NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW
Animals Seen Through Childs’ Eyes
Author Craig Childs has a gift for making even the mundane seem profoundly significant. He also has a penchant for seeking out outdoor experiences that are anything but mundane. The combination makes for writing that is gripping and poetic. With one hiking boot in adventure writing, another in naturalist essay, his latest book, The Animal Dialogues, includes some of Child’s most moving prose.
Childs’ natural habitat is the wild. Usually that’s the desert Southwest (even though it’s southern Colorado that he calls home), but his adventures recalled here have taken him far afield. The Animal Dialogues brings us along with him for encounters with predators and prey, including some that most of us would either die to have or die while we were having them.
These aren’t stories that reduce the animal kingdom to fuzzy cartoon critters. Nor do they raise animals to some sort of divinity, despite Childs’ obvious reverence. He tries to steer clear of anthropomorphism, and when he indulges, he acknowledges it. Yet it’s impossible to steer clear of it completely. The premise at the heart of this essay collection is the lessons that we can learn from the animal world. How can we learn from them if we don’t see a little of ourselves in them?
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New West Book Review
Desert Solitude: Amy Irvine’s “Trespass”
Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land
By Amy Irvine
North Point Press
361 pages, $25
Utah native Amy Irvine's first book Trespass: Living At The Edge of The Promised Land is an unusual hybrid that combines memoir, natural history, Western history, anthropology, and an examination of the Mormon religion. Irvine, who now lives in Colorado, writes with authority about all of these subjects, though sometimes the transitions between so many topics within a particular chapter can be dizzying. Luckily, her clear, detailed prose will help ground readers as they try to keep up with the leaps of her fertile mind.
Irvine will appear tonight in Park City at Dolly's Bookstore (6 p.m.), March 1 in Moab at Back of Beyond Books (7 p.m.), March 8 in Santa Fe at Garcia Street Books (4:30 p.m.), and March 18 in Denver at the LoDo Tattered Cover (7:30 p.m.), as well as in other regional bookstores.
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New West Book Review
Dagoberto Gilb’s “The Flowers”
The Flowers
by Dagoberto Gilb
Grove Press
250 pages, $24
With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life. Although Gilb's story alights on all kinds of touchy topics—racism, illegal immigration, women's roles, sex, and drugs—he never lectures. Instead, he creates a complex tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about. Gilb's narrator, a 15-year-old Mexican-American named Sonny Bravo, speaks in a distinctive patois that mixes in the lax English grammar of teenagers ("anyways"), Spanish ("Qué guapo es my little man!"), and even some French, which Sonny is studying as a lark. The result is an inventive language that sounds like that of today's YouTubed American youth.
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New West Book Review
“Valentines” from Ted Kooser with Love
Valentines: Poems
By Ted Kooser
University of Nebraska Press
47 pages, $14.95
It's Valentine's Day, and I am jealous. Since 1986, the poet Ted Kooser has been sending women original poems printed on postcards that arrived faithfully every February 14th, his mailing list eventually growing to 2,600 souls, and I was not among them. Sigh. My Valentine shoebox, stenciled with my name, decorated with pink hearts, rested empty for want of these poems. In the introduction to Valentines, Kooser writes that on the first year of this project, he sent a poem to 50 women, and notes that "my wife, Kathleen, didn't seem to mind, and she's tolerated this foolishness of mine every year since, as the list grew and grew. She's not only a good sport; she also knows that though I'm a flirt, I'm pretty much a harmless geezer…" Kooser was forced to conclude his Valentine poem project in 2007, when the costs of postage and printing became prohibitive.
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Western Classic Essay
“True Grit” Turns Forty
True Grit
By Charles Portis
The Overlook Press
224 pages, $14.95
The Overlook Press recently reissued Charles Portis's classic novel, True Grit, in honor of its fortieth anniversary, and the irresistible voice of Mattie Ross rings as clear today as it must have in 1968. "People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day," the book begins. Although the novel was hailed when it first came out, it has gone in and out of print over the years. In her afterward, Donna Tartt attributes the novel's vanishing "from the public eye" to "the John Wayne film, which is good enough but which doesn't do the book justice."
