Review

Music Review: Dave Tipton – Memento

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By Brian Rill David Tipton’s Memento is a touching tribute to the golden melodies of popular culture. The soothing sounds of a solo stick master rat-at-at-tating his steel strings offers a sweet relief to even the most stressed-out customer. Tipton, the original gangster of elevator music, makes a strikingly appealing and broad, sweeping declaration of …

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Music Review

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By Brian Rill Don Richmond and David Clemmer – Holy Roller and a Rolling Stone Don Richmond’s new collaborative musical work with David Clemmer is a straight-ahead folk album with an old-town vibe. This record was produced among long flat countrysides of the San Louis valley, amid dusty Colorado fields that are swarmed with wasps …

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Book Review: The Last Stand of the Pack

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The Last Stand of the Pack By Arthur H. Carhart University Press of Colorado Press, 2017 ISBN: 978-1-60632, paper Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons Readers of outdoor West literature value several well-known authors, whose works are like bibles for anyone with concern about what is left of unspoiled landscapes and wildlife that once inhabited them. …

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CD Review: The Heartstring Hunters 

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By Brian Rill

From my experience as a songwriter, most love songs start as a series of passionate screams inspired by a beautiful muse, only to end in a desperate, stifled echo never to be heard by the intended recipient. The Heartstring Hunters however have a very different story. Started by husband and wife duo Carolyn and Daniel Hunter, they have collected some premiere musicians and forged an extensive Indy-Folk team. The songs act as a sort of dialog between two lovers as they pass musical notes back and forth strumming pathos symbiotically within romantic spirits everywhere.

Lead vocalist and lyricist Carolyn Hunter soars, stretching her voice into other dimensions where shadows of true love hide slumbering like dreaming dragons snoring through fields filled with smoke, while lounging atop unstable mountains of gold. Musically solid, their self-titled debut album is impactful and well-recorded. Acoustic chords strummed quietly ring with precision. Harmony vocals from Rachael Sheaffer shatter the subdued back beat and steady drum rolls. Tempestuous runs from a Fender Telecaster guitar touch upon the heavily-hooked verses. Daniel Hunter joins his wife on vocals for some truly heartfelt folk duets.

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The Real Deal Music Review: SHEL Just Crazy Enough

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By Brian Rill

SHEL – Just Crazy Enough

The 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prefaced his book The Will To Power with this line, “Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness, that means cynically and with innocence.” I will attempt to relate honestly the virtue of music amidst my own opinions in order to set free for the listener the product’s appeal and cultural relevance. Discovering pathos within modernity can be a difficult task, but within the right hymns sometimes there are steps that lead us to hope. Not outside the advent of SHEL’s present work lives this new faith.

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Music Review: Justin Allison – Take Me Where the Moon Lives

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By Brian Rill

A new work has come from the Howard, Colorado artist and composer Justin Allison who breathes life into a sweet set of 14 tunes. Teaming up with Grammy-nominated woodwind player Bob Rebholz on the CD Take Me Where the Moon Lives, Justin presents a tome of striking creativity. His collection of original songs gets mixed with modern arrangements from classic and contemporary artists. His anthems present an array of striking guitar chords aligned with Bob’s astounding flute solos and succulent saxophone melodies. Thelonious Monk’s swinging jazz standard, Monks Dream, is brought to life through the guitar and alto sax. The 1954 duet of Clifford Brown and Max Roach, Joy Spring jumps to the old smooth sounds of New York Bop. Innovative covers of Phyllis Molinary and Artie Butler’s Here’s To Life with the Brazilian pop tune Being Cool by Lorraine Feather and Djavan help us discover the real essence of modern jazz.

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Music Review: Free the Honey – Fine Bloom

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Fine Bloom is an album graced by three instrumental muses: mandolin player Jenny Hill, violinist Lizzy Plotkin and guitarist Katherine Taylor. In the hives of these queen bees dwells a lone upright bass player, Andrew Cameron. He works his tail off to bring home a steady beat that forms the bottom end of this talented bouquet. Gunnison-based Free the Honey was formed as a string quartet steeped in the Appalachian sound. Its traditional mixture of slow-brewed fiddle is simmered on top of a jangling banjo, which warms when cooked over hot coals. Deep, low tones of double bass penetrate, held together with the churning chunk of a mandolin. Three American girls descant a breathtaking three-part harmony, blending together their soulful whispering vocals into a thick syrupy flow. These three sirens are songwriters accustomed to the classic country tune. Southern heritage runs like long river deltas down their veins. The Central Colorado Rockies beckoned them all distinctly with an older bluegrass mythos. A simpler form of music then made its emergence from floral meadows deep beneath the shadow of a prestigious mountain.

