Book Review

Book Review: Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

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Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness By Amy Irvine Torrey House Press & Back of Beyond Books ISBN: 978-1-937226-97-8 $11.95; 89pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel Last year, a 50th anniversary edition of Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” was planned, with Amy Irvine providing its introduction. Irvine is the author of 2008’s, “Trespass: Living …

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Book Review: Naked for Tea

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By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ISBN: 978-1-77349-016-8 $19.95; 114pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel At the bottom of the menu board for the hospital kitchen where I work, is a place for “Quote of the Day.” It’s an odd week without any quote by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Trommer has been an integral part of Colorado poetry …

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Book Review: Bricks Underneath A Hoop Skirt

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By Carolyn White Liferich Publishing 2018 ISB 978-1-4897-1637-8(sc) 101 pages Reviewed by Forrest Whitman When I picked up this book I was immediately skeptical. A book about a young woman working with horses in the backcountry sounded like another “girl meets horse” story. Not so this one. White has an understated, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, style. Her …

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Book Review: Brayed Expectations

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By John C. Mattingly; Judith Penrose Mattingly, illustrations ISBN: 978-0-9710430-7-7 Morris Publishing, 2017 $10.00; 97pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel Readers of Colorado Central are likely already familiar with Mattingly, since he’s a featured columnist. His latest book, Brayed Expectations, is a collection of brief tales and essays about donkeys. The majority of them are …

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Book Review – Principles of Flight: Flying Bush Planes Through a World of War, Sexism, and Meat

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by Bill Hatcher Lantern Books, 274 pages ISBN 9781590565742 Reviewed by Martha Quillen Principles of Flight is a memoir and a treatise against war, sexism, religion, capitalism, militarism, government policies, and eating meat. It contains lots of geographic color, general information and political commentary. But it has the spirit of a literary novel, and is …

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Book Review: Frontier Colorado Gunfights

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Frontier Colorado Gunfights
True Stories of Outlaws and Lawmen in the American West
by Kenneth Jessen
J V Publications, 260 pages
ISBN 978-1-928656-12-8

Reviewed by Forrest Whitman

Readers of this publication have come to expect careful and detailed historical writing from Kenneth Jessen. His new book lives up to that standard. Jessen describes gunfights and shootings in thirty one cases and clears up mysteries about some of them. My only criticism is that the book lacks context about the situations that led to the shootings.

When it comes to Jessen’s clearing up mysteries, a good example is Charley Harrison. He was a partner in a famous Colorado saloon, the Criterion. Myths abound about this gambler and killer. Jessen’s story clears up Harrison’s killing of “professor” Charles Stark. The Rocky Mountain News accused Harrison of wantonly killing “Professor” Stark. Was that true?

Jessen shows that Stark (a black man from Missouri) threatened Charley first, with a knife in hand. But did Charley have to shoot Stark six times? What was the context here?

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Book Review – Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master

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by David J Rothman, Jeffrey R Villines, eds.
ISBN: 978-0-9641454-9-8
Pleiades Press, 2017
$16.00; 201pp.

Reviewed by Eduardo Brummel

David J. Rothman is Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Gunnison’s Western State Colorado University. He is also, as anyone who’s recently spent time with him already knows, a passionate advocate for Breckenridge-based poet, Belle Turnbull (1881-1970), whom he describes as, “one of the strongest poets yet to emerge in Colorado.”

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Book Review: Richard Sopris in Early Denver

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Richard Sopris in Early Denver
by Linda Bjorklund
History Press 2016, 138 pages
ISBN 978.1 46713.593.1

Reviewed by Forrest Whitman

Richard Sopris is one of the least known of the early Colorado influential leaders. This book should help correct that. A “fifty-niner,” arriving during the 1859 gold rush, he was one of the earliest miners and explored many possible gold panning streams. He “discovered” Glenwood Springs and a mountain near there is named for him.

