Laura Pritchett’s first novel, Sky Bridge, is set in “Nowhere, Colorado,” on the ranchland east of the plains town of Lamar. In this tiny place assaulted by big forces — climate change, the global economy, federal policies — teenage narrator Libby finds the prospects slim: “… all my old schoolmates are either doing drugs or […]
Book Reviews
Posted inNovember 14, 2005: Back On Track
The native gardens of California
“I’ve always wondered why people call plants ‘wild.’ We don’t think of them that way. They just come up wherever they are, and like us, they are at home in that place.” — Clara Jones Sargosa, Chukchansi In her new book, Tending the Wild, ethnobotanist Kat Anderson examines the state of California’s “wilderness” at the […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2005: Back On Track
Imperfect Pasture: A Century of Change at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Imperfect Pasture: A Century of Change at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming Bruce Smith, Eric Cole and David Dobkin 156 pages, softcover: $14.95 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Grand Teton Natural History Association, 2004. The National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyo., is either a conservation success, or, as the scientist-authors of […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2005: Back On Track
The Mountain Encyclopedia
The Mountain Encyclopedia Frederic V. Hartemann and Robert Hauptman 291 pages, softcover: $29.95 Taylor Trade Publishing, 2005. The Mountain Encyclopedia delivers just what its title promises: intriguing facts and figures about mountainous topics from calderas and Chomolongma to vicuñas and virga. Colorful maps and photos complement the entries, many of which come from the authors’ […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Cougar Management Guidelines
Cougar Management Guidelines Cougar Management Guidelines Working Group 137 pages, softcover: $21.95 WildFutures, 2005. Wildlife managers and citizen activists alike will find this book useful. It collects current cougar research into a set of guidelines for managing these secretive and increasingly rare big cats. Full of charts and figures, the book explores topics such as […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Odes to an urban mountain range
Like other mountain ranges that dominate city skylines, Albuquerque’s Sandia Mountains are too easily taken for granted. The Sandias’ diverse hiking trails range from the lung-busters that scale the west side’s granite face to lush trails on the east that meander through mixed conifers. But how many of the city’s half-million residents take advantage of […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
A long walk into hope
This is a book by a tall skinny guy with a goofy warm smile who took “a long walk across America’s most hopeful landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.” Along the way, he meets up with old friends, many of whom also seem to be tall skinny guys with goofy warm smiles, who […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Tony Hillerman’s Navajoland
Tony Hillerman’s Navajoland Laurance D. Linford 318 pages, softcover: $19.95 University of Utah Press, 2005. Fans of Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, featuring Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, will delight in Laurance Linford’s obsessively detailed guide to every single mesa, pueblo, trading post and gully mentioned in the books. This second edition adds 45 new […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming
Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming Winona LaDuke 294 pages, softcover: $18 South End Press, 2005. Environmental and Indian rights activist Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe, was the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. In this book, she examines the struggle of American Indians to reclaim their sacred sites and […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Meloy’s last message — from bighorn country
Author Ellen Meloy died unexpectedly at her home in Bluff, Utah, last Nov. 4. The gifted writer, illustrator and environmentalist leaves behind an impressive canon of nature writing that includes Raven’s Exile, The Last Cheater’s Waltz and The Anthropology of Turquoise, a book short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Eating Stone, completed just before her death […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
An honest take on a tough land
In his debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner has woven a world where hunger, death and beauty go hand-in-hand. The book is set almost entirely on Kantner’s native Alaskan tundra, but don’t expect naturalist hyperbole. There are no splendid sweeping landscapes, big animals are either food or a threat, and cold is a given. Consider […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
The grasslands — humanity’s big backyard
“We live in grasslands, and we live off them,” write biologists Carl and Jane Bock. “They are our backyards, in an evolutionary if no longer always in a literal sense.” For more than three decades, the Bocks have studied humanity’s backyard, mostly in the form of an 8,000-acre former cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. On […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
The Boys of Winter
The Boys of Winter Charles Sanders257 pages, softcover: $19.95University Press of Colorado, 2005. Charles Sanders, an avid skier himself, tells the true stories of three champion skiers who joined the Army’s 10th Mountain Division during World War II. After training on the West’s snowy peaks, they went off to fight — and die — in […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
To Save the Wild Bison
To Save the Wild Bison Mary Ann Franke309 pages, hardcover: $29.95University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Mary Ann Franke traces the controversial history of Yellowstone National Park’s bison, the only wild bison herd that’s persisted since pre-Columbus days. Praised as a potent restorer of biodiversity, the animals have also been persecuted as transmitters of disease; dozens […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Wounded
Wounded Percival Everett 256 pages, hardcover: $23 Graywolf Press, 2005. Set in the Red Desert of Wyoming, this novel is a modern-day Western with a twist. John Hunt, a black horse trainer, gets pulled into the dark currents of hate crimes when an Indian friend’s cows are killed by racists and a friend’s gay son […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
The restoration will not be televised
In nature, there is neither right or wrong — only consequences. The truth of that is demonstrated in After the Fires: The Ecology of Change in Yellowstone National Park. The wildfires that swept Yellowstone in 1988 were the first prime-time forest fires, according to the book. Television viewers stared aghast at the raging flames and […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
Out of the video arcade and into the woods
For the first time in history, the bond between children and nature has been broken, writes child advocate and journalist Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods. The culprits are many: Kids prefer to play inside where the electrical outlets are, instead of outdoors where the wild birds sing. Computers, TV and video games […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
Aliens in the Backyard: Plant and Animal Imports to America
Aliens in the Backyard: Plant and Animal Imports to America John Leland 248 pages, hardcover: $29.95 University of South Carolina Press, 2005. We know by now that exotic species often wreak havoc: Asian tiger mosquitoes spread West Nile virus, Australian eucalyptus trees increase California’s fire risk. But Leland shows us that they can bring benefits, […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936
Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900-1936 Cathryn Halverson 230 pages, hardcover: $45 The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Probably you’ve never heard of the three Western women featured in this book. But if you’re not put off by literary criticism or footnotes, you’ll meet Mary MacLane, who lived in Butte, Mont., and […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2005: The Gangs of Zion
The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism
The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism by Robert W. Righter 277 pages, hardover $30: Oxford University press, 2005 Robert Righter, a history professor at Southern Methodist University, chronicles the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Although the water needs of San Francisco […]