Southwest Books of the Year
Bruce Dinges's Picks
Bruce Dinges is the director of publications for the Arizona Historical Society.
The Wailing Wind
by Tony Hillerman
Hillerman is at the peak of his impressive form in this seventeenth mystery set in his trademark Four Corners region. The discovery of a dead body in a pickup truck puts Navajo police sergeant Jim Chee and retired lieutenant Joe Leaphorn on the trail of a lost gold mine and the source of mysterious wailing emanating from the abandoned Wingate Ordnance Depot. A tight plot, interesting characters, and the lure of ghosts and lost treasure, combined with Hillerman's impressive knowledge of Navajo customs and lore, make this a compulsive page-turner.
Spain in the Southwest
by John L. Kessell
Kessell, a distinguished scholar of the Spanish borderlands, distills a lifetime of research into this magisterial history of European settlement of the present-day Southwest. An engaging stylist and master of intriguing detail, Kessell effortlessly leads readers through three centuries of triumph and tragedy as flesh-and-blood human beings struggle to advance cross and crown in the New World. In the process, he demolishes longstanding stereotypes and provides scholars and general readers alike with the most comprehensive and colorful portrait to date of Spanish conquest and colonization.
Diné
by Peter Iverson with photographs by Monty Roessel
Iverson, a history professor at Arizona State University, draws on a wealth of oral tradition, interviews, archival documents, and personal experience to paint a vivid and detailed portrait of Native American adaptation and endurance in the Southwest. Beginning with the Navajo creation story, he skillfully traces the history of the Diné from their semi-nomadic origins through the tragedy of the Long Walk, the dark days of the reservation period, and the twentieth-century emergence of the Navajo Nation. Throughout, Iverson emphasizes the unique cultural qualities that have enabled the Navajo to persist and prosper in the face of adversity. Sympathetic without sacrificing objectivity, this finely wrought book is likely to stand for the foreseeable future as the standard history of the Navajos.
Captives & Cousins
by James F. Brooks
The Civil War may dominate our view of slavery in the Americas, but it's not the entire story. In this pathbreaking book, a borderlands scholar examines three centuries of raiding by native people and newcomers in the Southwest and explains how the practice of warfare and the absorption of captives changed the face of colonial society. He suggests that multiculturalism in the region dates back much farther, and its roots go much deeper, than previous writers have suspected. Although aimed primarily at an academic audience, this bold and compelling study opens a revealing window on the personal, social, and economic consequences of Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and American interaction and the formation of ethnic identity in pre-twentieth-century Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas.
The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body
by Alberto Rios
In these graceful poems, Rios draws on his Nogales childhood and the vibrant rhythm of border life to explore themes of love and loss, fact and fable, family and friendship in the multicultural Southwest. A master of language, he evokes the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the borderlands in a way that is both personal and universal, and above all highly accessible. Rios is one of Arizona's best kept literary secrets. A National Book Award finalist,The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body should attract the wide readership that he richly deserves.
Top Ten Picks:
- Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family by Charles Bowden
- Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Will Bagley
- Madam Millie: Bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan by Max Evans
- The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman
- Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California by John L. Kessell
- Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest by Sandra Day O'Connor and H. Alan Day
- Diné: A History of the Navajos by Peter Iverson with photographs by Monty Roessel
- The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body by Alberto Rios
- Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands by James F. Brooks
- Red Water by Judith Freeman