Sopris is best remembered as mayor of Denver from 1878 to 1881. During that time he worked to develop a park system and is best known for establishing City Park. He went on to be one of the founders of the Colorado Historical and Natural History Society (what today is History Colorado and the Natural History Museum). Wherever the action was, Sopris was in it or around it.

Particularly interesting are several accounts of early Denver. The “Bummers wars” were wild affairs. This group of ruffians fought with the vigilance committees during the so-called “turkey wars.” The bummers were quick to steal things, including a cartload of turkeys. This war led to Richard’s career in law enforcement. In 1865 he was elected sheriff of what was then Arapahoe County, Kansas Territory. Later he was put in charge of the Denver jail. He also worked for the new Denver Pacific Railroad that hooked Denver up to the rest of the nation.

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Book Review – Navajo Textiles: The Crane Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science

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by Laurie D. Webster, Louise I. Stiver, D. Y. Begay, and Linda Teller Pete, with introduction by Ann Lane Hedlund
University Press of Colorado, 2017
ISBN 978-1-60732-673-1
Paper, large format, color, 230 pages, $34.95

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

Here is a book that will be coveted by curators in regional museums, libraries, private collectors, tourists in Navajo Country and visitors to the museum in Denver’s City Park, who have been beguiled by the beautiful rugs and other hand-woven textiles.

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Book Review – Heading Home Field Notes

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By Peter Anderson
Conundrum Press, 2017
978-1-9422-8021-7; 84 pp.; $14.99

Reviewed by Lynda La Rocca

Short, but sweet – and wistful, sad, thoughtful, funny, poignant, or filled with longing. That’s how I’d describe the essays that make up Crestone-based writer, teacher and poet Peter Anderson’s latest book, Heading Home: Field Notes.

These lyrical musings, which the author describes as “a collection of flash prose and prose poems,” are true songs of the open road, a road that stretches invitingly and seemingly endlessly before this man who starts down it independent, unencumbered, eager to learn and experience and explore.

It’s a lonely road where, paradoxically, one is never alone and “everyone [is] a good buddy just waiting to happen.”

It’s also a road Anderson is still traveling, albeit now with the quiet certainty that it always circles back to family and to home.

Along the way, Anderson revels in the vast sweep of the West with its moon-cast shadows and wide-open spaces, snowdrifts and high deserts, mountain ranges and deep forests.

He encounters mule deer and cougars, watches turkey vultures soar the thermals, and waits for bats to emerge from an abandoned mine. And he introduces us to rodeo clowns and waitresses, long-haul truckers in backwater cafés, a Navajo family stuck with his own family in car-repair limbo at the Econolube, friends separated by distance and death, and friends reunited over a beer. He falls in love and becomes a father who teaches the basics of pond hockey and air guitar and comforts his two girls after their ducks fall victim to a stealthy predator.

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Book Reviews – A Short History of Denver

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Stephen J. Leonard, Thomas J. Noel University of Nevada Press, paper, 212 pp, $21.95 Reviewed by Annie Dawid History and “short” don’t usually go well together, but in this case, the celebrated Denver Post columnist Thomas J. Noel and his co-writer, Stephen J. Leonard, history professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, make the combination fascinating, …

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Book Reviews – The Longest Night: A Novel

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By Andria Williams
Random House, ISBN-13: 9780812987423
Hardcover, $27 384pp

Reviewed by Annie Dawid

The debut novel by Colorado Springs author Andria Williams explores in white-knuckled prose the meltdown at a nuclear reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on January 3, 1961. This particular disaster, resulting in the deaths of three young military operators, receded into history, subsumed by the larger nightmare at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant 18 years later, in which no lives were lost, and now, by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi fiasco.

Williams teases out the story of the SL-1 accident within the context of the bildungsroman of Nat Collier, a very young Army wife, and her husband, Paul, both of whom will acquire wisdom, wounds and possible radiation damage in the course of their exposure to readers, from 1959 to 1961. A third protagonist, Jeannie, wife of Master Sergeant Richards, who is Paul’s boss and a negligent if not malignant force, adds the outsider’s view to the couple’s at times fractious marital life.

