Southwest Books of the Year
David Laird's Picks
W. David Laird, former librarian of the University of Arizona, now owner of Books West Southwest, a mail order and on-line book service.
Positively Fifth Street: Murders, Cheetahs and Binion's World Series of Poker
James McManus. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 422pp. $26.
James McManus, an award-winning journalist and life-long poker player, talked Harper's into a $4,000 advance to go to Las Vegas to cover both Binion's World Series of Poker and the trial of Ted Binion's paramour and her lover for Binion's murder (he was the son of the founder of the tournament). Proceeding to turn his advance into the $10,000 needed to enter the poker tournament by winning "satellite" tournaments, McManus, who had never played in the WSP, made his way to the final table! Every serious poker player's dream. His surprisingly revealing account integrates the tournament and the trial along with wonderful glimpses of poker champions past and present. A book for poker players to savor.
The River In Winter: New and Selected Essays
Stanley Crawford. University of New Mexico Press. 170pp. $21.95.
Reviewed by another panelist.
Brownsville: Stories
Oscar Casares. Back Bay Books (Little Brown & Co.). 192pp. $13.95.
Reviewed by another panelist.
Las Misiones Antiguas: The Spanish Missions of Baja California
Edward W. Vernon. University of New Mexico Press. 288pp. $44.95.
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.
Reviewed by another panelist.
Folk Saints of the Borderlands: Victims, Bandits, and Healers
James S. Griffith. Rio Nuevo Publishers. 175 pp. $14.95.
As James Griffith makes clear in his text, the saints of the title should probably be put in quotes for none, with one possible exception, fits the Catholic Church's idea of sainthood. He gives us verbal pictures (and photos, too) of Juan Soldado, Teresita, Jesus Malverde, Pancho Villa (!), Don Pedrito and El Nino Fidencio, each with background, historical account; legends past and present; even questions and doubts. A concluding chapter notes a few potential folk saints-in-the-making and leaves us with the broad-minded notion that the definition of sainthood might be in need of a little expansion.
Pueblo Imagination: Landscape and Memory in the Photography of Lee Marmon
Leslie Marmo Silko, Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz. Beacon Press. 156pp. $35.
Books of photography often fail to satisfy us (at least those of us of a certain age) because, for the most part, we have been there, seen that. This book is an exception for its combination of images and words, the latter coming from three of our stellar writers of the Southwest: all Native American and all able to capture in words this land and its people in ways that make us understand just a little bit better why we love it here. Many of Marmon's images are black and whites from the 1950s and 1960s, reminding us, accurately, of what it was like in those days of our youth.
The Parrot Trainer
Swain Wolfe. St. Martin's Press. 288pp. $24.95.
Reviewed by another panelist.
New Mexico Then & Now: Contemporary Rephotography
William Stone, Jerold Widdison. Westcliffe Publishers. 155pp. $39.95.
I am a sucker for re-photography books, those paired images that show us graphically how much (or, in some cases, how little) places have changed. Dividing his work into five geographical areas of the state, plus Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Stone pairs his contemporary, mostly color images with virtually identical ones that are 90 to 140 years old. If the cover pair of a tent city for workers on the Elephant Butte Dam (1911) faced by a shot of the modern Damsite Marina with dozens of boats and a 25-foot "bathtub ring" doesn't capture your imagination, check your pulse.
Blanket Weaving in the Southwest
Joe Ben Wheat, edited by Ann Lane Hedlund. University of Arizona Press. 440pp. $75.
There are truly two lifetimes of study, assimilation, and integration in this, the late Joe Ben Wheat's magnum opus, for editor Hedlund is herself a world-renowned expert on southwestern Native American weaving, with numerous books and exhibit catalogs to her credit. Here the editing seems flawless, permitting Wheat's knowledge to show at its best. In addition to nearly 200 color plates with full technical descriptions, Wheat's texts are virtually mini-glossaries or mini-histories under such headings as Weaves or Design or Colors or Fibers and Yarns. Not intended nor appropriate for a beginning collector or reader with only a general interest, this is, nonetheless, one of the most important books on southwestern weaving published in recent decades.