New West Book Review

Lights on a Ground of Darkness
by Ted Kooser
University of Nebraska Press, 60 pages, $10.95

Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, popular essayist, former United States Poet Laureate, and proud Nebraska citizen, has reached the stage in his career where he can publish anything he wishes to, whether or not it fits into a standard category.  And that’s a lucky thing for readers, because it’s difficult to know what to call his Lights on a Ground of Darkness—a novella-length memoir, maybe?—but it’s a wonderful little book, studded with insights and arresting images about Kooser’s mother’s family, German-Americans who lived in the little town of Guttenberg, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi.  The prose is so full of sensory detail that it transports the reader to this simpler time and place, where the social highlight of a summer week was a lively neighborhood pinochle game on the screened porch.

In the preface, Kooser elegantly describes the dilemma of a writer who wants to record a family history: “This is a book I put off writing for more than fifty years because I wanted it to be perfect, which it is not and could never be.  In almost every family there is someone like me who desperately wants to write such a story and is forever kept from it by fear of failure.” Kooser finally wrote this story in 1997, when his mother was dying.  “She was the last living member of her family, and before she was gone I wanted to show her how much I had loved them,” Kooser writes.  She was pleased with the story, and Kooser first published it in the Great River Review. 

New West Book Review

The Journal of Antonio Montoya
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 214 pages, $15.95

This month Unbridled Books reprinted Rick Collignon’s The Journal of Antonio Montoya, first published in 1996. Antonio Montoya was the first of Collignon’s four novels set in the New Mexico town of Guadalupe, and it establishes this traditional, insular, and unchanging desert place through the story of Ramona Montoya, an artist who tried to leave it behind.  It’s a contemplative, gently humorous novel, and reading it is an experience that fills one pleasantly, like the nourishing food that Ramona’s resurrected grandmother cooks throughout the book.

As a young woman, Ramona moved away, but the people of Guadalupe seem to be like plants that can’t take root outside of their native ground, and she returned in mid-life after she inherited her grandparents’ old adobe, which she suspects is “turning back to dirt.” Oddly for Guadalupe, Ramona lives alone, passing the days painting pictures of the town, until her brother and sister-in-law are killed in a car collision with a cow, leaving their son José orphaned.  José is to live with his mother’s relatives, but then his mother, Loretta, sits up in her coffin at her funeral and asks Ramona to raise José.

Western Book Roundup

One of my fellow ex-Rocky Mountain News book reviewers, Dan Danbom, recently wrote in an email, "Now, instead of reviewing books, I've decided that a fast route to famine is to try to sell them." Along with his business partner, Nancy Stevens, this week the intrepid Danbom opened a new bookstore in Denver, Printed Page Bookshop, at 1416 S. Broadway. The shop is in a Victorian house, and features contemporary and vintage books. Printed Page's tagline: "Ask about our books on paper." Danbom notes that they will be "defiant and antiquated to the very end!"

To celebrate its opening, Printed Page will display a special exhibit of 50 banned books, and they invite patrons to guess which book among them has "never been the target of censorship on political, religious, social or sexual grounds." Four people who guess the right answer will win a shopping spree at the bookshop.

Christopher Cokinos, Utah State University professor and author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in honor of the annual Perseid meteor shower. In "Dust in the (Cosmic) Wind," he writes explains that "meteor showers are really comet dust" and that tiny particles of space dust filtering down to earth add a little extra crunch to everyone's vegetables: "As Donald Brownlee, an astronomer at the University of Washington who studies cosmic dust particles, has noted, 'If you had lettuce for lunch, you probably ate a few.'"

Also in the Roundup: Events for Margot Mifflin and David Knibb, a new Reading the West selection, and New West's Books & Writers page is now available on the Kindle. (Is it "the" Kindle?) [more]

New West Young Readers Book Review

Wild Horse Creek: The Mystery Stallion
by Sharon Siamon
Walrus Books, 123 pages, ages 9-12, $8.95

A few weeks ago I was at The Bookworm in Boulder and a ten-year-old girl in riding clothes came in with her mother, looking for novels with horses in them. She'd read the classics: Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and The Black Stallion by Walter Farley and its sequels. I overheard and suggested Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry—I found Henry's books in the library one summer, big square volumes with horse head portraits on the front, and read them all back-to-back.