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The Real Deal Music Review: Leadville Cherokee – How to Build a Fire

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By Brian Rill

A dry lake bed is perhaps the appropriate place for lighting a signal fire. That’s just what Leadville, Colorado band Leadville Cherokee has done with the release of their first studio-length album How to Build a Fire. Out of a chilly 10,000-foot mountain town, they have coveted ingredients for combustion: a large cluster of superheated gas and rock grinding together in a vacuum. Producing a loud exclamation of exaggerated activity, they are blazing the trail to ignite a new star, in the form of lead vocalist Coco Martin.

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Book Review

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The Cowboy Takes a Wife
By Davalynn Spencer
ISBN-13: 9780373486977
Publisher: Love Inspired, 2014

Reviewed by Elliot Jackson

Ah, the “historical” romance novel! Casually dismissed by the non-cognoscenti as “bodice-rippers,” the classic formula is this: take one beautiful and spirited (also penniless, orphaned or in some way materially disadvantaged) heroine, and one handsome, studly, often lordly and always rich hero; add instant mutual attraction/antagonism between same; set in an “exotic” historical setting of some sort or other; mix well with other ingredients including villainous Other men and scheming Other women, and sex – lots of unashamed, lusty and usually premarital sex. Ah, the good old days. 

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Book Review

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 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.”

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Restaurant Review

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Jade Café, 129 Church Avenue, Florence, CO 81226 (719) 784-3888 . Hours: 11 am – 9 pm every day

If you live in a town of over 3,500 in Colorado, chances are you’ve got a Chinese restaurant somewhere nearby. Salida’s got one, Buena Vista has two, as do Gunnison and Alamosa. Leadville may well lay claim to being the highest city in the U.S. where one can order moo goo gai pan. Florence, Colorado, population 3,881, is no exception. The Jade Cafe, just west of downtown, has been in business for fourteen years and is operated by the Youhuan Xiang family.

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Book Review

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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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Restaurant Review – The Asian Palate

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By Sue Snively

 The Asian Palate
328 E. Main St., Buena Vista, CO
719-395-6679

Hours: Lunch – Mon, Wed – Sat: 11am-2pm

Dinner – Mon, Wed – Sunday: 5pm-9pm

 

For a small town with many eateries, it doesn’t take long in Buena Vista to find a type of food that will satisfy your tastes on any particular evening. We don’t eat out very much, so when we do so we like it to be special and different; thus we found ourselves bypassing a variety of standard American dining places and a few others with international influences, and chose to dine at the Asian Palate.

Eddie Sandoval opened the restaurant in July of 2009. He chose Buena Vista because of his familiarity with and love of the town. He surveyed a fair number of residents to learn what kind of restaurant might do well, and came up with Asian cuisine based upon the number of requests for sushi on the menu. Eddie is a first-generation Filipino who grew up eating Asian food, and decided a restaurant with a wide variety of authentic foods from many Asian countries would be a good bet. He is an expert on Asian cooking and personally trains his chefs.

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Book Review

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La Sociedad: Guardians of Hispanic Culture Along the Rio Grande
By José A. Rivera
University of New Mexico Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0 8263-4894-4
Photographs by Daniel Salazar et al.

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

In 1900, led by Celedonia Mondragón of Antonito, his Hispanic neighbors organized the Sociedad Protección Mútua de Trabajadores Unidos, which soon had 65 chapters called concilios throughout rural southern Colorado, northern New Mexico, and a few places in Utah. These buildings once bore, or still bear in many cases, the fading initials SPMDTU for brevity’s sake, as the facades often tended to be small.

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Regional Restaurant Review

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by Suzy Patterson

Barry’s Den Café
27077 US Hwy. 50
Texas Creek, CO
(719) 275-3275

Need a great excuse to visit Texas Creek, Colorado?

Two words: “Barry’s Den.”

This unassuming little roadside café pretty much is Texas Creek. You’ll find it about midway between Salida and Cañon City on U.S. 50 at the junction of Hwy. 69. There’s not much else there except a couple of defunct gas pumps, a rafting and ATV tour operation, a herd of bighorn sheep hangin’ around and the Arkansas River flowing by. But the Barry family’s signature “Howlin’ Good Cookin’” definitely has put Texas Creek on the map.