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New West Book Review
Minute Montana: Kathe LeSage’s “One Woman’s Montana”
One Woman's Montana: Photographs
By Kathe LeSage
Riverbend Publishing
80 pages, $24.95
Photographer Kathe LeSage grew up in Great Falls and Bozeman, currently lives near Wolf Creek, and for her first book she stuck close to home, capturing intimate, contemplative images of the landscape, people, flora, and fauna of Montana. LeSage, who has been taking photos professionally for over three decades, writes in the preface to One Woman's Montana that early on she came to understand "that where attention is placed, creation occurs." She decided to place her attention on "beauty, harmony, joy, balance—love," and her photographs bear this philosophy out, as they are often tightly focused on small details that could have been overlooked in a more traditional emphasis on Montana's vastness as its chief beauty.
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New West Theater Review
“Plainsong” Sings at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts
Eric Schmiedl's excellent stage adaptation of Kent Haruf's beloved 1999 novel Plainsong premiered last week at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, opening with townspeople introducing the high school teacher Tom Guthrie against a 65-foot backdrop of the eastern Colorado plains.
"Plainsong" brings the fictional town of Holt to life, with 21 actors performing 36 roles, and the set changes seamlessly between 46 scenes, from the high school to The Chute bar to the American Legion to the kitchens and ranches where Holt's individual dramas take place. The play's elemental themes, rich humor, nuanced characters, and appeal to a wide audience should give it a long life beyond its Denver opening.
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Introducing...
A New Magazine: The New West
Driving past most any Western city these days is a little like watching those time-lapse films back in grade school. Empty fields become bulldozed lots become framed houses become finished homes with trucks in the driveway and new grass in the yard.
It’s a time of dramatic change in the Mountain West. And I’m excited to say that we at NewWest.Net are now launching a quarterly print magazine to help us tell the big story of growth and change in the region.
The best way to check out our magazine is to subscribe. We want to know who’s interested in The New West, so we have made the magazine available free to qualified subscribers who answer a short questionnaire.
We’d love to hear your input and feedback on our new venture. Comments? Criticism? Story ideas? I’d love to hear them. You can email me at . And click “more” below for the full announcement.
[more]New West Book Review
There Will Be Blood: Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh”
Refresh, Refresh
By Benjamin Percy
Graywolf Press
249 pages, $15
Central Oregon native Benjamin Percy is a 28-year-old writer who created a stir among short story fans when his "Refresh, Refresh," won the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review and earned a spot in the Best American Short Stories 2006. That year's guest editor, Ann Patchett, called it "the story of 2006." Set in Oregon's Deschutes County, its searing authenticity, brutal energy, and pitch-perfect dramatization of the impact of the Iraq war on communities that are losing their fathers to combat make it a tale that should be reprinted in anthologies for years to come. But was it beginner's luck? Not exactly. Percy may be young, but he's already a prolific writer with two collections, the second of which, Refresh, Refresh, was recently published by Graywolf Press. The consistent quality of this book makes it clear that Percy has carefully honed his craft until his tales became so sharp that they cut. And bleed—every story in Refresh, Refresh unleashes a good deal of blood.
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New West Book Review
Hard Times: Rita Williams’ “If The Creek Don’t Rise”
If The Creek Don't Rise
By Rita Williams
Harvest/Harcourt
322 pages, $14
I've spent almost my whole life in Colorado, and I was beginning to think I knew the place, until I read Rita Williams' riveting, richly-detailed memoir, If The Creek Don't Rise, which has added layers to my understanding of the state's recent history through telling the personal story of one Colorado native. As Williams explains, "few people, black or white, seemed to remember that African American Westerners had existed at all."
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