Southwest Books of the Year
Bruce Dinges's Picks
Bruce J. Dinges, Ph.D., is director of publications, Arizona Historical Society.
Brownsville: Stories
Oscar Casares. Back Bay Books (Little Brown & Co.). 192pp. $13.95.
In this auspicious debut collection of short stories set in the author's hometown, Casares explores with wit and imagination themes of friendship, loss, and identity played out in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. A boy learns a hard lesson about dignity and work, a borrowed hammer opens a chasm between neighbors, a monkey's head creates a rift between a young man and his parents, an old man wrestles with years of sorrow over a lost daughter, the theft of her cherry-red bowling ball transforms a widow's life. The locale is particular, but the themes are universal and the stories are honestly told. The winner of the James Michener Award and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, Casares is a voice to be reckoned with in southwestern letters.
Getting Mother's Body
Suzan-Lori Parks. Random House. 257pp. $23.95.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Parks stands the plot line of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying on its head in this sometimes touching and often hilarious story of a teenaged black woman and her outlandish family in 1960s West Texas. When Billy Beede discovers she is pregnant by a smooth-talking salesmen who has a wife and family in Oklahoma, she decides that salvation lies in digging up the jewelry that family legend says was buried with her mother on the site of a soon-to-be shopping mall in LaJunta, Arizona. While satirizing southern racial attitudes and poking good-natured fun at her protagonists, Parks produces an immensely entertaining and ultimately heartwarming exploration of the bonds of family and friendship.
American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857
Sally Denton. Alfred Knopf. 306pp. $26.95.
Reviewed by another panelist.
The Guaymas Chronicles: La Mandaderas: El Guero on the Streets of Northwest
David E. Stuart. University of New Mexico Press. 389pp. $24.95.
In the 1980s, the author—an anthropology professor— took a writing class from Tony Hillerman at the University of New Mexico. We don't know the grade he received, but judging from this polished memoir of his adventures as a young graduate student in Guaymas, Mexico, we can assume he did all right. Drawing on his journals and recollections, Stuart describes in engaging detail the collapse of his relationship with a local girl and his subsequent life as El Guero ("Whitey") among the hustlers and street people in the Sonoran port during the late 1960s and early 1970s. His clear eye for detail and assured sense of pacing hold the reader attention as he chronicles his life as a contraband runner and as a facilitator for Americans in Mexico. The most affecting part of this unique story, however, revolves around Stuart's relationship with a feisty, street-smart shoeshine girl who becomes his messenger ("la mandadera") and, eventually, his surrogate daughter. Stuart's self-effacing memoir opens a fascinating window on a hidden, and now lost, Mexico that few Americans have had the opportunity to experience, much less record with so much empathy and insight.
Exit Wounds
J.A. Jance. William Morrow. 368pp. $24.95.
Reviewed by another panelist.
Juan Bautista de Anza: Basque Explorer in the New World, 1693-1740
Donald T. Garate. University of Nevada Press. 323pp. $39.95.
Although their names are scarcely remembered today, few men did more than Juan Bautista de Anza, father and son, to advance settlement in the present-day Southwest, including northern Sonora, southern Arizona, and southern California. National Park Service historian Garate, a self-confessed "anzaholic," goes a long way toward rectifying the oversight in this first volume of a projected trilogy chronicling the adventures and accomplishments of the Basque soldiers, ranchers, explorers, and colonizers. Drawing on personal experience and exhaustive documentary research, Garate paints a vivid portrait of the senior Anza as a capable, conscientious, hardworking servant of Cross and Crown, who defended royal interests in the New World, particularly in his oversight of the famous Arizonac silver discovery that gave its name to the future state and planted the roots of livestock raising on New Spain's northern frontier. Along the way, he lifts the curtain on the substantial contributions of Basques in the spread of Spanish civilization. This beautifully rendered biography will stand the test of time.
Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona
Ryan Harty. University of Iowa Press. 158pp. $15.95.
