Sometimes ignorance feels like bliss. When you’re stowing your breakfast eggs and sausage, you don’t want to think too much about their origins. But ignorance is also dangerous. Take, for example, the electricity that powers the stove and coffeepot behind your morning breakfast. Today, more than half of U.S. electricity comes from burning coal. This […]
Books
Posted inApril 2, 2007: Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields
Thomas McGuane’s lonely freaks
One of our most distinctive short story writers, Flannery O’Connor, famously opined, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Her subject was the metaphysical and geographical American South, its spirit inextricable from its landscape and history. […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2007: The Silence of the Bees
Mortal fear and a state of wild grace
“Grace” is not the first word that comes to mind when you picture two naked women running hell-bent through the desert night, fleeing from UFOs. “Fear” seems more apt — the primal kind that stems from being chased in the dark by a faceless predator while having numerous opportunities to impale tender flesh on ocotillo […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2007: The Silence of the Bees
Taking the conservation movement to task
Tired of discussing the alleged death of environmentalism? Fear not: Why Conservation is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground is no dirge, but a complex and cogent analysis of the American environmental movement. University of Illinois law professor Eric Freyfogle claims that “The conservation cause … is stymied less because of its disciplined opponents […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2007: Wish You Weren’t Here
A geography of the imagination
At first glance, Home Ground resembles a straightforward encyclopedia of geography. But crack the book open, and you find yourself in unexpected territory, a geography of the imagination that blends literature, science, folklore and history. Author and editor Barry Lopez got the idea for the book after a frustrating attempt to find a definition for […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
Ode to a public lands experiment
This could have been just another coffee-table volume full of stunning vistas and images of elk grazing in misty valleys. But by refusing to be yet another pretty book, Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico’s National Preserve better serves the preserve’s long history and complicated beauty. The preserve’s abbreviated history goes something like this: […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
A quest for the world’s finest pinot noir
This is no stodgy dissertation on wine and how it’s made. With the very first sentence of The Grail, Brian Doyle uncorks a full-bodied work of enthusiastic storytelling. The Grail delivers on the promise of its subtitle: A Year Ambling and Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Notes from a place of risk and hope
Writer Kevin Holdsworth copped Wyoming’s tourist slogan “Big Wonderful” to describe a place of both risk and hope, a beautiful, battered landscape rich in myth and fact. He presents it through the complementary perspectives of a mountain climber, family man and friend, describing both Utah, the state of his birth, and Wyoming, the home 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 […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 2007: Salmon Justice
A family of criminals and killers
Danielle Marie Cox came from a loving family. She attended private school through the sixth grade, had a 3.8 grade point average in high school, and earned a scholarship to Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore. But the impressionable Cox fell prey to the drama and drugs of a homeless Portland street “family” she met […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 2007: Salmon Justice
How to be #1 in the world and still be a loser
On one level, Giles Slade’s new book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, can be read as the played-straight history of the demise of things like the paper shirt front, tailfins on cars, and the pinball machine. Slade ranges considerably wider than his title lets on, however, and raises fundamental questions about the […]
Posted inDecember 25, 2006: Confessions of a Methane Floozy
A corps of visitors, not discoverers
In Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, the late historian and journalist Alvin Josephy assembles nine weakly linked essays by 10 Indian writers. A few essays are solid; some are tough to get through. But together they should enable the Anglo reader to pass through the looking glass, as Alice did in Lewis Carroll’s classic, […]
Posted inDecember 11, 2006: Old but Faithful
Travels in a sublime wasteland
It is a gift when an author transports you to the place he loves most. Writer Bill Broyles and photographer Michael Berman accomplish this in Sunshot: Peril and Wonder in the Gran Desierto, an exquisite portrait of place. Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta and Mexico’s Sierra Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar lie at the heart of […]
Posted inDecember 11, 2006: Old but Faithful
Dancing to Biederbecke in Montana
In his first novel, Montana memoirist William Kittredge serves up a simmering potboiler, a deliberately old-fashioned stew rich with The-Summer-I-Became-a-Man mythology and a poor boy/rich girl romance. The mother of The Willow Field’s protagonist, Rossie Benasco, runs a sort of halfway house in Reno for divorcées: “By the time his voice changed, Rossie had seen […]
Posted inDecember 11, 2006: Old but Faithful
The art of an alien landscape
Westerners are always surprised to realize that critics often dismiss the region’s art and literature as an inferior, derivative part of the American canon. Luckily, we have Alan Williamson, a poet and scholar with roots on both sides of the country, to set the record straight. In Westernness: A Meditation, he examines what it means […]
Posted inNovember 27, 2006: The West: A New Center of Power
An encyclopedia of rivers
Rivers are the “nerve system” of the continent’s ecology, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reminds us in his foreword to Rivers of North America. As population, industry and agriculture grow, the need for fresh water increases. But meeting that demand often entails the wholesale diverting, damming and draining of rivers. Rivers of North America is the […]
Posted inNovember 27, 2006: The West: A New Center of Power
Crafting the everyday
Stridently male: That’s how journalist Joseph Kinsey Howard characterized Butte, once the world’s greatest producer of copper. Not only was hardrock mining physically demanding, it was the most dangerous industrial occupation in America. Small wonder that Butte developed a reputation for being a man’s town or that its official history has always been told from […]
Posted inNovember 27, 2006: The West: A New Center of Power
Somewhere up the crazy river
Robin Carey’s Upstream: Sons, Fathers and Rivers is a riveting story of river ascent, with a family’s troubled history unfolding along the way. Rob and his son, Dev, former “down river” guides, decide to kayak from the mouth of the Klamath River in California 200 miles up to Oregon’s Klamath Lake. They want to learn […]
Posted inNovember 13, 2006: Bred for success
A whole lot of shaking
Simon Winchester’s latest book, A Crack in the Edge of the World, takes a comprehensive look at the country’s worst earthquake: San Francisco, 1906. The quake, he writes, “came thundering in on what looked like huge undulating waves … the whole street and all its great buildings rose and fell, rose and fell, on what […]
Posted inNovember 13, 2006: Bred for success
Elementary, my dear cowpuncher
In his new historical mystery, Holmes on the Range, Steve Hockensmith slyly tips his hat to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose 1887 novella, A Study in Scarlet, introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world. Both books feature a Western theme. In Doyle’s melodramatic tale, a murder in London is linked to the history of Mormon Utah. […]