The Longest Night explores the culture of military life in general and the strictures for the military wife in particular during the late 1950s. The novel’s epigraph comes from the 1954 edition of The Army Officer’s Guide: “There can be no greater admiration than that of the husband … to return and find, as he had hoped, that his own wife has met the test of keeping up her end of things.”

What follows is Nat’s valiant attempt to do just that – sometimes successfully, often imperfectly as she attempts to raise two young daughters and becomes pregnant with another child during the couple’s fraught two-year stint in Idaho. Nat grew up on the beaches of San Diego, where she cultivated a freedom-loving existence – not grounded, with no particular direction – which comes to a close at 19 when she meets Paul, an intense military man from Maine. These opposites find a sort of completion in one another, and fulfill a familial love not offered by the parents of either. They marry quickly, launching themselves and their fast arriving progeny into a world of rigorous routine.

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Book Review – Early Days in South Park: Parked in the Past

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By Laura Van Dusen
Vandusenville Publications, 189 pages
ISBN 978-692-72310-4

Reviewed by Forrest Whitman

Sooner or later, if you live in Colorado, you’ll drive through South Park. It’s a lovely ride in its own right, but this book will keep the motorist seeing it all in a fresh way. Van Dusen, long-time writer for many publications (including this one), opens up the surprising history of the park.
Her vignettes about early notables in the park are well done and give us a new look at them. Some of them, like Willia Hamilton Johnson of Alma, or Marshall Lewis Link, are especially crisp. She reveals them in “the bad and the good.” They emerge as real people.
She draws on the letters of Wilbur Fisk Stone to show us just how dastardly some of our early heroes and villains were. Her historical accounts of the outlaws are gripping. Some of the bad guys, like the Espinoza brothers, were terrorists of the most incredible kind.

Wilbur Stone spared neither Governor John Evans nor Reverend Chivington (the fighting Methodist minister who led the massacre at Sand Creek). Both were crooked and amazing liars, as were many others who dealt with the Indians.
A weakness in Van Dusen’s coverage concerns the Utes. They were very much a part of South Park history, but other than a brief appearance by Chief Saguache, they don’t come through. On the other hand, Van Dusen can write only about the accounts of the first settlers, and the Indians were only backdrops for them.
Especially interesting is her coverage of how hard life was in South Park. For instance, Benjamin Berg, second owner of the Fairplay Hotel, lost three of his children to typhoid. During World War I, The Fairplay  Flume reported death after death to the Spanish influenza. Some 675,000 died in the U.S. in that outbreak.
There were interesting cures to various diseases, which she covers in detail, including Bayer Heroine, Lydia Pinkham’s Herbal Remedy (popular with women partly because of its alcohol content) and Magic oil (87 percent alcohol).
Driving on U.S. Hwy. 285, the motorist will have a new understanding of how hard travel was by stage coach. You’ll also learn more about Como. This was a big rambling coal mining town with its own “war” to remember. Her chapters on Como and the Antero Reservoir fights are especially good. The motorist may even pause to think of the King Coal disaster where so many miners died. The book makes a routine trip through South Park fascinating.
There’s more to the book than the 19th century too. Her accounts of pre-history and the Porcupine Cave are compelling. So are her accounts of modern history. She covers the death of JFK and the beginning of the Ed Snell race.
I’m always looking for books to add to my holiday giving list. Early Days in South Park is on mine this year. Laura Van Dusen has done an outstanding job here.

