Southwest Books of the Year
David Laird's Picks
W. David Laird is the former librarian of the University of Arizona, now owner of Books West Southwest, a mail-order and online book service. He was on the first Southwest Books of the Year panel in 1977.
The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family
by Ralph M. Flores. University of New Mexico Press.
Written as fiction, these 14 tales ring with the truth of family history as the narrator, beginning with the memories of a four-year-old, tells of the move from Sonora into Arizona, the hardships of migrant laboring and the satisfactions of troubles conquered. Flores never blinks at trouble and never milks misfortune for extra tears. When the boys of the family travel to California to work in the harvest, for example, we see both the enticements of nightlife in the city and the dishonesty of bosses in getting work done either for no wages or at levels much reduced from what was promised. The title refers to the action taken by a family when Mexican revolutionary soldiers approached the village: hide anything valuable in the kitchen because soldiers, knowing how poor and hungry the villagers are, never bother to look there.
Waterborne: A Novel
by Bruce Murkoff. Knopf.
The title of this novel is enigmatic, for neither the story line nor any character in it is literally carried by water. Instead, hero Filius Poe is first devastated by the death of his wife and son in a boating accident, then slowly builds a new love for a boy and his mother while he serves as a major construction engineer in the building of Hoover Dam. The puzzle of the title should not, however, cause anyone interested in superb storytelling and reading pleasure to avoid this book. Wondrous descriptions of the construction process, development of characters (including one named Lew Beck, who will give some readers nightmares), and faultless dialog make this an outstanding literary achievement.
Assembling My Father: A Daughter's Detective Story
by Anna Cypra Oliver. Houghton Mifflin.
In the turbulent 1960s Oliver's father, Lewis Weinberger, well-educated son of an affluent eastern family and failure as professional architect, married a vivacious woman. Before the end of the decade they made their way to Hippy Heaven Southwest in the communes of Taos. More than five years later, when the author was just five years old, Weinberger put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, ending a drug-ridden life separated from wife and daughter, and hiding from drug dealers. Passed thirty and feeling somehow both responsible and incomplete, Anna Oliver set out to extract "the truth" of dead history from existing sources, both living and inanimate. And she reveals her discoveries in first person present tense which gives the reader a sense of accompanying her during the process. The text is sprinkled with reproductions: candid photos which put faces to names in the text, and reproductions of handwritten documents that say "look at me" in a mandatory way. As we "finish" our quests, we readers and Anna, we do not have any blinding revelation. This is, after all, reality, not cocaine-dreaming. But we, or at least this reader, found satisfaction in knowing we had done our job. As Anna says for us about her father on the penultimate page "I should forgive you."
The Dogfighter: A Novel
by Marc Bojanowski. William Morrow.
Bojanowski's narrator, an old man, begins with events in his early life in Veracruz, then moves briefly to northern California before telling of how he became a dogfighter in a town named Canción, Baja California, where he had gone to work on construction of a hotel. His powerful build made him successful at killing dogs in an arena while local businessmen and their mistresses placed bets and applauded. Noticed by both the local "boss" and by those older men in the community trying to foil the building of the hotel and preserve the community's small town atmosphere, the dogfighter must eventually choose, and all choices mean death to someone he has cared for, and likely to himself as well. A truly original narrator in an equally original story setting.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
by Aron Ralston. Atria Books.
Wilderness hiking alone (bad idea) in Blue John Canyon in southern Utah in 2003, Ralston is trapped when a dislodged boulder (much too large to lift) pins his right hand and wrist in a V-shaped slot. In his sixth day with limited food and water, and his plight and last will and testament recorded on his video camera, he understands that his only hope is to cut off the lower arm which he proceeds to do with the pliers and knife blade of a multi-purpose tool after first breaking both arm bones by prying them against the pinning rock. The text includes his previous mountain climbing adventures (he was involved in a 2002 climb of Alaska's 20,000+ foot Denali) as well as his return to climbing after he was fitted with an artificial limb that can hold appropriate climbing tools. Ralston lays it all out with incredible aplomb; no "gee-whiz" here. Photos show the entrapment and the blood-smeared rocks of the aftermath.
Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman
by Kristie Miller. University of Arizona Press.