The girl had too, but horse-loving girls are perennial, so there are plenty of contemporary horse books for young readers, and the girl and her mother went off to look for the many books with horses or horseshoes on their spines. There's the Wild Horse Island and Phantom Stallion series by Terri Farley (who isn't related to Walter Farley), the Thoroughbred series by Joanna Campbell (who, incidentally, also writes adult romances under the name Jo Ann Simon) and the Heartland and Chestnut Hill series by Lauren Brooke, the former of which has been made into a Canadian television series, and latter of which looks very East-Coast-prep-school-ish, with a crest on the cover of every title.

Canadian author Sharon Siamon works with Western settings in her Mustang Mountain books, set in the Canadian Rockies, and the new Wild Horse Creek series, set in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The first book in the series, The Mystery Stallion gets off to a lively start with its heroines, twin sisters Sophie and Liv, leaving their Vancouver home to visit their grandparents' Arizona ranch and encountering just about every danger the desert has to offer: rattlesnakes, rampaging javelinas, aggressive mustangs, baking sun, flash floods in the arroyos and even water rights squabbles. [more]

New West Book Review

The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman
by Margot Mifflin
University of Nebraska Press
261 pages, $24.95

The picture of Olive Oatman on the cover of Margot Mifflin's The Blue Tattoo is arresting: a dark-haired, beautiful woman, covered from neck to wrists to the floor in an elaborate Victorian-era dress stares forward, wearing a Mohave chin tattoo. Mifflin does a careful job of reconstructing the fascinating story behind how this woman came to wear that tattoo, ascertaining the most accurate possible accounting of the 1851 murder of Oatman's family near Yuma, Arizona, her captivity by a band of Yavapai Indians, her sale to the Mohaves, and Oatman's eventual return to white society.

This story riveted Olive Oatman's contemporaries, and has been told by many, beginning with Royal B. Stratton's 1857 bestseller, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, "the biography he ghostwrote for [Olive]," adding plenty of his own interpretation and embellishment of her experience. As Mifflin writes, Olive Oatman's story "was the subject of a 1965 episode of Death Valley Days (starring Ronald Reagan), an Elmore Leonard story, two novels, and four children's books, including a Christian title sold with a collectible Oatman figurine."

Mifflin sets out to separate as best she can the fact from the fiction, trying to deduce from what is known of Mohave culture at that time what Oatman's life may have really been like. Although in the ghostwritten biography, Olive Oatman disparaged the Mohave culture (though not her adoptive family) in order to fit back into white society, Mifflin finds plenty of evidence to suggest that Olive was happily living with the tribe, willingly accepted the tattoo, and neglected some opportunities to make her situation known to white people the tribe encountered. [more]

‘EXTINCTION WHILE WE WATCH’

Grizzlies are one of the most iconic of the endangered species that have all but vanished from the American West. Efforts to bring them back, though, have been dogged by their reputation for eating humans, a trait that has made them even less popular than wolves as government biologists have fought to help the species regain some of its lost ground.

Even hikers, who tend to be among the most conservation-minded among forest users, have balked at the idea of sharing more hiking trails with more grizzlies.

The grizzly arguably has been affected more by the Bush administration’s war on the environment than any other forest dweller. It was Interior Secretary Gale Norton who scuttled plans to boost the bear population in the Bitterroots, effectively ending augmentation plans anywhere else. But the contention over grizzlies, and the collisions between science and politics goes back long before that.

Author David Knibb tells the tale in his book Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight Over the Great Bear. Plenty of other species have suffered at the hands of human expansion across the continent. Some have disappeared altogether. Few, though, spark the imagination, or for some, the hatred, that the grizzly does. [more]

New West Classic Essay

The Pass
by Thomas Savage
Riverbend Publishing, 335 pages, $12.95

I'd never heard of Thomas Savage until I came across Riverbend Publishing and the Drumlummon Institute's recent reprint of 1944's The Pass, and after falling into this beautiful, multi-layered, funny, heart-wrenching novel of the Montana prairie, I'm kicking myself for not reading his books sooner. Savage was the author of thirteen novels. Born in Utah in 1915, he grew up in Horse Prairie, Montana and Lemhi, Idaho, spent brief stints in Missoula and Portland, Ore., then lived most of the rest of his life on the east coast until his death in 2003. But like Willa Cather, he set much of his fiction in the West where he grew up, and his first novel, 1944's The Pass, shares Cather's themes of the tight communities that form in isolated stretches of prairie and a reverence for the beauty of the open land coupled with a respect for the hardships that living there can bring. Annie Proulx is a Savage admirer; she wrote the afterword for a recent edition of his 1967 novel Power of the Dog, and describes The Pass in this way:

"Savage's first novel, The Pass, is shot through with the deepest kind of landscape description which utterly controls the destinies and fortunes of the ranchers and Scandinavian farmers who settle on the prairie adjacent to a formidable pass. The people of the place love it beyond reason, the blue autumnal haze, the grassland stretched out, and they relish testing themselves against spring storms and baking drought. The novel is studded with brilliant portraits that already display Savage's masterly ability to show the inner lives of characters, especially women, who are treated with a rare depth of understanding."
[more]

New West Book Review

Where the Money Went
by Kevin Canty
Nan A. Talese, 191 pages, $25

The title story of Missoula writer Kevin Canty's new collection Where the Money Went sets the tone and theme for the book, with its wry, sad-funny accounting of a busted-up marriage. "When the thing was over, Braxton sat down at the kitchen table of his apartment and tried to figure out what they had done with the money," it begins. In less than two pages, Canty provides a clear picture of this family that formed, consumed, and then dissolved, spending money on "cars, landscaping, clothes, vacations" on its way out of existence. Most of the stories revolve around a lonely male narrator who made a hash of some prior romantic relationship or is about to trash his current one. It would all be pretty depressing if Canty wasn't so funny.

"The Birthday Girl" serves as an example of Canty working at his best. It kicks off with a vivid, immediate start: "Saturday Night at the Sip 'n' Dip: Piano Pat is bellowing out her 35,000th rendition of 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' while the college boys and girls—home for Christmas, stuck in town till New Year's—suck mixed drinks off the piano-top bar and sing along. It's ten o'clock or ten-thirty and the snow is coming down like a freight train outside. I get a Daniel's ditch to go and take it back to the room, not without regret."

Kevin Canty will read from his new collection in Seattle at Elliot Bay Book Co. on August 4 (7:30 p.m.) and in Portland at Powell's on Hawthorne on August 6 (7:30 p.m.).
[more]

New West Book Review

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It
By Maile Meloy
Riverhead, 219 pages, $25.95

Some writers achieve their effect on the reader through surface finery: poetic frills, dazzling description, or a quirky voice. Maile Meloy doesn't go in for that sort of thing, which is why when she gets you by the throat or heart, as she does in every story in her second story collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, you never see it coming. The way a good seamstress hides her work by making her stitches neat on top and bottom, Meloy writes clean prose that seems like it must have been effortless to construct until after you've finished reading the story and you realize the psychological complexity of the tale she's told.

Meloy grew up in Helena, and many of the stories in this collection are set in Montana. Even when the stories occur in that sparsely populated state, Meloy skips the nature and zeroes in the people, portraying how they yearn for and torture one another when placed in close proximity. One of the best stories in the collection is the lead-off piece, "Travis, B.," about a young polio-stricken ranch hand named Chet Moran who "walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question." Shy because of his ailments, Chet takes lonesome jobs feeding livestock in winter, and he's working one such job in Glendive, near the North Dakota border, when he gets stir crazy and drives into town. He notices people going into the school building, so he follows them, where he finds a "tired and nervous" young woman named Beth Travis teaching an education law class.

Maile Meloy will appear in Missoula at the Montana Festival of the Book on October 22 at the Wilma Theater.
[more]

New West Book Review

Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now
By Robert Root
University of Oklahoma Press, $19.95, 306 pages

In Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now, Robert Root becomes a model “migrant flatlander” by making an adventure of his move to Colorado’s Front Range from central Michigan. Root’s wife takes on a new job in Denver, and he follows, but readers of this book will soon discover that its author isn’t content to sit around and do yard work in his retirement.

Instead, Root immerses himself in Colorado’s natural and literary history and sets out to explore his new surroundings including the state’s hiking trails, back roads, and high peaks. Root models his travels after those of bold British traveler Isabella Bird, who visited the Colorado Territory in 1873 and wrote about what she discovered in her classic travel narrative A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. [more]