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Book Review: The Man Who Thought He Owned the Water

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theman_webBy Tershia D’Elgin
University Press of Colorado, 2016
978-1-607-495-9; 287 pp, $29.95

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

Although Central Colorado is the birthplace of three of Colorado’s major waterways – the South Platte, Arkansas, and Rio Grande – who owns the water seems puzzling except among water managers and farmers. Most consumers simply take it for granted that the liquid stuff for sinks and plastic bottles, rafts and kayaks, fishing, skiing resorts and wells will always be there. To get an inkling of how change can happen, read The Man Who Thought He Owned the Water, with its subtitle On the Brink with American Farms, Cities, and Food.
The author, Tershia D’Elgin, writes a compelling biographical account of what happened to her own father in the Platte River Valley near Greeley. A great-grandson of Colorado Governor Benjamin Eaton, Bill Phelps begins with ambition aplenty and surface water rights that promised success at Big Bend Station. Where he ran amuck was in the assumption that he, like many of his neighbors, could increase productivity by using wells that delivered underground water.

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Book Review – Seasons of the Enemies: The Long Walk of the Navajo

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seasons_webBy Sharon Leslie Gearhart
Xlibris.com: 2015, 245 pp, $19.95
SC-ISBN: 987-1-4931-1

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

The subtitle will lead prospective readers to believe this volume to be an account of the exodus of Navajo Indians to Fort Sumner. Instead, it is an amalgam of detailed descriptions of ceremonies that are incorporated into the narrative, descriptions of military personnel and events related to the period of 1858 to 1864, some text that appears to be historical fiction, approximately 25 pages of very well-researched history devoted to the Army’s campaign at Canyon de Chelly in 1863-1864 and a two-page epilogue about the internment at Fort Sumner. Although at times readers may not feel certain as to whether various parts of the text are historical fiction, anthropology or history, general readers with a special interest in the Diné will enjoy the book. They also will enjoy descriptions of the setting and activities in it at Black Mesa near Kayenta, New Mexico, Tseigi Canyon, the surrounding region and especially Canyon de Chelly itself.

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Book Review: The Western Lonesome Society

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By Robert Garner McBrearty ISBN: 9781-942280-12-5 Conundrum Press: 2016 $14.99; 123pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel This isn’t your father’s Western novel. Time frames – past, more recent past, and what’s current – get sloshed together. Also, every so often an imagined psychologist appears, questioning and harassing our narrator, Jim O‘Brien, who’s also battling “president …

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Book Review: Lost Ghost Towns of Teller County

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Reviewed by Forrest Whitman By Jan Mackell Collins History Press, 2016 ISBN 878.146713.512.2 This author has done a commendable job of researching the lost ghost towns around Cripple Creek and other Teller County locations. Her attention to detail is excellent. The book might entice one to try and find some of the sites, or what …

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Book Review: Mountain Rampage

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mountain-rampage_webMountain Rampage
By Scott Graham
ISBN: 978-1-937226-45-9
Torrey House Press: 2015
$14.95, 269pp.

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

In Rocky Mountain National Park someone is poaching Rocky Mountain sheep, taking just the heads and leaving the bodies. Meanwhile, Chuck Bender, hired by a professor at Durango’s Fort Lewis College, is leading an eight-week college field class in historical archeology, also in Rocky Mountain National Park. During their final week, a huge pool of blood is found outside their Estes Park dormitories, which turns out to be the first of several horrors about to take place.

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Book Review – Mostly Short, Mostly True Stories From Ireland: A Compilation of Thirty-One Short Stories

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By Jim Remington Pineglenn Press: 2015 ISBN: 978-1-36-469865-2 110pp, $12.95 Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel I loved the title of this collection of remembrances from Ireland, especially the “mostly true” part – after all, isn’t that the way it goes? But let me get this out of the way: I don’t consider nearly any of them …

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Book Review – The Denver Artists Guild: Its Founding Members, An Illustrated History

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The Denver Artists Guild: Its Founding Members, An Illustrated History

Colorado History and University Press of Colorado, 2015, USBN  978-0-942576-58-0

By Stan Cuba

260 pages, 9×11, color, 187 figures, paper, $39.95; also available as ebook

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

In 1928, a vibrant group of 52 artists formed the Denver Artists Guild, and for a quarter century this group enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for the high quality of their artistry and workmanship. Images in this book, biographical essays about each artist, and the knowledgeability of author Stan Cuba and the book’s other collaborators make this an outstanding contribution, whether the person holding it is a working artist or an appreciator of fine art and of this state’s social history. The Denver Artists Guild may further encourage people to enjoy firsthand viewing of art works by taking a walking tour of the public locations in Denver (a map is included) or by taking a driving tour, mainly but not exclusively limited to the Front Range.