Like so many literate people of her generation, Isabella wrote lengthy personal letters incessantly, and by choice and good fortune most of them have been preserved making Miller's job as biographer both easier and more difficult. Some potential biographers before her have been bogged down by the question: "What to choose from such a large array of material?" Fortunately for us Miller persevered and has produced a life story packed with quotations from those letters, and from diaries and other source material. Dozens of small, but well-printed, historical photos supplement the text, and for people with a yen for even more detail there is a daunting section of bibliographic notes followed by a comprehensive index. Greenway is known to most long-time Tucsonans as the founder of the magnificent Arizona Inn; now we know the rest of the story.
Bailing Wire & Gamuza: The True Story of a Family Ranch Near Ramah, New Mexico, 1905-1986
by Barbara Vogt Mallery. Foreword by John Nichols. New Mexico Magazine.
Think of this as a scrapbook drawn together by an 80+ year-old descendant of a pioneering family with access to those old trunks stored in attics and basements. Mallery's father, Evon Z. Vogt, brought his bride to his small ranch near Ramah, on the edge of the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico, near the beginning of the 20th century. Born there in 1920, the author returned to her roots after an active life and relived the joy of her youth in the photographs, letters and memories she found. Weathering the Great Depression was not easy, but the Vogt family survived helping and being helped-by their Navajo neighbors. Later there were famous visitors: the Wetherills, Frederick Webb Hodge, Charles F. Lummis, and Clyde Kluckhohn, to name a few with anthropological interests, probably the inspiration for her brother, Evon Z. Vogt, Jr.'s ground breaking studies of Navajo culture. Mallery brings it all to life with joyous prose, nearly three dozen photos, and an excellent sense of the people and events that made life worth living.
Forever New Mexico: Heartfelt Images from the Land of Enchantment
edited by Arnold Vigil. New Mexico Magazine.
Occasionally I become jaded about southwestern photographs and feel certain I have seen it all. On such occasions, fortunately for my mental health, a book comes along to jar me back to reality. This is just such a wowzer! 124 large-format, black-and-white photographs that remind us how much there was, and still is, to see in the everyday world around us. In this case it's New Mexico, but I have faith such a collection could be composed from archives anywhere. Vigil has made superb selections and captioned each with a one-sentence description and an indication of the source. A nifty index leads you to subjects you might not even think to look up (e.g., "baseball" which leads to a 1935 photo of the professional(!) baseball team's park in Madrid), and to the names of photographers such as T. Harmon Parkhurst and Russell Lee. Whether it is skiers pulled by a horses across the mesa near Los Alamos, Upper Canyon Road in Santa Fe when there were buildings only on one side of the street, boys boxing at Los Alamos Ranch School in the 1930s, or the hand-crafted courtyard doors of a church in Las Trampas, I'll wager there is something here you have never seen before or will visit again with a great sense of pleasure.
The Importance of a Piece of Paper
by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Grove Press.
In literature it is common to discover that good poets make excellent novelists, storytellers and memoirists when they turn their hand to narrative. Baca demonstrates that piece of common knowledge in this, his first published book of short stories. Good poetry is a discipline. It requires its producers to choose exactly the right word to follow exactly the right word to follow exactly the right word, ad infinitum. Other forms of wordcraft seem to require lesser strictures, and we readers seem to accept those lower standards, but when poets turn their attentions to narrative, suddenly it sings. The title story, and longest piece in this collection of eight, sings with the nuance of contemporary Hispanic New Mexico when a land grant document, which everyone knows exists, cannot be found to defend rights of the current owners as the ever-growing Albuquerque encroaches on farm and pasture land held in the same families for centuries. In Baca's crafty hands the tale of love and heartbreak and near-murder and redemption is so simply told it feels as if it sprang from the events themselves. If you don't believe that real-life sometimes has happy endings, start here.
Books of the Colorado River & the Grand Canyon: A Selective Bibliography
by Francis P. Farquhar. Five Quail Books in cooperation with Fretwater Press.
The Books of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, the Green River & the Colorado Plateau: A Selective Bibliography, 1953-2003
by Mike S. Ford. Fretwater Press.
I found it impossible to separate these two fine, small books. More than just a reprint of a classic, which was first published in 1953 and has been out of print for many years, the publishers have added to the first of these two titles a vastly improved index by Richard Quartaroli that makes access to the 55 titles and their excellent annotations a snap. The old index is also included.
The second of the two came about when Mike Ford, challenged by Phoenix bookseller Dan Cassidy, ploughed through the massive accumulation of publications in the past 50 years concerning the geographical area of the title and chose 125 items as the best. Short, pithy annotations explain why each item was chosen for this excellent guide for armchair adventuring or to prepare for that river trip on the Green or Colorado Rivers.