Harty creates a fictional Arizona quite unlike any other in this award-winning debut collection of short stories in which haunted characters search for scraps of happiness that seem to reside just beyond the next desert sunset or in the shadow of Bob's Big Boy. In the opening and closing pieces, a youngster wrestles with his relationship to his troubled older brother. In between, the memory of a Led Zeppelin concert serves as the yardstick for a man's life, a substitute teacher and a homeless teenager form an edgy relationship that dissolves when they return from San Francisco to Phoenix, a brother learns difficult lessons about himself as he cleans out his dead sister's Las Vegas apartment, a female comparative literature instructor and a gay Indian studies professor form a bond in an ASU neighborhood bar, parents deal with the mechanical meltdown of their robot son, and an ex-con experiences a moment of redemption on the highway between Tubac and Tumacacori. These sad tales, with their crystalline moments of revelation, offer unsettling glimpses into the heart of the suburban Southwest.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Jon Krakauer. Doubleday. 372pp. $26.
In a book that is at once spellbinding and profoundly unsettling, the author of the best-selling Eiger Dreams and Into Thin Air explores the nature of religious zealotry, using as his vehicle the 1984 murder of American Fork, Utah, housewife Brenda Lafferty and her infant child. As disturbing as the crime itself is the fact that the murderers were Brenda's brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who to this date feel neither guilt nor remorse for their actions, claiming that they were acting under instructions from God. With the events of 9/11 haunting the background, Krakauer traces the growth of mainstream Mormonism and carefully explores the manifestations of Mormon fundamentalism, particularly among the polygamous residents of Colorado City on the Arizona Strip. The result is a chilling glimpse into the minds of these particular fanatics and a thoughtful rumination on "faith-based violence," which Krakauer describes as the "dark side to religious devotion." Although Krakauer has chosen to focus on an aberrant strain of Mormonism, the lessons he draws are universal.
Sky Full of Sand
Rick DeMarinis. Dennis McMillan Publications. 271pp. $30.
If it weren't for Jim Crumley, DeMarinis would be indisputably the best under appreciated southwestern writer currently living in Missoula, Montana. The former El Pasoan has crafted a dark comic gem in this raunchy and raucous story of a down-on-his luck ex-body builder and former junior college remedial math instructor caught up in the sleazy and dangerous world of drug trafficking and money laundering at the Paso del Norte. A nifty plot, smart dialogue, and razor-sharp satire make for an engrossing read that lays bare the unsavory reality of urban life along the U.S.-Mexico border. As Crumley notes in his introduction to this handsomely designed Dennis McMillan production, DeMarinis "has always hung in there, nailing the heart of American humor to the gall bladder of American foolishness." If there is a shred of justice left in the world, Sky Full of Sand should attract the wide audience DeMarinis richly deserves.
Child of the Fighting Tenth: On the Frontier with the Buffalo Soldiers
Forrestine C. Hooker. Oxford Press. 280pp. $25.
Forrestine C. Hooker was the daughter-in-law of Willcox rancher Henry Clay Hooker and a best-selling novelist at the turn of the twentieth century. But most memorable in her eyes were her childhood years, when she was "Birdie" Cooper, the daughter of Captain Charles Cooper of the famed 10th Cavalry buffalo soldiers. Late in life, she recalled those exciting and romantic days of army life in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona. Remarkably, in her early sixties, she was able to recapture through a child's eyes the comradery of frontier soldiering and personal experiences with Nelson Miles, Quanah Parker, Geronimo, and other legendary southwesterners. Few memoirs of the period are as readable, or better convey the pride of frontier soldiering.
Fanny Dunbar Corbusier: Recollections of Her Army Life 1869-1908
Patricia Y. Stallard. University of Oklahoma Press. 348pp. $29.95.
As a young bride in the 1870s, Fannie Dunbar Corbusier accompanied her army surgeon husband to Fort Verde and other isolated Arizona military posts. In the mid-1880s, she returned to the territory when her husband was stationed at forts Bowie and Grant. An uncommonly observant woman blessed with healthy curiosity, she paid careful attention to events large and small, which she later recorded for the benefit of her family. Through her eyes, readers gain a vivid sense of the hardships and joys of daily life and raising a family at remote outposts.