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The Ogallala Road– A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

By Julene Bair

Viking, hardback, 278 pp, $26.95, ISBN-13: 978-0670786046

Reviewed by Annie Dawid

On a boulder-strewn hill behind the cabin, pink barrel cactuses fended off would-be moochers with whorls of bright-pink spines, and in the gorge between that hill and the cabin, water trickled. The pools were too tiny to immerse myself in, but a mile upstream stood a windmill beside a six-foot-tall stock-water storage tank where I could go swimming! Well, dunking anyway.

The above is a sample moment Julene Bair describes in her love story/ecology tutorial/memorial to her Kansas family farm, The Ogallala Road. As a young woman she spends months alone in the Mojave Desert, appreciating every particle of color, light, and, especially, water. With humor, grace, and hard-won wisdom, Bair tells her story of life on the Western Kansas high plains as the child of a farming family, and her subsequent travelogue through many landscapes of adulthood, landing her, finally, here in Colorado.

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A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography
By Kayann Short
Torrey House Press, paperback 215 pp $14.95

 Reviewed by Annie Dawid

 

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive

throughout a long and uncomplaining life

committed to one goal: to give yourself!

And silently to grow and to bear fruit.

Rainier Maria Rilke, “The Apple Orchard”

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Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vázques de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate

By Stan Hoig

University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 987-1-60732-194-1
$34.95; 352 pages

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

 

Whether you prefer scholarly history or blood-and-thunder stories, Came Men on Horses by Stan Hoig is mesmerizing. If you are looking for a sanitized or romantic account of the conquest of the Southwest, though, this book may not be your choice for bedtime reading. The unvarnished facts about the entradas of Coronado and Oñate, like those of other conquistadors, force readers to some uncomfortable conclusions about human behavior, its cruelty and rapaciousness, but there is evidence of human courage, tenacity and the desire for personal enrichment.

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Benediction By Kent Haruf

Alfred A Knopf, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95988-1
$25.95, 258pp.

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

With the 1984 publication of his first novel, The Ties That Bind, Kent Haruf introduced Holt, Colorado to the rest of the world. Haruf’s fifth novel, Benediction, arrived this past February – its initial paragraphs placing the main character into the trouble that will be the story:

Go on ahead, Dad Lewis said, say it.

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The Marble Room: How I lost God and Found Myself in Africa

By Bill Hatcher

Lantern Books
ISBN: 978-1-59056-406-6
$18.00; 288 pp.

Reviewed by Forrest Whitman

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land.
They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

That’s an old African joke attributed to Bishop Desmond Tutu. Many a young Peace Corps volunteer went to Africa to try and ameliorate that ugly situation. Bill Hatcher, a current resident of the San Luis Valley, was no exception.

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Rescue in Poverty Gulch

Historical Fiction for Ages 8 and up

By Nancy Oswald

Filter Press, paperback, 185 pp, $8.95

 

Reviewed by Annie Dawid

The first in a new series by Cotopaxi author Nancy Oswald, Rescue in Poverty Gulch will delight children who get their hands on this book as well as the adults who read it to youngsters. Oswald’s stories appeal to readers in search of lively characters and rich local history.

