Selling Your Father’s Bones: America’s 140-Year War Against the Nez Perce TribeBrian Schofield 368 pages, hardcover: $26.00.Simon & Schuster, 2009. A white 30-something British guy might not seem like the obvious source to turn to for a definitive history of the persecution and flight of the Nez Perce — one of the most complex, tragic […]
Books
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Old trees, new ideas, and humility
Old Growth in a New World:A Pacific Northwest Icon ReexaminedThomas A. Spies and Sally L. Duncan, eds.344 pages, softcover, $32.00.Island Press, 2009. Many of this book’s 28 authors are the usual suspects — Jerry Franklin, Jack Ward Thomas, Tom Spies and other experts on the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. In Old Growth in […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Forestry from the inside
The Forester’s Log: Musings from the WoodsMary Stuever264 pages, softcover: $24.95.University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Forester Mary Stuever started writing newspaper columns “to share my love for forests and my passion for my chosen profession.” It’s a profession that has changed dramatically during the last 25 years, and in her new collection, The Forester’s […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
The bizarre intersection of humanity and nature
Rancho WeirdoLaura Chester212 pages, softcover, $18.00.Bootstrap Press, 2008. The cover of Laura Chester’s Rancho Weirdo features a cartoon of an armless human bound in a black sheath, banging its bloody head against a boulder. The image could be a metaphor for the stories in this collection — tales in which middle-class people, wrapped in conflicts […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Western water in the age of climate change
Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the WestJames Lawrence Powell304 pages, hardcover: $27.50.University of California, 2008. In 1893, at a meeting of the International Irrigation Congress, Major John Wesley Powell, known for his daring exploration of the Colorado River, stood up to grand applause in front of men eager […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
A conflict of values
Yellowstone and the Snowmobile: Locking Horns over National Park UseMichael J. Yochim328 pages, hardcover: $34.95.University Press of Kansas, 2009. Even as another winter recedes, Mike Yochim’s new book on snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park will remain in season. It’s an instant classic — the first comprehensive examination of a notorious nationwide controversy, packed with facts […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Renewing a battered land
Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie LandscapeRichard Manning 238 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2009. In 1874, when most of the West was still held in common, a simple invention — barbed wire — pushed the region toward a long-held national ideal: privatization. With amazing swiftness, ranchers began to enclose their lands and […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Fishing for solace
Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous LandW.D. Wetherell166 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2009. An engaging blend of history lesson, fly-fishing essay and philosophical treatise, Yellowstone Autumn describes a veteran writer’s three weeks of solitude in Yellowstone National Park. Walter Wetherell makes the trip from New England to commemorate his 55th […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Nonprofits reap the profits
Green, Inc. – An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone BadChristine MacDonald288 pages, hardcover: $24.95.The Lyons Press, 2008. Inflated executive salaries. Top brass hobnobbing at expensive getaways. Questionable side deals negotiated with no concern for the everyday folks affected by them. These problems aren’t just native to Wall Street. They also occur […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Raising cows — and kids — in the West
The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American WestLinda Hussa, photographs by Madeleine Graham Blake272 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of Nevada Press, 2009. The families described in The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West are traditional in that they are not “traditional” at all: One mother is single, and […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
History viewed through gunsights
Famous Firearms of the Old West: From Wild Bill Hickok’s Colt Revolvers to Geronimo’s Winchester, Twelve Guns That Shaped Our HistoryHal Herring189 pages, hardcover: $24.95. TwoDot/Globe Pequot Press, 2008. Chief Joseph was carrying a lever-action Model 1866 Winchester rifle that fired .44 Rimfire cartridges when he led the Nez Perce against the U.S. Cavalry […]
Posted inMarch 2, 2009: How low will it go?
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 […]
Posted inMarch 2, 2009: How low will it go?
Of flotsam and jetsam
As poetry students at a California university, my friend Merie and I walked to class along the beach. We often paused to examine dead seagulls, whose glazed eyes and tar-matted feathers we described in our would-be avant-garde verse. Somehow we never questioned where the birds came from or even why they were dead. Twenty years […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2008: Back to the future
A macabre measure of the human footprint
I’m a student of roadkill. I keep an informal tally of the carcasses I spot on the roadside — what kind, how many and where — and I note the splatters that accumulate on our car wi”ndshield. They’re an indication of the diversity and abundance of animal and insect lives along the unnatural transects we […]
Posted inFebruary 16, 2009: The Half-life of Memory
Shooting a double victory
Full-Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School: Basketball Champions of the WorldLinda Peavy and Ursula Smith479 pages, hardcover: $29.95.University ofOklahoma Press, 2008. Sixteen years before women in the U.S. gained the right to vote and long before women’s public sporting events were considered decent, a team of American Indian girls from Montana traveled […]
Posted inFebruary 16, 2009: The Half-life of Memory
A battle for the land — and soul — of the West
The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and RecoveryHoward G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, andRichard W. Hazlett617 pages, hardcover: $35.Oxford University Press, 2008. It’s no secret that the West’s public lands are in deep trouble. The American West at Risk presents a familiar litany of problems: damage from overgrazing, […]
Posted inFebruary 2, 2009: Non-navigable River Blues
The darkest element
Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the WorldTom Zoellner317 pages, softcover: $26.95.Viking, 2009. Writer Tom Zoellner has a great sense of timing. His latest work, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, hits the shelves as media attention zeros in on Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs, the explosion […]
Posted inFebruary 2, 2009: Non-navigable River Blues
Catch him if you can
The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James HogueDavid Samuels192 pages,hardcover: $23.New Press, 2008. Palo Alto High School believed James Hogue was a recently orphaned 16-year-old from a Nevada commune. Princeton University thought he was a self-educated ranch hand who lived alone in the […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2009: Blood Quantum
In praise of prey
American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost IconSteven Rinella288 pages, softcover: $24.95.Spiegel & Grau, 2008. Steven Rinella is a hunter with complex feelings about his prey. The Michigander-turned-Montanan-turned-Alaskan spends about half of his new book near-breathlessly extolling the virtues of the bison: its superbly adapted physiology, its prominent role in American history, its unlikely rebound […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Life during wartime
Refresh, RefreshBenjamin Percy256 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2007. In Refresh, Refresh, his second collection of short stories, Benjamin Percy examines the fallout of the Iraq war on the people at home. Set on Oregon’s high plateau, these tales are shaped by the tension between the banal and the bizarre. The collection’s eponymous knockout story describes […]