Eduardo Rey Brummel

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

by

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 …

Read more

Book Review: Naked for Tea

by

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 …

Read more

Book Review: Brayed Expectations

by

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 …

Read more

Book Reviews – A Compendium of Curious Colorado Place Names

by

By Jim Flynn
ISBN: 978-1-46713-732-4
The History Press: 2016
$21.99; 186pp, plus index

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

Cannibal Plateau. Breckenridge. Westcliffe. Slumgullion Pass. Tin Cup. Saguache. Colorado is chockablock with odd and peculiar place names.

Fortunately, there are numerous books telling the varied tales of how these names came to be. (I own two other such books, myself.) But since so many of these books already exist, and many of us have at least one or two’ why bother with this one? Well, because two qualities distinguish this book from the rest. First, it’s not an alphabetic listing of Colorado place names, it’s divided into chapters. Second, Jim Flynn writes with a simpatico tone and winking sense of humor.

Read more

Book Review: The Western Lonesome Society

by

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 …

Read more

Book Review: Mountain Rampage

by

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.

Read more

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

by

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 …

Read more

Book Review: Dirt: A Love Story

by

Dirt: a love story Editor: Barbara Richardson ISBN: 978-1-61168-766-8 ForeEdge: 2015 $19.95, 200pp. An anthology about dirt. How is it possible to have over thirty writers tell us about something that is, well, as plain as dirt? Well, it helps when you’re able to bring in some of the big guns of land-based writing: Pam …

Read more

Nomadic Love

by

by Eduardo Rey Brummel Back in 2003, when Craig Nielson was hosting monthly “P3” (Poetry Prose Performance) evenings at the former Bongo Billy’s Café in Salida, he would occasionally witness ensemble performances, which he had also seen during a local poetry festival named Sparrows. Liking the idea of working with other poets, he conceived of …

Read more

Book Review – Under a Triumphant Sky: A Bike Across America Story

by

Under a Triumphant Sky: A Bike Across America Story By Steve Garufi Mount Princeton Press: 2014 332 pp, $21.95 ISBN: 978-0692302897 Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel Is there any of us who hasn’t dreamed of running away, of heading on out to the highway, never looking back, getting away from it all? Steve Garufi had …

Read more

Book Review – Responding

by

Responding Beatrice Strawn and Sue Mills CreateSpace: 2015 ISBN-13: 978-1503384378 $18.50, 48pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel Beatrice Strawn has been a consistent and sturdy contributor to Central Colorado’s art scene for close to three decades; and for 16 years, prior to retiring here, she crafted and taught in Denver. Here, in this book, 16 …

Read more

Reviews– The Garden of Dead Dreams

by

The Garden of Dead Dreams By Abby Quillen Sidewalk Press: 2014 ISBN: 978-0-9899822-3-8 $13.95, 253 pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel In her novel’s opening lines, Abby Quillen tells us: Etta Lawrence wasn’t the only one who came to Roosevelt Lodge to become someone else. That’s why they’d all come. Forty-some years earlier, Vincent Buchanan …

Read more

Book Review – Between Urban and Wild: Reflections from Colorado

by

Between Urban and Wild: Reflections from Colorado By Andrea M. Jones University of Iowa Press, 2013 ISBN: 978-1-60938-187-5 $22.50, 196pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel I first opened this collection of essays after placing my order at Telluride’s Brown Dog, and was who-knows-how-many pages immersed in it before noticing that my pizza had arrived and …

Read more

Book Review

by

 Tributary

By Barbara K. Richardson
Torrey House Press, 2012
ISBN: 978-937226-04-6
$15.95, 348pp.

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

This second novel by Barbara K. Richardson was finalist for this year’s Willa Literary Award in Historical Fiction. It begins in 1859, when a Mormon Brother finds six-year-old Clair Martin, orphaned and abandoned in Honeyville, Utah, and brings her with him to Brigham City. There the Mormon Elders find a place for her, assisting an aging widow. From birth, Clair’s face has borne a distinguishing mark, “the purple-red stain that covers my left cheek and flutes down my neck like I’ve been scalded.”

