Reviews & Essays
New West Book Review
Peggy Shumaker’s “Just Breathe Normally”
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.
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New West Book Review
Cave Men: “Kartchner Caverns”
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.
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New West Book Review
Home on the Range: Laurie Wagner Buyer’s “Spring’s Edge”
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.
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New West Book Review
God Takes a Hike: Rabbi Jamie Korngold’s “God in the Wilderness”
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.).
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New West Book Review
Old and New Montana Clash in Accomplished “Jackalope Dreams”
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.
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New West Book Review
No Country for Old Women: “New Stories from the Southwest”
New Stories from the Southwest
Ed. D. Seth Horton
Swallow Press, 285 pages, $16.95
Swallow Press recently published the first edition of New Stories from the Southwest. This collection, which editor D. Seth Horton drew from stories that appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in 2007, is diverse and diverting, including a variety of writing styles, taking place in Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas and the southern parts of Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and California. The thirsty, dusty landscape is a common feature, and some familiar Southwest icons turn up. It may be just a coincidence unrelated to the southwest setting of these stories, but many of them feature ailing or dead mothers, wives, and grandmothers.
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New West Book Review
“My Montana”: One Woman’s History
My Montana: A History and Memoir, 1930 – 1950
by Jewel Beck Lansing
Ink Water Press
258 pages, $22.95
In My Montana: A History and Memoir, 1930 - 1950, Jewel Beck Lansing, an Oregon-based writer, tells the story of her family, the Becks, who farmed like the rest of their neighbors in Round Butte on the Flathead Indian Reservation, but also owned the Beck General Store and the attached post office, making them one of the most influential families in their area. Despite the name of the land, the Becks were not Native Americans, nor were most of their neighbors. The government sold the “surplus” homesteads for cheap to Caucasians, yet Lansing never really says why.
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NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW & INTERVIEW
‘Ski the 14ers’: Photo Book Reaches New Heights
Skier Chris Davenport set out on an epic adventure. An Aspen, Colo., resident, Davenport dedicated himself to skiing all of Colorado’s Fourteeners – the 54 peaks topping out at over 14,000 feet – within a year. He would do it from their summits, or close to it, with free-skiing style.
For many, just climbing the Fourteeners in the comparatively balmy summer months is a long-term commitment. Others have skied them, but only one other has skied them all. Davenport did it in a year, and with aplomb.
He documents his journey photographically in his striking book Ski the 14ers. Just as Davenport pushed backcountry skiing to a new level, his work takes coffee table books dedicated to Colorado’s peaks to a new extreme. As he notes in his introduction, there’s nothing new about beautiful picture books of mountain landscapes. Davenport’s book, filled with photos shot by himself and his backcountry companions, exposes the mountains in their winter glory, or fury.
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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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