how buffalo came to be rescued from the brink of extinction stood out: many of Yellowstone's buffalo came from a single herd preserved and nurtured by a woman named Mary Ann Goodnight, who settled in West Texas's Palo Duro Canyon in 1876. She and her husband Charles raised orphaned buffalo calves left behind after the mass slaughter, and their animals served as crucial breeding stock for the restoration of the Yellowstone herd. This seems to be the perfect tidbit to interest children in the history of the buffalo in the West, and Tracey E. Fern's debut picture book for ages 4 to 8, Buffalo Music, tells just this tale of one pioneer woman whose actions helped avert a species' extinction. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/brandon_r_schrands_the_enders_hotel/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/brandon_r_schrands_the_enders_hotel/C132/L39/ Fri, 16 May 2008 07:58:00 MDT The Enders Hotel By Brandon R. Schrand University of Nebraska Press 230 pages, $17.95 Brandon R. Schrand's vivid new memoir chronicles his childhood growing up in the Enders Hotel in Soda Springs, Idaho. In the 1970's, Schrand's grandparents restored the place, originally built in 1919, and welcomed all kinds of people, especially the itinerant laborers of the region. Schrand, who teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho, moved back and forth to the Enders as his mother's and stepfather's jobs came and went. "Because we were job seekers," he writes, "we endured the perpetual ebb and flow of work—the overtime followed, always, by the lay-offs, the shut-downs, the walkouts." Brandon Schrand will appear at Common Knowledge Bookstore in Sandpoint, Idaho (May 16, 4:30 p.m.), Fact & Fiction in Missoula (June 13), and at The Enders Hotel in Soda Springs, Idaho (June 30, 5 p.m.). http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/an_american_dream_turned_nightmare/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/an_american_dream_turned_nightmare/C132/L39/ Mon, 12 May 2008 08:00:00 MDT Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West by Ethan Rarick Oxford University Press 304 pages, $28 There’s a maxim among travelers that goes something like this: bad trip, good story. That’s partly why the travails of the Donner Party and its cannibalistic trek across the Wild West – when it really was wild – has become such an iconic part of the history of this region for over a century and a half. It’s hard to have a trip any worse than theirs, trapped in the heavy snows of the Sierra Nevada for the winter eating their dead relatives. Remember that on the family road trip this summer. If its cannibalistic anticlimax is what we remember best about the Donner Party, though, author Ethan Rarick reaches deeper to uncover a quintessential story of America’s westward expansion, when not just adventurous thrill-seekers but pioneering men, women and children set out across forbidding deserts and mountain ranges for a chance to start over in a new land. In his book Desperate Passage, Rarick deftly re-creates the stories of these pioneers who risked everything for the 19th century version of the American Dream, and lost nearly everything in the pursuit. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/rigged_alexandra_fullers_the_legend_of_colton_h_bryant/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/rigged_alexandra_fullers_the_legend_of_colton_h_bryant/C132/L39/ Fri, 09 May 2008 07:00:01 MDT The Legend of Colton H. Bryant By Alexandra Fuller The Penguin Press 202 pages, $23.95 In her extraordinary new book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, Alexandra Fuller does a cruel thing. She makes readers fall in love with a Wyoming boy in the space of a few pages, carries us through his life, which leads inevitably to a dangerous job on an oil rig, and makes us stand as witnesses to his end, however much we wish we could turn our heads away. I still feel heartsick a few weeks after finishing it. Fuller writes with simple grace and a cowboy twang, taking a rather unconventional approach for nonfiction by composing the book of the private conversations and intimate scenes that are the turning points of Bryant's short life, and though she must have spent months with his family and friends, the author stays offstage, disappearing into a bracing, honest voice that is motherly in its tenderness toward her subject. Fuller will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) in Denver on Monday, May 12 (7:30 p.m.), at Borders in Portland on May 13 (7 p.m.), and in Evanston, WY at the Uinta Library on May 16 (5 p.m.) http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/sirotas_tour_of_america_there_are_all_kinds_of_uprisings/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/sirotas_tour_of_america_there_are_all_kinds_of_uprisings/C132/L39/ Tue, 06 May 2008 15:12:00 MDT Reading The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Searing Wall Street and Washington, by David Sirota, is a bit like a cross-country road trip with an insistent guy who talks the whole time. The thing is, Sirota's saying stuff you should probably hear, and he goes to places you need to go, but he's tough to follow at first. He starts in Helena, Mont., with a barrage of information about the partisan political machinations of the state's most recent biannual legislature, and he tosses other stuff in at a dizzying pace and with a good dose of populist outrage: from vermiculite poisoning in Libby to Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting of his hunting companion to century-old labor wars to an aside about how some Helena locals referred to him (Sirota) as a "city mouse." His story gains traction when it becomes clear that he's not finding a uniform populist movement in America where there isn't any. Sirota reports on the outrage felt by working people, whether it is channeled toward big business or misdirected at Mexican immigrants. