Southwest Books of the Year
Introduction
Hey there! 
You with this publication in your hand. We hope you’ve seen one like it before, because this is the 29th edition of Southwest Books of the Year. Our goal is to make a list of every book we can find published in the last 12 months—fiction and non-fiction—with the American Southwest as its locale. This year, that complete, annotated list—more than 275 titles—can be found by clicking on "Complete List" above. But what we call the “Best Picks” are here in this publication, which is distributed to public and university libraries and many bookstores throughout Arizona. There are 27 picks. Ten of them have been chosen by more than one panelist, and those books are “Top Picks.”
And who are the members of the Southwest Books of the Year panel? They are: Bill Broyles, a retired TUSD teacher, an author and a naturalist; Bruce Dinges, director of publications for the Arizona Historical Society; Patricia Etter, curator of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at Arizona State University; W. David Laird, former head of libraries at the University of Arizona and an online bookseller; and Richard Quartaroli, special collections librarian at Northern Arizona University and a veteran Colorado River runner. We also have a selection of children’s books from Deborah Bock, librarian for Pima County Public Library’s Elizabeth Steinheimer Collection of children’s books about the Southwest.
Our titles are wide-ranging, and this year they seem to touch almost every area of interest including history, folklore, culture, and education. And for the first time, two of the titles are self-published. This year the book selected by the most panelists, 4, is Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, about the first 19 years in the life of “Teresita, the Saint of Cabora,” a young healer who lived and healed in Mexico in the decades before the fall of Porfirio Diaz and the start in 1910 of the Revolution. It is followed closely by 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos by Jennet Conant (chosen by three panelists). Using unpublished memoirs, Conant has produced a riveting tale of the development of the atomic bomb.
—J.C. Martin, coordinator
Thanks & Sponsorship
Southwest Books of the Year – Best Reading 2005 is published by the Pima County Public Library in partnership with the Friends of the Tucson-Pima Public Library and the Arizona Historical Society. This is the 29th annual edition. It was begun by the Arizona Daily Star in 1977 and continued by the Library in 2000.
The publication is made possible by a gift from the Friends of the Tucson-Pima Public Library and in part by grants from the Arizona Humanities Council and the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records Agency under the Library Services and Technology Act, which is administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Members of the Pima County Public Library’s Southwest Literature Project Committee are: Kathleen Dannreuther, chair; Deborah Bock; Bruce Dinges, director of publications for the Arizona Historical Society; Marly Helm, president-elect of the Friends of the Tucson-Pima Public Library; Rona Rosenberg; and Dianna Thor. Nancy Ledeboer is the director of the Pima County Public Library.
For his help as a ready reference, thanks goes to Robert Pugh and his Trail to Yesterday Book Niche, P.O. Box 35905, Tucson Arizona, 85740. We also thank the numerous publishers who provided the Southwest Books of the Year panelists with free review copies of their books.
Kudos to proofreader Mary Carbonaro Canavan