New West Book Review

Kevin Desinger‘s debut novel, The Descent of Man (Unbridled Books, 272 pages, $24.95), jumps off to a brisk start when a forty-year-old man named Jim wakes up in the middle of the night and looks out his bedroom window to see two men attempting to steal his Camry. His wife Marla tells him to call the cops, but instead he heads outside to try to foil the theft. He observes them for a moment, then, as Desinger writes, “something in the Camry broke off with a loud snap, and one of the car thieves swore. At the same time something in me snapped too.” Jim, a mild-mannered man suddenly filled with rage, hops into the men’s truck, drives it down the road into a ditch, and beats it with a galvanized pipe. Jim can’t account for his own actions, and begins to craft a series of lies to cover up what he did from Marla and the police.

Kevin Desinger will discuss The Descent of Man in Portland at Powell’s on May 3 (7:30 p.m.), Woodstock Wine & Deli on May 7 (7:30 p.m.), and Broadway Books on May 10 (7:30 p.m.).

New West Fiction

I can’t tell you whether the tunnel is in New Mexico or Arizona, but find the most lightly guarded stretch of the border and you’ll know you’re close.  Every night we escort a group across, sometimes as a many as fifty at a time.  We don’t ask for any information about who they are or where they’re from.  We take whoever shows up.  Once they arrive on the other side, we guide them to a hidden location where we have several nondescript vans waiting to take them into the interior.  We have yet to lose a single individual, although when we finally drop them off they’re on their own.  I’ve never been a believer in borders.  They’re just imaginary lines, the location of which is usually an accident of history.  If borders exist, they exist for one reason and that is to be crossed. 

What prompted me to take my unconventional opinions and turn them into action was an email I got from my brother Curtis saying he was getting out of the heavy equipment business.  He had been in an accident not long before so I wasn’t surprised.  I asked if I could use his tunneling machine before he sold it and he said yes. Not only that, but as soon as he was feeling better, he’d bring it here himself and stay to help. 

The particular model he owns is a Raycor/Voss with tungsten-carbide blades and four 250 horsepower motors capable of producing 159,00 foot/pounds of torque.  Before Curtis brought it here, he used it to dig utility tunnels in places where it wasn’t feasible to dig an open trench, such as under an existing building or under a freeway that can’t easily be torn up.  It’s all done by remote control. 

New West Poetry

New West closes out National Poetry Month with two poems by Katie Phillips, whose Driving Montana, Alone won the 2010 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Phillips grew up in Maryland and Colorado and lived in Montana before moving to a suburb of Chicago. She has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Iowa and feels fortunate that she can walk to work with her dog, Sasha. Her poems have been published in the Cider Press Review, the Raintown Review, the White Pelican Review, and elsewhere. Driving Montana, Alone is illustrated by several of Phillips’ photographs of Montana, and the title poem was recently featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Moab

I can see myself
growing lonely at the corner
of Uranium and Main.

Western Book Roundup

Deanne Stillman‘s Mustang continues to find new audiences off the page. According to Hollywood Reporter, actress Wendie Malick will star as Velma Johnston in the movie “Wild Horse Annie,” in development for summer 2012 for the Hallmark Channel. Kimberly Nordyke writes:

“The movie is being adapted from a portion of Deanne Stillman’s epic book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. It centers on the late Velma Johnston, a leading animal rights activist who campaigned to protect America’s wild horses. Her quest culminated in the U.S. Congress’ passing the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971.”

Also in the Roundup: A new story by Thomas McGuane in The New Yorker, Boulder writer Florence Williams is a finalist for a prestigious award, the busy career of Boulder scholar Adam Bradley, and the Colorado Book Award finalists and Oregon Book Award winners are announced.

New West Book Review

Claudia Sternbach’s moving memoir Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses (Unbridled Books, 224 pages, $12.95) is composed of essays about the memorable kisses in her life. It’s a clever concept, but what makes this book so easy to love is its offbeat execution of this idea—you never quite know how the kiss will turn up in the stories. Will it be a comforting kiss, an ominous kiss, a romantic kiss, or a missed kiss?  Sternbach has written newspaper columns for many years, and her breezy prose has a natural, effortless quality that is surely the result of great care.

One of the strengths of Reading Lips is Sternbach’s ability to capture the evolution of her thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions at each age. The voice is recognizably the same, but in the early chapters the details convey the quirky viewpoints of a child’s perception, free of the rote language adults use to describe common objects and experiences, like this moment from a visit to her mother’s office: “She showed us her desk, stacked with papers and in and out boxes. And the machine she used to do all of the adding and subtracting. She showed us how it worked. I liked the sound it made. Noisier than a typewriter. A fatter noise.”

Mouthful of Feathers Feature

Green arrives more suddenly than brown, I have decided.

A month ago, I was in southwestern Missouri buying fast-walking horses that will keep up with my bird dogs this fall. One day it rained, the kind of rain that pounds the land like an old showerhead in a fleabag motel stings your skin after a long day afield.

