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Bruce Dinges Picks

Billy the Kid: the Endless Ride
By Michael Wallis. W.W.Norton & Co.
Wallis deftly sorts through a wide array of often-conflicting archival and published sources to paint a vivid portrait of the Southwest's most famous outlaw. From his birth, probably in New York City, to his violent death at the age of twenty-one at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, Henry Antrim (a.k.a. Billy the Kid) unwittingly planted the seeds of legend as he played a small but conspicuous part in the saga of violence that accompanied the settlement of Arizona and New Mexico territories. Although Wallis uncovers no new pieces of evidence to help unravel the puzzle of the Kid's life, he does a masterful job of describing the times, places, people, and events that molded his character and shaped his legend. This is a superb, and engagingly written, synthesis of current scholarship.
Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer
By Richard Shelton. University of Arizona Press
In this remarkable memoir, University of Arizona creative writing professor Shelton describes, in poetic and sometimes gut-wrenching detail, three decades of conducting workshops in Arizona's prisons. His successes are notable and heartwarming - award-winning authors Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ken Lamberton, and others - just as his repeated defeats at the hands of corrections personnel are crushing and spirit numbing. Throughout, readers will be inspired by Shelton's profound humanity and, hopefully, aroused by his informed rage at a society that uses its prisons as dumping grounds for problems it would rather not face.
Fugitive Landscapes: the Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
By Samuel Truett. Yale University Press
In a book that is as well written as it is meticulously researched, historian Truett takes a revealing look at the late-18th and early 19th century Arizona-Sonora borderlands. What he discovers will shock 21st-century readers accustomed to border guards, electronic surveillance, and concrete barriers. Instead, Truett paints a portrait of fluid social, economic, and cultural landscapes that defy national boundaries. It is a world in which transnational corporations such as Phelps Dodge and William C. Greene's Cananea Consolidated Copper Company work hand-in-hand with U.S. and Mexican businessmen and politicians to exploit resources and extract wealth from an untamed frontier where custom and tradition hold sway. Truett's groundbreaking study redefines the way in which we view U.S.-Mexico relations.
Hecho en Tejas : an Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature
By Dagoberto Gilb. University of New Mexico Press
Aptly described as a "literary pachanga," Gilb's zesty sampling of poetry, song, letters, memoirs, stories, photographs, paintings,and drawings conveys the arc and depth of Mexican-American artistic expression in the Lone Star State from the 16th-century explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca to today's emerging writers. Emphasis is on the 1930s to the present. Although intended for classroom use, this well-selected and entertaining collection deserves a broad audience among lay readers as well.
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
By Craig Leland Childs. Little, Brown and Co.
Childs, the award-winning author of The Secret Knowledge of Water, leads readers on foot and by truck from the Four Corners region into northern Mexico, following the footprints of ancient Puebloan civilization. Along the way, he talks with archaeologists who share often-conflicting theories to account for the flourishing culture of Chaco Canyon around 1100 A.D. and its seemingly sudden disappearance three centuries later. Childs listens closely, compares scientific conjecture with his own informed observation, and ties it all together in an engrossing and understandable narrative. An impressive bibliography attests to Childs's immersion in his subject matter and provides the rest of us with a sweeping survey of current scholarship.
Land So Strange, A: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
By Andres Resendez. Basic Books
Resendez, a history professor at the University of California-Davis, brings fresh insights and breathes new life into this classic Southwestern adventure tale. The sole survivors of a 300-man expedition to colonize Florida in 1528, Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, including the Moorish slave Estebanico, embarked on an eight-year odyssey on foot across the continent, traveling among native people and laying the first European eyes on present-day Texas and northern Mexico at the same time that native people caught their first glimpses of Europeans. This rousing story, based on extensive research, places Cabeza de Vaca's epic journey in the broader context of Spanish exploration and settlement. Along the way, Resendez dispels persistent myths of a virgin continent and reminds us that European conquest of the New World and its native people did not have to embark on the brutal path it ultimately followed. A highly entertaining and enlightening read for scholars and general readers alike.
Once in a Promised Land
By Laila Halaby. Beacon Press
Halaby's magical and moving novel, set in Tucson during the months following the 9/ll tragedy, follows the lives of an upper-middle class Jordanian couple unsettled by events thousands of miles away. Hydrologist Jassim Haddad finds his life spiraling out of control after he accidentally kills a boy and attracts the attention of the FBI; his wife, Salwa, suffers a miscarriage and is drawn into a harrowing affair. Framed by an ancient folktale, Halaby's intricately woven plot explores rifts in the American dream and reveals the strong threads of humanity and culture that bind us to one another.
Sanctuaries of Earth, Stone, and Light: The Churches of Northern New Spain, 1530-1821
By Gloria Kay Giffords. University of Arizona Press
Gloria Giffords reads Spanish Colonial architecture like bibliophiles read good books. In this sumptuous volume, she surveys church buildings and furnishings from the Pacific to the Gulf coast and finds them representations in stone and mortar of what today we might term "multiculturalism"-a blend of Spanish/Moorish influences modified by New World native practices. Going from the general to the particular, Giffords describes in encyclopedic detail church buildings and builders, furnishings and decorations, vestments and religious images, symbolism and iconography. Hundreds of photographs and exquisite line drawings illuminate the text. Giffords has produced nothing less than a masterpiece, rich in detail, breathtaking in scope, and joy to behold.
Walk, The
By William Eno DeBuys. Trinity University Press
In a two-room house near a bend in northern New Mexico’s Rio de las Trampas (if you think “River of Traps” you may remember deBuys’ 1990 award winning book of that title), the author considers his life and the microcosm of a world around him. He describes a walk he has taken literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times: a circuit through a pass in the nearby hills, along the river, across a meadow, and back to his adobe rooms; forty minutes, he says, at a fast pace. Somber and thought-provoking stops along the way give him scope to meditate on subjects as diverse as water, horses, wildfires, divorce, life and death. A quiet book to read in a comfortable chair!

About Bruce Dinges

Bruce Dinges is director of publications for the Arizona Historical Society.