Books & Writers
New West Book Review
Rick Bass’s “Why I Came West”
Why I Came West: A Memoir
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin, 238 pages, $24
Rick Bass' new book Why I Came West is subtitled "A Memoir," but it's more of a cri de coeur. Bass spends a few pages discussing his life, explaining how he came to move to the remote Yaak Valley of northwest Montana after growing up in Houston, and devotes the rest of the book to a philosophical reflection on twenty years spent as an environmental activist. His goal, simply put, is that he wants "the last roadless lands in the Yaak Valley to be designated as wilderness."
Although he thought this was a fairly modest aim when his quest began, he met vehement opposition or indifference from his neighbors, logging interests, and politicians. Bass never could have predicted the course his life would take when he left his job as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi and drove with his eventual wife west and north until they hit his "beloved supple landscape with its velvet folds and curves," a valley in which no species has gone extinct since the last ice age.
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book review
A Perspective on the Russian Experience with Wolves
In 1965 an American working for the National Security Agency as a Russian linguist picked up a copy of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. Instead of a new found appreciation for the contentious canids, as Mowat’s book generated for so many of his generation, Will Graves found the book didn’t mesh with what he knew from 14 years of reading about wolves in Russia.
“His book is fiction,” Graves said Thursday over coffee in Missoula, taking particular aim at Mowat’s claim that in the far north rodents and small game comprise substantial parts of a wolf’s diet.
Alarmed by not just Mowat’s book, but what Graves perceived to be a trend of often inaccurate and misleading pro-wolf Western literature, Graves decided to set the record straight with a book of his own. Over the next 42 years, he meticulously clipped Russian-language news reports, translated popular and scientific articles, joined preeminent Russian biologists at international conferences on wolves, and traveled and talked with Russian biologists, game managers and hunters about the Russian experience with wolves.
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New West Books Feature
Summer Books for the Western Reader
Summer is half over, but there's still plenty of time to fit in some reading. Here's a selection of some of my favorite books that I've reviewed for New West so far this year—I've picked a collection of short fiction, a book of photography and prose, a novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction narrative. Click the links to read longer reviews and interviews with the authors. Happy reading, and let me know what you think.
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Western Book Roundup
Denver Book Burglar Sentenced
Last year I mentioned the arrest of the Denver booknapper, Thomas Pilaar, who checked out about 1,400 books and DVDs from Denver-area libraries and attempted to sell them online. Pilaar pleaded guilty to theft and last week was sentenced to "10 years in prison and ordered to pay $53,549 of restitution," according to Tille Fong of the Rocky Mountain News. During the year between his arrest and his sentencing, it seems that the formerly moustached Pilaar took the time to further cultivate his facial hair.
I can't think of a way to segue gracefully into the non-felon portion of today's Roundup, so I guess I'll just proceed: Steven Wingate emailed to point out a new book deal for a fellow Colorado writer, Irene Vilar. Matthew Thornton of Publishers Weekly reported that Vilar recently sold her memoir Impossible Motherhood to Other Press.
Also in the Roundup: David Wroblewski's continued success and Albuquerque's Cary Herz is honored.
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New West Book Review
Ron McLarty’s “Art in America”
Art in America
By Ron McLarty
Viking Penguin, 366 pages, $25.95
Ron McLarty's new comic novel Art in America begins by listing the "Selected Works" of its protagonist, Steven Kearney, a 48-year-old writer who, despite decades of diligent work, has never published a book or seen one of his plays produced. All his novels are epic in scope, topping 1000 pages, and his plays are equally ambitious and lengthy.
As the book opens in New York, Kearney has just lost his girlfriend and his apartment and a car grazes him as he lugs his collected works in two trash bags over to the apartment of his best friend Roarke, a lesbian theater director. A reprieve comes for Kearney in the form of an invitation to spend the summer in Creedemore, Colorado (a fictional town in the San Luis Valley that resembles Creede), where he will write and produce a play about the history of the town.
Ron McLarty will discuss Art in America at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on Wednesday, July 16 at 7:30 p.m.
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Book Excerpt
We Shouldn’t Exist: Preliminary Notes from No Man’s Land
The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published this month by AK Press. Edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, Red State Rebels is a collection of essays by people who hail from predominantly conservative states but consider themselves "political progressives."
