Communities

Feeling overwhelmed by pell-mell developments that consume the landscape of your community? Two new books suggest a remedy — a variety of innovative planning methods, illustrated with plenty of maps, diagrams and photos. Typical subdivisions are shaped around the “human context” — roads and schools, zoning, and the marketability of the lots and houses — […]

John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison, ed. 272 pages, hardcover: $29.95 University of New Mexico Press, 2005. This new collection of essays, John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures, manages to break fresh ground in discussing the great naturalist. Historic photographs, sketches and excerpts from letters brighten the sometimes-scholarly essays, […]

Mourning the loss of a special place has become a common plaint in the West. Changes in paradise always evoke regret and loss, especially when they happen on your watch and seem irrevocable. Roger Brown, a 70-year-old filmmaker who lives near Gypsum, Colo., has written, photographed and self-published Requiem for the West, an impassioned lament […]

History buffs can easily get an education alongside Western highways. Interpretive signs point out where Chief Joseph retreated, and where Lewis and Clark spent the winter. But what if you want to know what’s coming out of the smokestack in the distance? Or what gets made inside that gigantic steel structure you just passed? The […]

New Mexico’s most famous resort, Ghost Ranch, has charmed many visitors. One overwhelmed admirer proclaimed that any description of the place amounted to “an advertisement for God and New Mexico.” Area historian Lesley Poling-Kempes tells the story of Ghost Ranch and its lovers in her absorbing new book, Ghost Ranch. Ghost Ranch covers 20,000 acres […]

The backbone of the West, the Great Divide, stretches some 1,100 rugged miles from Montana to New Mexico. It’s been the home of Native Americans, artists, miners, mountain men, preachers and charlatans, back-to-the-landers and trust funders. Each group has defined the landscape for its own purpose, leading author Gary Ferguson to conclude, “Hardly a story […]

The Sum of our Past: Revisiting Pioneer Women Judy Busk 224 pages, hardcover: $32.95 Signature Books, 2004. Pioneer women are often portrayed as strong, brazen heroines or meek, conforming housewives. Author Judy Busk looks beyond the stereotypes to find the truth of these women’s lives in a book that’s part personal memoir, part historical research. […]

The Pictograph Murders P.G. Karamesines 352 pages, softcover: $21.95 Signature Books, 2004. P.G. Karamesines combines pot hunting, witchcraft, and murder in a chilling first novel set on an archaeological dig in southern Utah. A sinister stranger appears in the field camp; he models himself on Coyote, the legendary Indian trickster. When Alex McKelvey, an archaeology […]