Finding Beauty in a Broken WorldTerry Tempest Williams416 pages, $26.Pantheon Books, 2008. When asked to accompany artist Lily Yeh to Rwanda to help create a memorial to the country’s genocide victims, author Terry Tempest Williams initially refused. Perhaps best known for her book Refuge, which draws a profound emotional parallel between her mother’s losing bout […]
Jared Blackley
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
Riders and writers, hobos and fauxbeaux
Riding Toward EverywhereWilliam T. Vollmann188 pages, hardcover: $26.95 Ecco, 2008. Embittered by the policies of the Bush administration, disillusioned by the general fear growing within our society and slowed by age and poor health, National Book Award Winner William T. Vollmann sets out on a series of freight trains through the Western United States. He […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
A brief, interpretive look at the Indian Wars
Author Michael Blake is best known for his fictional accounts of the often-violent cultural misunderstandings between Euro-Americans and Native Americans; his novel Dances with Wolves was made into a film and won several Academy Awards. But in his latest book, Indian Yell, Blake shifts his focus from historical fiction to historical fact. Chronicling 12 of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
A tale of shame and glory in the Southwest
Hampton Sides’ latest book, Blood and Thunder, is an expansive treatise on an expansive subject: Manifest Destiny and the opening of the desert Southwest. Sides uses Kit Carson — with his distinctive combination of chivalry, heroism, cruelty and unflinching complicity with inhumane policies — as a sort of thread to weave together the history of […]