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Book Review

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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.”

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Restaurant Review

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Alfonso’s Real Mexican Food
2801 East Main Street
Canon City, CO 81212
(719) 276-0186

Driving through Cañon City on U.S. Hwy 50 it is easy to miss one of the best taquerías in Central Colorado. That’s because it is located inside a Conoco mini-mart off a frontage road on the southeast side of town and takes a bit of searching to locate if you don’t know your way around.

We call it a taquería, but it is much more than that. The menu is vast and the food is prepared quickly. If you are looking for fish tacos, shrimp burritos, mulita, carne asada fries or a chimichanga to take with you on the road or enjoy in the dining room/ mini- mart, you definitely want to give them a try.

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Book Review: The Book of John

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The Book of John, By Kate Niles

O-Books, paperback, 225 pages
ISBN-10: 1846942918
ISBN-13: 978-1846942914

Reviewed by Annie Dawid

Surely we are all autistic at some level, in some place in our hearts? Living in this country, with its glamour and malls, its stream of cars, its TV and competition, is like battering yourself against a sea wall, time and again. How do you not retreat into a world of your own in the face of that?

John Gregory Wayne Thompson, eponymous hero of Kate Niles’s second novel, ponders thus in the first chapter of this exquisitely-rendered journey of one man’s soul, from the deserts of Southwest Colorado to the cold beaches of Neah Bay in the Pacific Northwest, tracking his life and loves like an archeologist mapping our collective history.

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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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Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company: 1914-1942
By Jonathan H. Rees
Published in 2010 by University of Colorado Press
ISBN 978-0-87081-964-3
344 pages, paperback, $34.95

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

The Ludlow Massacre near Trinidad was attracting national outrage in 1914. Leading up to it, labor unrest was widespread, and violent incidents had been escalating, not only at Ludlow but in the coalfields of the whole region. With mine owners pitted against union organizations throughout Colorado in the early 1900s, as well as throughout the nation for decades, public sympathies came down on the side of the workers after Ludlow, with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the largest single stockholder and member of the board of directors of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), becoming a special target of public anger.

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Book Review – Halfway to Heaven

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Halfway to Heaven
By Mark Obmascik

Published in 2009 by Free Press,
a division of Simon and Schuster
ISBN13: 978-1-4165-6699-1

Reviewed by Martha Quillen

Halfway to Heaven is an adventure travelogue featuring harrowing tales of derring-do and death, along with passages about Colorado history, Colorado places (including Leadville and Salida), Colorado fourteeners, and mountain climbers; all held together with stand-up style comedy.

For me, this combination was not an immediate success. At first, I thought Obmascik’s jokes about marriage, aging, baldness, and parenthood blended with his profile on William Henry Jackson about as well as ice cream and lemonade blend to make a sundae.

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Book Review – Historic Photos of Colorado Mining

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Text and Captions by Ed Rains
2009 – Turner Publishing Company
ISBN:978-1-59652-535-1

Reviewed by Mike Rosso

Having spent several years as a photo restorist in Durango, working with museums in Durango, Cortez, Dolores and Silverton, I was eager to obtain a copy of Historic Photos of Colorado Mining when it was offered for review.

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Ores to Metals: The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry

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By James E. Fell, Jr.
Published in 2009 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 978-0-87081-946-9

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

Like most readers in Colorado, I have countless books and booklets about the holes in the ground where miners struck it rich or suffered disappointment, but until I read this book, I never knew much about the rusty smelter ruins and grimy slag heaps that remain near those mines. The no-nonsense tome Ores to Metals became a lodestone for me this summer, attracting me to read every page and learn the things about the smelter ruins and slag heaps that have been ignored in the more popular dramas and melodramas about mining.

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Table Walking at Nighthawk

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By Carol Darnell Guerrero-Murphy
Published in 2007 by Ghost Road Press
ISBN 0-9796255-1-3

Reviewed by Elliot Jackson

Why, oh why, wonders the Inconstant Reader, do I routinely pass by poetry in my restless forays through my library’s shelves? Is it because I had a rigorous education in my youth, and read so much of it that I just OD’d? Or do I just forget about it? Maybe it’s simple intimidation: a good poem is such a richly-stuffed little nugget that getting through a whole book of poetry feels like downing a plate of baklava all by myself (maybe that’s why, when I do get around to reading poetry, that I love to read it aloud, or hear it read: just like that plate of baklava, a poem seems created to be shared – munched by multiple ears).