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Book Review

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Kings of Colorado by David E. Hilton Simon & Schuster, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-4393-8383-0 $14.00, 276pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel One Chicago evening, William Sheppard’s father, drunk and two hours late to dinner, goes into another rage, this time, over the cold food. In defending his mother, thirteen-year-old Will stabs his father twice with a …

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Topic of Capricorn
By John C. Mattingly
Illustrations by Judith Penrose Mattingly
Published in 2011 by Mirage Publishing
ISBN 978-0-9710430-4-6

Reviewed by Ed Quillen

There’s an old saying that “Goats can live on nothing and a man can live on goats.” Given that observation and the dismal income level of certain portions of Central Colorado, it’s kind of surprising that we don’t see more goats around these parts.

The critters do have remarkable appetites. A couple of years ago, the Jumpin’ Good Goat Dairy in Buena Vista entered a float in Salida’s boat-race parade. It was a long flat-bed trailer with a corral full of goats. The corral was decorated with plastic flowers. The goats kept jumping to eat the polyethylene blooms.

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Crooked Creek
by Maximilian Werner
Torrey House Press, Paperback, 178 pp, $15.95
ISBN-10: 193722600X
ISBN-13: 978-1937226008

Reviewed by Annie Dawid

“Not to have known – as most men have not – either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one’s self. Not to have known one’s self is to have known no one.” So begins Utah writer Maximilian Werner’s novel with this epigraph from Joseph Wood Krutch. Such an opening portends a fiction about self-knowledge, it would seem, or an attempt at such a voyage.

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Buried by the Roan
by Mark Stevens
People’s Press, 2011
Softcover, 348 pages, $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-9817810-9-9

Reviewed by Elliot Jackson

OK, let me see if I’ve got this straight: our heroine in Buried by the Roan is plucky Allison Coil, yet another average working-girl mystery heroine – who always seems to be at least 40 pounds lighter and quite a bit blonder and petite-er than the average American working girl. Because of a personal crisis (she survives a plane crash), she is inspired to leave her yuppie existence in the big city and become a hunting guide in the Western Slope wilderness. And really, this is the sort of thing that could happen to anybody. Particularly a woman with no apparent previous wilderness or hunting experience.

So we have the obligatory death (one of her clients on a hunting trip, a rancher who is embroiled in a land dispute with – wait for it – an environmentalist). At this point in the story, I am hearing my internal Mike Myers chiming hopefully: “Is he an EVIL environmentalist?” Yes, as it turns out, he is! And he’s even on the cover of High Country News!

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In Search of Powder: A Story of America’s Disappearing Ski Bum
by Jeremy Evans
Bison Books
2010 ISBN-13-0-8032-9 $16.95

Reviewed by Forrest Whitman

“Ski all day, drink all night and fight off the chicks!” That was the mantra of the cool ski bums of the past. Jeremy Evans was once one of those ski bums and loved it. He quit the ski bum life for a time, but went right back to it, or at least writing about it. Even a small stroke didn’t slow Jeremy down. Now he writes for ski magazines and is well known in ski circles. The fact that he got the legendary snowboarder and skier Glen Plake to write the forward tells us something about Jeremy’s popularity. Alas, the ski bum life is not what it once was. As we move into winter it’s wise for prospective ski bums to read this book and think twice.

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Mercury’s Rise
by Ann Parker
Published in 2011 by Poisoned Pen Press
ISBN 978-1-69058-961-8

Reviewed by Ed Quillen

You could say that Ann Parker is an elemental writer, or maybe a metallic one, given her book titles. Mercury Rising is the fourth in a series that includes Silver Lies, Iron Ties, and Leaden Skies. All feature the adventures of Inez Stannert, a partner in the Silver Queen Saloon in the boomtown Leadville of 1880.

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The Legend of Benjamin Ratcliff: From Family Tragedy to Legacy of Resilience
by Chris O. Andrew

Published in 2011 by the author
ISBN 078-193266786-8

Reviewed by Ed Quillen

It’s a safe bet that most family trees have some branches that nobody much wants to talk about, but few have a branch like this one. Benjamin Ratcliff, a Civil War veteran and rancher in South Park, shot and killed three members of his local school board on May 6, 1895.