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/peggy_shumakers_just_breathe_normally/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/peggy_shumakers_just_breathe_normally/C132/L39/ Fri, 02 May 2008 06:00:01 MDT Just Breathe Normally by Peggy Shumaker University of Nebraska Press 267 pages, $24.95 Peggy Shumaker is an English professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books of poetry, including Blaze and Underground Rivers. Her poetry background is evident in every carefully sculpted sentence of her memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This book is more than just pretty prose, though. It’s a gripping account of one woman’s struggle through a potentially life-ending accident and through her chaotic childhood. The wounds are on the body and in the mind. This is a book I will read again and again to decipher how Shumaker makes her magic happen. Clearly, this is a seasoned writer with an intriguing story to tell. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/cave_men_neil_millers_kartchner_caverns/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/cave_men_neil_millers_kartchner_caverns/C132/L39/ Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:00:00 MDT Kartchner Caverns By Neil Miller University of Arizona Press 224 pages, $14.95 In 1974, two young spelunking buddies named Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen discovered an untouched cave in southern Arizona, filled with breathtaking formations like nothing they'd ever seen, so impressive and mysterious that they named it Xanadu. Then they did what any self-respecting cavers would do: they told no one about their discovery. Neil Miller's engaging new book, Kartchner Caverns: How Two Cavers Discovered and Saved One of the Wonders of the Natural World follows Tufts and Tenen and the cave that would eventually become an Arizona State Park over a twenty year period in which the men try to determine how to safeguard Xanadu from vandals and eventually advocate it becoming a "show cave" in order to preserve and share it with others. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/home_on_the_range_laurie_wagner_buyers_springs_edge/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/home_on_the_range_laurie_wagner_buyers_springs_edge/C132/L39/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:00:00 MDT Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles By Laurie Wagner Buyer University of New Mexico Press 223 pages, $18.95 Here's a job description for you. In Laurie Wagner Buyer's new memoir, Spring's Edge, she describes her occupation in this way: "There are no days off, not even weekends. No sick leave. No benefits. No vacations. No retirement plan. No perks. No health insurance. No camaraderie of fellow workers…If you're lucky, you manage to hang on to the home place and pass it on to your children." Any takers? If so, head to the nearest mountain ranch and sign on for calving season. Laurie Wagner Buyer will read from Spring's Edge at the Tattered Cover LoDo on Saturday, April 19 at 2 p.m., and will host a poetry workshop at the Golden Public Library on April 24 at 6:30-8:30 p.m. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/god_takes_a_hike_rabbi_jamie_korngolds_god_in_the_wilderness/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/god_takes_a_hike_rabbi_jamie_korngolds_god_in_the_wilderness/C132/L39/ Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:03:00 MDT God in the Wilderness By Rabbi Jamie S. Korngold Three Leaves Press/Doubleday 160 pages, $11.95 On any given weekend in Boulder, the bike paths, hiking trails, and open spaces are filled with people who are not in church. Or are they? As Boulder's own "Adventure Rabbi," Jamie S. Korngold writes in God in the Wilderness: Rediscovering the Spirituality of the Great Outdoors with the Adventure Rabbi, many of her most powerful spiritual experiences have taken place outdoors, and she argues that she's not wrong to take nature as her temple, because Judaism (and by extension Christianity) was founded outdoors, in deserts, on mountaintops, and by rivers. Humanity has always experienced the awe that many associate with a feeling of communion with the divine amid the beauty and wonder of the wilderness; it was only relatively recently that worship was brought inside. Although Korngold writes from a Jewish perspective, her book contains ideas that are relevant to people of all religions, or those who lack one, but simply love to be outside. Rabbi Korngold will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover in LoDo on April 23 (7:30 p.m.). She'll visit the Boulder Book Store on June 19 (7:30 p.m.). http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/old_and_new_montana_clash_in_accomplished_jackalope_dreams/C132/L39/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/old_and_new_montana_clash_in_accomplished_jackalope_dreams/C132/L39/ Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:00:00 MDT Jackalope Dreams by Mary Clearman Blew University of Nebraska Press 390 pages, $24.95 "She's what, in her late fifties, and that's the kind estimate," begins Montana native and University of Idaho professor Mary Clearman Blew's engrossing new novel, Jackalope Dreams, introducing the reader to its uncommon protagonist, Corey Henry. Corey is a lifelong horsewoman, the only child of the legendary rancher/rodeo champion Loren Henry, and a spinster schoolteacher in the central Montana countryside near Fort Maginnis. As we join Corey, school has just let out not only for summer, but in the immortal words of Alice Cooper, school's out forever, because a wealthy man from California named Hailey Doggett has moved in, building a 1.5 million dollar house and bringing his daughters, spaced out wife, and creepy brother along. Many changes are afoot in Blew's rural Montana, where new-moneyed outsiders buy up land for its beauty while old pioneering ranchers fade away or succumb to foreclosure. Mary Clearman Blew will read from Jackalope Dreams at Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton on April 23 at 7 p.m.