A mother comes to terms with her son’s childhood in the urban environment.
Andrea Appleton
For farmers, small is beautiful
Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of AgribusinessLisa M. Hamilton309 pages, hardcover: $25.Counterpoint, 2009. Few of the authors behind the recent glut of information on — and the impassioned opinions about — our modern food system have done the obvious: Spend time with farmers. But in her new book, Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in […]
The spirit of the place
The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in MontanaRick Bass384 pages, softcover: $26.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. The Yaak Valley in the northwestern corner of Montana is one of the wildest places in the continental United States, home to grizzly bears and mountain lions, wolverine and elk. Nature writer Rick Bass, who lives there, has devoted […]
The meat of the matter
Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory FarmsNicolette Hahn Niman278 pages, hardcover: $23.99.HarperCollins, 2009. When lawyer Nicolette Hahn was first assigned to sue gigantic polluting hog farms, she didn’t care for the idea. It sounded like an “immersion in poop,” she writes in her first book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and […]
An underground uprising
Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor WarThomas G. Andrews386 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Harvard University Press, 2008. Rusted bits of metal, staircases to nowhere, perhaps a weathered gun tower: These fragments are all that remain of southern Colorado’s coal-mining towns. The casual visitor would never guess how central to Western history their inhabitants were. There is one […]
Blood Quantum
A complicated system that determines tribal membership threatens the future of American Indians
Birds of a feather
Home Ocala, Fla. (Dave); Bozeman, Mont., and Patagonia, Ariz. (Tam)Subscribers since 2002 At a remote watering hole in northeastern Montana called Harry’s Nite Club, HCN readers Dave Schweppe and Tam Scott and HCN intern Andrea Appleton crossed paths one moonlit October evening. Andrea was on assignment, and Dave and Tam were on their annual visit […]
The fruits of their labor
A guard, a vineyard owner and prisoners talk about a new farm worker program
Roan on the auction block
BLM set to open Colorado plateau to gas drilling despite broad opposition
Regulating the river
Jim Hagenbarth has spent his life ranching along the banks of the Big Hole River in southwestern Montana, on land his family has worked for more than a century. The area remains sparsely populated and mostly agricultural, much as it was when Hagenbarth used to get in trouble as a kid for riding calves behind […]