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Crestone – Gateway to the Higher Realms
By James McCalpin

Crestone Science Center
ISBN 978-0-9835382-0-2
$21.95; 256pp, including appendices and index.

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

Remember your grade school teacher’s admonition to never title a paper, “All About —”? That’s the intrinsic trouble with any guidebook: So much information; so few pages. The cover of this one proclaims it to be: “A Comprehensive Guide to Crestone, Colorado, and Area Attractions,” which it truly seems to be.

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Vision of Photography Series, The Museum Collection,
William Meriwether
People’s Press, 52 pages $14.95
ISBN #0981781071

Reviewed by Mike Rosso

William Meriwether is not a well-known name in photo circles but the recently deceased Colorado-based photographer left behind a body of work that may someday bring his works the stature they deserve.

Meriwether, who spent part of his youth in the San Luis Valley, self-published a limited edition book of his work and essays in 2005 and it was formally published in 2010 by Peoples Press in Woody Creek, Colorado.

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Forgotten Cuchareños of the Lower Valley By Virginia Sanchez

The History Press, Paperback, 191 pp $19.99
ISBN #1609491343

Reviewed by Annie Dawid

As a fiction writer, reading Virginia Sanchez’s book about the history of Hispano Southern Colorado made me wish I were writing a long-planned, much-delayed novel which takes place in the Huérfano Valley during the 20th century. Forgotten Cuchareños of the Lower Valley is a researcher’s dream of a book: appendices, maps, bibliographies, indices, timelines, excellent photographs of now-disappeared buildings, monuments, cultural artifacts.

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Deadly Currents
By Beth Groundwater
Midnight Ink/Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7387-2162-0. $14.95, 300pp.
www.midnightinkbooks.com

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

This is the first in a series of mysteries by Groundwater, telling the adventures of Arkansas Headwaters river ranger, Mandy Tanner. Groundwater’s previous novel, A Real Basket Case, was a finalist for the 2007 Agatha Award for Best First Novel.

This story begins with Mandy along the Arkansas River, only halfway through her lunch break, when a raft flips going through a rapid. Mandy and her supervisor spring into action: he, jumping from a boulder onto the unmanned raft; she, paddling out to rescue two “swimmers,” before they’re left to their own devices in the quickly upcoming next rapid. The rescue is a success, with one exception. The male passenger Mandy rescues dies shortly after being brought to shore.

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The Present Giver
A Memoir, by Bar Scott
Alm Books
223 pages, paperback
ISBN-13: 978-061544069
$13.95

Reviewed by Annie Dawid

Recently decamped from Woodstock, New York, to Westcliffe, Colorado, at least for part of each year, singer-songwriter Bar Scott has published her first book, The Present Giver: A Memoir, which tells the story of her son, Forrest, who died in 2002 at the age of three and a half, from cancer. Scott informs the reader of this fact on the frontispiece of her beautifully designed book, adding, “If this were a novel, I would be reluctant to disclose that the central character dies in the end. But this is not a novel, and Forrest’s death was not the end.”

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Wild Burro Tales: Thirty Years of Haulin’ Ass

By Hal Walter
Out There Publishing, 2010

Reviewed by Teresa Cutler-Broyles

“Hang on. Don’t let go.”

So Hal Walter tells us in Wild Burro Tales, his wonderful new collection that takes us on a wild ride through the exciting and overlooked sport of pack-burro racing, and his life with the creatures that give it all meaning.

At first glance the book appears to be, simply, about burros and the relatively obscure and unusual sport of running marathon distances partnered with an animal not known for its cooperative nature. Indeed, the stories – 19 in all, punctuated with brief asides that take on a life of their own in their ability to hit hard – are ostensibly about Walter’s experiences with pack-burro racing and the people and animals who make the sport what it is. For anyone interested in knowing the facts – where pack-burro racing originated, why it continues today, what sorts of skills and hardships are encompassed – Wild Burro Tales certainly delivers. And Walter touches on Wild West legend as well as hard 20th century reality as he opens that world for us.

