High Country News September 03, 2010
Feature
Still Cranish After All These Years
A specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens considers evolution and becoming a crane.
Current
Lumbering along, barely
The timber from Colorado's beetle-killed trees is not finding much of a market.
Beyond beefalo
New technology finds cattle DNA lurking in bison once thought purebred.
Editor's Note
On the wing
This special "books and essays" issue circles around the theme of migration.
Uncommon Westerners
Daniel Orozco is out of the office
In Moscow, Idaho, Daniel Orozco writes darkly funny short stories that flirt with the macabre.
What was and what is
In Anchorage, Alaska, Inupiaq poet Joan Kane dreams of the uninhabited island where her ancestors lived.
Road warrior
Ted Conover talks about roads in life and writing.
Book Reviews
Fall books, from steampunk to conservation science
There's a good harvest of new books by Western writers.
Wait until darkness
In his debut novel, The Wilding, Benjamin Percy captures our ambiguous attitudes toward the natural world.
How we got to this place
In Driving on the Rim, Thomas McGuane creates a dark picaresque novel.
Nature and cities in context
In Cities and Nature in the American West, environmental historians dissect the relationship between the urban West and the natural landscape.
Of history and home
Poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko serves up a place-based memoir in The Turquoise Ledge.
Taking stock
Annie Proulx's memoir Bird Cloud and Gary Snyder's book-and-film project, The Etiquette of Freedom, unveil the private lives of two iconic Western writers.
Essays
The Terrain of This Ambition
A writer wrestles with the huge shadows cast by the men and women of “Literary Utah.”
The Second Second City
A native Chicagoan who now lives in Montana goes searching for New Chicago, Mont.
The Western Lit Blues
A Western writer is tired of being typecast as a Western writer.
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