New West Book Review

Nine Ten Again
by Phil Condon
Elixir Press, 186 pages, $17

Looking out the window each day at peaceful American streets, it’s difficult for many of us to tell that our country is at war.  But the characters in Missoula writer Phil Condon’s sharply-written new story collection, Nine Ten Again, are all too aware of the far-away wars that the U.S. has participated in over the past few decades, which have affected them in ways both tangible and intangible.  Yellow ribbons appear throughout the book not as symbols of hope but as symptoms of malignancy, signs of the wars that rob people of their lives, mental health, self-respect, and peace of mind.

Most of Condon’s characters work blue-collar jobs, and so they are not as insulated from war as are those with more money.  They are veterans too scarred by their service to hold down a job, or people desperate enough for money to contemplate signing up for a hitch as contractors in the Middle East.  As a character in the title story says, “She ain’t ever gonna be 9-10 again, boys.”

Phil Condon will read from his new book at Fact & Fiction in Missoula on Friday, September 25 (7 p.m.).

New West Book Review

In the Heart of the Canyon
By Elisabeth Hyde
Knopf, 336 pages, $22.95

In her latest novel, In the Heart of the Canyon, Colorado-based writer Elisabeth Hyde (The Abortionist’s Daughter) churns out an adventurous narrative that rumbles along like a white-water rapid.  In it, fifteen different people pile into three rubber rafts to run the biggest, most bad-ass river of their lives: the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River.  And for the next thirteen days, their fates are intertwined as they navigate this remote landscape and confront the rocky confines of their personal lives along the way. 

Expert river guide JT Maroney might have shown up at Lee’s Ferry with some idea of what to expect from the days that would follow.  This is his 125th trip through the Grand Canyon, and even though some elements of the journey remain the same each time, he can’t predict the particular quirks that will show up along with his guests who arrive on Day One, with “their skin pale and freshly shaved and smelling of sunscreen.”

New West Book Review

Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
by Helen Thorpe
Scribner, 387 pages, $27.99

Some readers will pick up Helen Thorpe‘s Just Like Us because it’s written by the wife of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.  But by the time they finish this moving, intelligent, and nuanced inquiry into the situation of illegal immigrants in contemporary America, they may begin to think of Hickenlooper as the husband of the writer Helen Thorpe.  Thorpe begins by plunging into the preparations for prom night of four engaging west Denver girls in April of 2004. 

Marisela is flamboyant, driven, “dramatic,” and wears “twice as much makeup as anybody else in her circle.” Yadira is strong and reserved and “never gave away anything important with her facial expressions.” Sensitive Clara usually dresses like a tomboy, and Elissa is a star athlete.  They are all eighteen, all top students at their Denver public high school, and each of their families immigrated from Mexico. 

While Clara has a green card and Elissa was born in the U.S., Marisela and Yadira remain illegal immigrants, born in Mexico but raised in the United States, with American ambitions and the skills to realize them, but with the host of insurmountable obstacles that living in this country without citizenship cause.  Simple privileges that their peers enjoy, such as getting a driver’s license, boarding an airplane, or qualifying for in-state tuition, are out of their reach.  When legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition in Colorado fails to pass, the girls manage to cobble together scholarships or funds from benefactors to go to college, and three of them decide to attend the University of Denver, while the fourth, Elissa, heads to Regis College in Denver.

Helen Thorpe will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on September 22 at 7:30 p.m.

New West Book Review

Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same
by Mattox Roesch
Unbridled Books, 317 pages, $15.95

Cesar, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Mattox Roesch‘s first novel, Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same, is badly in need of a change of scenery when the book opens.  Cesar has grown up in Los Angeles with his Eskimo mother and white father, and he and his older brother have joined Hispanic gangs.  “We were those chameleon kids who almost blended in but never quite did,” Cesar observes.  Cesar’s mother decides to leave his father and L.A. behind after his brother is sent to prison for murdering two 15-year-olds who were trying to leave his gang.  She moves with Cesar to the village she left twenty years earlier, Unalakleet, Alaska (the same village where Roesch currently lives with his family). 

Cesar is focused on earning enough money to return to L.A., but his cousin, the exuberant Go-boy, does everything he can to convince him to stay.  Through Cesar’s eyes, Roesch creates a richly detailed portrait of this town—from its plywood buildings, to its annual salmon counts, to a common malady known as “seal finger"—that is authentic and refreshingly unlike any typical depiction of Alaska.

Mattox Roesch will read from his novel in Portland, Oreg. at Annie Bloom’s books on Thursday, September 10 (7:30 p.m.), and he’ll appear at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association tradeshow the following day. Roesch will read at Neptune Coffee in Seattle on September 17 (7 p.m.) and at Village Books in Bellingham, Wash. on September 18 (7 p.m.).

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]