The next morning, it was spring. Green. The horses ate at the young grass as if they were starving. And green was on the land. We loaded our new horses into the trailer and headed out, watching the green fade from the land as we chased longitude westward, into the flat platter that is western Kansas and southeastern Colorado. The diesel outran the green, but still it came, as steadily and as consistently as a truly-talented young bird dog figures it out in his second year.

And so the green is here and yet I think about when it will leave. It will be more subtle, more of a fade than a swell of color, more of a wither than a burst. It will wane slowly in this country starting in late summer, when hoppers ratchet from baked fields.

New West Essay

My wife and I met Greg Mortenson sometime in the early 90s, long before he was famous or the Bozeman-based Central Asia Institute had any financial legs.  He had come to Ketchum, Idaho, to tell his story and raise funds for girls’ schools in Pakistan. As I recall, his presentation at the Community Center consisted of a modest slide show about how he tried to climb K2, was befriended by local villagers after his failure, saw the crying need for education there and decided to launch a school building effort. At the conclusion of the meeting, Jean Hoerni, the wealthy Silicon Valley transistor pioneer and Greg’s early financial backer, made a brief appeal for support.

Having just returned from an extensive trek in remote areas of Nepal, my wife and I needed no convincing that education, particularly education of young girls regularly sold off into virtual slavery and worse, was a crying need in that part of the world.  Along with others at the meeting, we wrote Greg a modest check on the spot, all of $40.

What impressed us was what Greg said he could do with that check—employ a full-time teacher for a month.  And although we had no way to check out the veracity of his claim, we were hardly betting the farm.

New West Fiction

Cal was an angel of death. He noticed before anyone else that his private jinx hovered over all, visible as the sky’s lupine blue or the cloud of dust behind a duelly on gravel. Sooner or later, someone was bound to see it. At the Dairy Queen, the AgriNeeds store, the grain elevator, someone would sidle by and slyly let loose: “Calvin, why is it that every time I see you at a rodeo, some kind of livestock gives up the ghost?”

He had asked himself the same question.

At the Lincoln show, a pale dun gelding backed into the start corner and promptly had a heart attack, collapsing, grounded, stone dead. The team roper was a young cowboy who worried his black Stetson, shedding real tears, wandering at a loss saying, “It wasn’t even mine. I just borrowed him. He wasn’t even my own damn horse.” That one shook even the wranglers, stoic by nature. It took Cal and five others to walk the stiff alabaster steed to a flatbed and heft it like a salt block, a feedsack.

The previous July, in East Helena, the count had begun: one brindle steer, one calf, two Brahma bulls all hauled away by backhoe in the same night. The calf died a moron after a horse stepped on its neck artery and severed connections between blood and brain. It swooned. The last bull lost was an honest-to-god tragedy, its leg swinging free after it ran its cocky rider into the fence. Inflicting its own demise, the flat-faced beast circled with steroid surge, mindless of ruin. It wore the visage of a man who’d shot himself in the temple but missed somehow and had gone on raging.

New West Book Review

Jackson Hole residents share this trait with comic-book superheroes: their origin stories tend to be more interesting than their immediate circumstances. That may be why the bulk of Tim Sandlin’s new book, Lydia (Sourcebooks Landmark, 432 pages, $24.99), rests on a centenarian’s life-tale, while the arc compelling the novel rides on a Gotham City street-level villain with the determination of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men. The title character connects these storylines in the narrator’s quest to understand human behavior.

“Why do we treat those we love so much worse than those we don’t like?” the narrator, Sam, writes. “Lydia would starve before not tipping a waitress. She’d go back home if the alternative was parking in a handicapped slot, yet she lied to and browbeat the family she loved.”

Tim Sandlin will visit several regional bookstores, including Valley Bookstore in Jackson (April 23, 7 p.m.), Boulder Book Store (April 25, 7:30 p.m.) Barnes & Noble stores in Fort Collins (April 26, 7 p.m.) and Colorado Springs (April 27, 7 p.m.), Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, April 28, 7:30 p.m.), and Cheyenne’s Barnes & Noble (April 29, 7 p.m.).

Western Book Roundup

Sometimes we journalists have to go into some pretty harrowing situations to investigate our stories. Take Ted Conover, who has become a train-hopping hobo, served a stint as a prison guard at Sing Sing, trekked with Mexican migrants, hung out with icky shallow Aspen people, and traversed some of the world’s most dangerous roads.

My assignment last Thursday took me to the Evil Companions Literary Award celebration at the Oxford Hotel in Denver, honoring Denver-raised Conover, and benefiting the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation. Like Conover, I wanted to embed myself in this unfamiliar world, try to fit in, and find out what I could learn. The ballroom was packed with a sold-out crowd of stylish, bookish people, and the open bar was serving a martini called the Sing Sing Sling. For research, I sampled several of them. I met a nice woman who told me that Ted Conover used to baby-sit for her children. I also met a pair of lovely geneticists from the University of Colorado who drank with me and geeked out over our mutual past participation in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s paleontology certification program. We all wished we had been able to drop everything and go on that mastodon dig in Snowmass. Sigh.

Also in the Roundup: Colorado connections to this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, and several observers question the truth of Three Cups of Tea by Bozeman’s Greg Mortenson.