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Historic Photos of  Heroes of the Old West
Text and captions by Mike Cox
Turner Publishing Company, 2010
ISBN: 9781596525689

Reviewed by Elliot Jackson

The title of this handsome coffee-table book tells you almost everything you need to know about what you will find inside: yet for every photo of a traditional “hero” or villain (Wyatt Earp, George Custer, hanging judges, stolid Indians), there is a photo that chronicles a lesser-known thread in the story: Ann Eliza Webb Young, for example, one of the wives of Mormon leader Brigham Young, who spoke out against polygamy in her book, “Wife No. 19”; or Nat Love, a black cowboy born into slavery, who wrote his autobiography. There are also fascinating group shots: a group of men huddles around a faro table in one; the company of Troop C, Fifth Cavalry, which was charged with keeping the peace and throwing out squatters in Oklahoma Territory, stares out from another. All the photos are accompanied by captions by author Mike Cox, who also provides short introductory essays for each chapter.

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An adventure in book publishing

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By Hal Walter

My little jab at the Literary Industrial Complex – Wild Burro Tales – Thirty Years of Haulin’ Ass – is nearly reality. Soon the book will be available in local retail establishments and on amazon.com.

This collection of stories had its origins in my adventures on the Western Pack-Burro Racing circuit. But this experience grew to include a fascination with equus asinus, my exploration of using these animals as backcountry packers and saddle donkeys, and as therapeutic riding animals for my son Harrison. While the book is full of adventures, the process of putting this volume together is another story worth telling.

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Review: Mother Jones: Raising Cain and Consciousness

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By Simon Cordery

Published in 2010 by University of New Mexico Press

ISBN 978-0-8263-4810-4

$21.95 paperback; 224 pages

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

Social, political, and economic gulfs that are seldom probed in depth by popular histories exist between the mansions of mining kings in cities and the shacks of anonymous miners in ghost towns. This new biography of Mother Jones will offer readers an understanding of the underlying issues, attitudes, and clashes in strikes and elections.

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Book review

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The Cliff Dwellings Speak: Exploring the Ancient Ruins of the Greater American Southwest
By Beth and Bill Sagstetter
BenchMark Publishing of Colorado LLC, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9645824-2-2
$24.95, 314pp, plus appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

Winter is over, days are longer, kids are out of school, and ‘tis the season for getting outside, tanning your hide, skinning knees and scraping elbows. For those planning to visit Mesa Verde and/or other cliff dwellings, you’re in luck. Beth and Bill Sagstetter have just completed this follow-up to The Mining Camps Speak, which is also destined to become both essential and popular.

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Book review

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A Dozen on Denver: Stories – edited by the Rocky Mountain News

Fulcrum Publishing, 2009
ISBN: 9781555917272

Reviewed by Elliot Jackson

The late, lamented Rocky Mountain News, shortly before its demise, commissioned a collection of tales from twelve Colorado authors, some famous and some virtually unknown, to commemorate the sesquicentennial of both the paper and the city of Denver. The idea for this collection was inspired, according to the forward by former RMN editor John Temple, by a similar collection of tales commissioned by the Times of London.

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Book Review – The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado

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The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859-2009
By Duane A. Smith
Published in 2009 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 978-0-87081-975-5
$26.95; vii+282 pages

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

After chronicling nearly every facet of gold and silver mining in Colorado, from the Caribou camp to Horace Tabor and Baby Doe, Duane A. Smith has now concisely written the colorful story in The Trail of Gold and Silver. With this, his 50th published book, his friends might wonder whether The Trail of Gold and Silver is meant to be the swan song of our most prolific miner of Colorado’s mining history. Well, don’t bet the claim on it.

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