Read more

In the Strangest of Places

by

By Eduardo Rey Brummel

Even though it’s commonplace for me to be in bewonderment over the ways I find myself connected to this town, I still have difficulty not constantly calculating my cost to others. You could blame my upbringing. Dad made it a point to tell people, “I would have finished college, but I ran outta money, I ran outta smart-sauce, and I had him.”

A major factor leading me to move here was the hope that I’d be enfolded into this community. With my small-town roots and outdoorsy lifestyle, I thought the locals would quickly take me in as one of their own. Instead, the first nine months was the darkest, loneliest period of my life. Instead of welcoming me, as they had during each of my visits, residents were now keeping me at a distance.

Read more

Book Review

by

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 …

Read more

Winging It Home

by

 By Eduardo Rey Brummel

A junior college in Dallas. Me, outside, taking a study break with a just-bought bag of cheddar goldfish to feed the campus geese. I pour a handful; offer them to the nearest goose. There’s hesitation and tentativeness. One goose-step shakily segues into others. I hold myself steady when the first ticklish peck pincers a cracker. Not five minutes later, I’m surrounded by a gazillion geese, each loudly insisting on being fed.

Read more

Book review

by

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.

Read more

Book Review

by

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.

Read more

I Love Salida’s Living Room

by

By Eduardo Rey Brummel

Roughly a decade ago, Salida Café was called by a Front Range newspaper, “Salida’s living room.” Certainly, this is true, for there’s a hint of mother hen in the air; and anyone walking in when Clark is there, is considered both friend and family. Robert Frost once said home is the place that when you go there, they have to take you in. And so it is, at Salida Café – but only if you change, “they have to take you in,” to, “they graciously take you in.”

Read more

Book Review

by

Breaking into the Backcountry

By Steven Edwards

University of Nebraska Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2653-1
$16.95, 179pp.

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

Just last week I had a brief conversation with a friend regarding the lack of male rites of passage these days. Breaking into the Backcountry is about things explicit and implicit. One of those things is Steve Edwards’ rite of passage.

He writes, “The call came from John Daniel, the contest’s coordinator: I had somehow managed to win the PEN/Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, whose prize was a small cash stipend and seven months as caretaker of a backcountry homestead in what John called ‘unparalleled solitude’ along the federally designated Wild and Scenic Rogue River in southwestern Oregon.”

Read more

Book Review – Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight Over the Great Bear

by

By: David Knibb

Eastern Washington University Press: 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59766-037-2

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

Grizzlies, like wolves, are “NIMBY” critters. They are iconic to our images of “the wild west,” and our lands seem a sham in their absence; yet it seems the majority want them, “out there,” away from their own backyards and stomping grounds. Grizzlies can also, like wolves, be elusive and wary of humans, making their existence, and their numbers, difficult to prove.

Read more

Sand, Wind, and Light: Great Sand Dunes National Park: An essay in words and images

by

2007-2009
By Ed Berg
Blurb, Inc: May 2009. $14.95

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

The San Luis Valley is a distinctly different world. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the Valley’s unique nature is the thirty-some square miles of sand dunes serving as foyer for the Sangre de Cristos’ western flank. In the same view, you have Lawrence of Arabia sands foregrounding snow-stippled mountains, with Medano Creek pulsing at your ankles. In his book, Sand, Wind, and Light, author Ed Berg begins where we all do – attempting to reconcile the existence of the Great Sand Dunes:

Read more

Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey

by

By: Susan J. Tweit
Illustrations by: Sherrie York
University of Texas Press, March 2009
ISBN: 978-0-0292-71917-0

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

Susan Tweit has been a fixture of Salida for over a decade. Her weekly column in Salida’s Mountain Mail, has been a fixture for nearly as long, and she’s graced the pages of Colorado Central, bunches of times. Now, after writing eleven place-based books, Tweit’s most recent book, Walking Nature Home, is her most intimate, and has the most to say about the place we call “home.”

Read more

Revenge For The Hunted

by

By Mike Sherack
Beaver’s Pond Press: September 2008
ISBN: 1592982506

At the start of deer season in Idaho, someone begins hunting the hunters. The FBI takes over the case after the killer runs a classified ad in the Idaho Statesman, warning that the slayings will continue until officials end the hunting season. The FBI’s top agent in such matters, Max Miller, is dispatched to Boise.

Read more