We are not supposed to exist. According to the political Steinberg map of the nation, we come from no man's land, fly-over country, the unredeemable middle, where political progressives are as rare as a Hooters in Provo, Utah. We are children of the wasteland. The rural outback. Where folks carry guns and use them. Where fenced compounds and utopian communes exist side-by-side with a cyanide heap-leach gold mine. Out here cell phones don't work. Not yet, anyway. And some of us would like to keep it that way.
Frank grew up on the wheated plains of eastern Montana. St. Clair hails from the humid cornfields of central Indiana. These states span the glaciated heart of the continent, a region carved and ground-smooth by the weight of ice. From a distance, the terrain of the Great Plains appears homogenous.
From a distance so do its politics and demographics. You must look closer to discover the diversity, the radical nuances.
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Western Book Roundup
Nonprofit Bookstore Opens in Bend and New Missoula Lit Mag Launches
Idealistic optimism in the book world is not dead: David Jasper of the Bend Bulletin reported that Kilns Bookstore, a nonprofit enterprise, opened in Bend over the holiday weekend. (Via Shelf Awareness.) Jasper writes, "The opening comes just more than a month after The Book Barn, a 35-year-old shop in nearby downtown, closed due to declining sales and stiff competition from online retailers such as Amazon."
Rick Bass recently reviewed Stephen Trimble's new book, Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America for the Boston Globe.
Denise Hill at the NewPages blog noted the arrival of the premier issue of a new literary magazine called The Oval, published by University of Montana undergraduates.
Also in the Roundup: the Virginia Quarterly Review publishes a new story by a Casper author, the Colorado Book Award finalists are announced, and Denver's David Sirota tours.
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New West Book Review
Lonely Hearts: Steven Wingate’s “Wifeshopping”
Wifeshopping
By Steven Wingate
Houghton Mifflin, 208 pages, $12.95
The men in Steven Wingate's engrossing, entertaining debut story collection Wifeshopping are looking not just for love, but for marriage. They're not adverse to commitment, but they are particular, seeking the ideal woman for whom to forsake their days of youthful flings. This ultimate woman never quite materializes for Wingate's protagonists, who reject their girlfriends and fiancées because they don't like used clothes or don't agree that they should get rid of a stranger's mementos found buried in the backyard. But more often, their women reject them for being too pompous, for proposing marriage too early or for trying to rush them out of their rituals of mourning for past loves. Wingate, who lives in Lafayette, Colo. and teaches at the University of Colorado, sets his stories across the country, from Denver to Thermopolis, Wyo., to Rockport, Mass., to Miami (and vividly evokes each of these varied settings), but the problems that plague his characters are the same everywhere—they're not-quite-perfect guys trying to create something lasting and meaningful with not-quite-perfect women.
Steven Wingate will discuss his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 30 at 7:30 p.m., and at Poor Richard's Bookstore in Colorado Springs on August 7 at 5 p.m.
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New West Book Review & Interview
Carl Haywood’s Innovative Take on Explorer David Thompson
Canadian David Thompson is considered by some to be one of the shrewdest explorer-mapmakers to ever chart or trek a course. Following quickly on the heels of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Thompson is widely credited as being the first person to set up a commercial trading post in Montana, a northwestern business venture called Saleesh House. Several opinions have always existed relating to the post’s precise location.
Shunning foregone historical conclusions, Carl Haywood, author of Sometimes Only Horses to Eat ($24.95, Stoneydale Press), has not only raised serious questions about Thompson’s travels in northwestern Montana, but he has offered new interpretations of his own that certainly command confutation.
Carl Haywood will discuss his book at David Thompson Days in Thompson Falls, Mont. on July 4-5, at the Libby Public Library in Libby, Mont. on July 14 (7 p.m.), at The Corner Bookstore in Sandpoint, Idaho on July 19 (1 p.m.), and information on his other regional appearances is available on his website.
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Western Book Roundup
Krakauer Delays Book, CutBank Takes on the World, and Bigfoot Field Guide is Announced
Best-selling Boulder author Jon Krakauer has withdrawn the manuscript for Hero, his book about Pat Tillman, according to Publishers Weekly (Via Slushpile.Net). Rachel Deahl writes that Doubleday had scheduled the book for an October release with a first printing of half a million copies.
Denise Hill at the always informative NewPages blog pointed out Ahmede Hussain's interview with Brian Kevin, Managing Editor of the University of Montana's CutBank. The interview ran in The Daily Star, which Hill says is "Bangladesh's largest circulating English-language newspaper." And according to Hussain, CutBank is "America's foremost literary magazine."
Also in the Roundup: Bigfoot spotted at the bookstore.
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