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Breaking Open the Heart: A Meditation on Broken: A Love Story

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by Lisa Jones
Scribner, May 2009
Hardcover, 288 pages
ISBN-10: 1416579060

Essay/Review by Elliot Jackson

“What does it matter if it hurts like hell, so long as it makes a good book?” – Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Colorado writer Lisa Jones has just finished her first book, Broken. The title is a play on words – it refers to horse breaking, hearts breaking, bodies breaking. She has subtitled it, “a love story”, and so it is – in the way that, say, the New Testament is a love story. Bear with me, here, a moment – I mean no disrespect, and certainly no blasphemy. But imagine the gospel of – let’s call her Theodora: a well-educated Greco-Roman woman who, having heard tell of a healer and holy man working in the provinces of the Empire, makes the decision to leave Rome and travel to Jerusalem to write about him. She has heard tales of miracles which she accepts skeptically but politely: she doesn’t need to believe in miracles, or this Hebrew God, to write about them – or so she thinks.

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Silver Lies, Iron Ties and Leaden Skies

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By Ann Parker
2003, 2006, 2009 Poisoned Pen Press
ISBN 1-59058-072-9

Reviewed by Nancy Hudelson

Ann Parker’s Silver Rush historical mystery series, published by Poisoned Pen Press, is set in the silver boomtown of Leadville in the 1880s. The series is rich with tales of greed, lust and deception when men and women stopped at nothing, not even murder, to strike it rich. There can be no doubt that the rush mining era in the 1880s in the Colorado Rockies was one of the most exciting chapters in the history of the American West.

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Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey

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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.”

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From Redstone to Ludlow: John Cleveland Osgood’s Struggle against the United Mine Workers of America

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By F. Darrell Munsell
Published in 2008 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 978-0-87081-934-6

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

With its inclusion of Ludlow, the scene of southern Colorado’s most deadly labor fight, From Redstone to Ludlow will hardly be mistaken for a tourist’s guide to Pitkin County’s tiny village of Redstone on the Crystal River. Rather, as the subtitle indicates, the text is a hefty study in Colorado labor history, specifically relating to coal mining. But who is the subtitle’s John Cleveland Osgood, a name that seldom appears in Colorado histories, except in advertisements that might lure travelers to Redstone? As author F. Darrell Munsell shows, he was the stubborn, aggressive leader of mining men in Colorado’s coal and coking industries at the turn of the last century.

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Red Light Women of the Rocky Mountains

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By Jan MacKell
Foreword by Thomas J. Noel
Published in 2009 by University Press of New Mexico
ISBN 978-0-8263-4610-0

Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons

As Frank Gifford once said about the sport of pro football, “There are no winners, only survivors.” As this new book by Jan MacKell shows, there were few winners and survivors in the sport of prostitution, but Central Colorado can claim a couple of well-known survivors, like Cockeyed Liz Spurgeon (or Spurgen) in Buena Vista and Laura Evans (or Evens) in Salida, who managed to survive for many years. Perhaps their survival was helped by the healthful climate.

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Revenge For The Hunted

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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.

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

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by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver
Illustrated by Richard A. Houser.
Harper Collins, 2007
ISBN: 0060852569

I found so much to appreciate in this book – a sprawling meditation on food, food politics, family, origns, and what we sometimes self-consciously refer to as The American Way of Life – that it is a bit of a challenge for me to know where to begin. So, let’s begin with: why this book? Why now? It came out in 2007, for heaven’s sake – two years ago being a sliver of eternity in America. 2007 – remember when?

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Some personal favorites

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Review by Lynda La Rocca

Books – January 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine

I HAVE TO ADMIT that I had a little trouble selecting some “favorites” for this column because, frankly, I didn’t read a lot of books in 2008 that were “new” to me in the sense of never having read them before. Instead, I had concentrated on rereading old favorites, many of which I’ve recommended previously in the pages of Colorado Central.

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Colorado 1870-2000 II, by John Fielder, et al.

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Review by Ed Quillen

Colorado – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

Colorado 1870-2000 II – Historical photography by William Henry Jackson Contemporary rephotography by John Fielder
Text by Gillian Klucas
Published in 2005 by Westcliffe Publishers in conjunction with the Colorado Historical Society
ISBN 978-1-56579-566-2

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