Books & Reading

Top Picks

Billy the Kid: the Endless Ride
By Michael Wallis. W.W.Norton & Co.. 288pp. Index. $25.95.
Do we really need another book about Billy the Kid? An Internet search shows some 3,007 titles, which include books, movies, comic books, music scores, articles, and more. The author has consulted a goodly number of those items including works by Robert Utley and Jerry Weddle, who are thought to have covered the territory. Wallis has more to add to the story, including personal interviews as he attempts to present "a clear, concise, and truthful story of a young man who became a legend in his own time." [Patricia Etter]
Wallis is an experienced journalist who writes smooth, readable prose. He has obviously read a massive amount of what we might call “Billy-lit” and, as journalists do, has winnowed the grain from the chaff providing us with an account that is as much about the literature as it is about the Kid’s life. Unfortunately there is little “grain” available from Billy’s early years and the reader is left with much that is speculation until the New Mexico years when the Kid’s role in local feuds begins to be documented in letters and official records. However, Wallis knows that his version is not the final story and, as the subtitle suggests, no end is in sight for the retelling of a fascinating tale. [W. David Laird]
Brujerías : Stories of Witchcraft and the Supernatural in the American Southwest and Beyond
By Nasario García. Texas Tech University Press. 373pp. Index. $34.95.
As author, editor or co-editor Garcia has been presenting us with fascinating pieces of our southwestern heritage, usually, as is the case here, bi-lingually, for at least twenty years. His 1987 book Tales of the Rio Puerco opened for me an unknown world of folk wisdom. Brujerias is an eye-opener too. In this book he has collected and edited/translated more than 125 accounts of witchcraft, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. He presents them in six categories, the most interesting being “Witches, Spooks and Ghostly Apparitions”, “Lights, Sparks and Balls of Fire”, and “Handsome, With Hoofs and Tail”. The teller of each tale is named and Garcia’s introduction to each spine chilling section explains the category. Whether you believe in such Halloweenish things, or not, this is a terrific book by an expert. [W. David Laird]
Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer
By Richard Shelton. University of Arizona Press. 256pp. $35.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.
This is a simultaneously wonderful and painful memoir of Shelton’s efforts to establish and maintain writing workshops in Arizona’s prisons. The wonder comes from amazing accomplishments that include his students producing prize-winning books and poems; the pain comes from seeing a prison system that has no interest in rehabilitating prisoners and in fact seems to seek to thwart any efforts in that direction. If I could think of a more positive adjective than superb, I would apply it to this book. [W. David Laird]
Thousands of prisoners learned the craft of writing poetry through Shelton’s workshops. Jimmy Santiago Baca, Stephen Dugan, & Ken Lamberton were a few of his students. Mr. Shelton, an advocate of Prison Reform also discusses the injustices of the Correctional Institutions and the Justice system citing that the majority of prisoners are poor Blacks and Latinos unable to afford competent legal representation. By being in the inside, Mr. Shelton was able to observe drug smuggling by guards, and harassment and inhuman treatment of inmates including medical neglect. Crossing the Yard gives us insight into a system that doesn’t work and the lives it harms. The book is both inspiring and disturbing. I highly recommend it. [Patricia Etter]
Hecho en Tejas : an Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature
By Dagoberto Gilb. University of New Mexico Press. 522pp. . $29.95.
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. [Bruce Dinges]
Whether you are immersed in the spirit of La Raza or are an outsider looking to read some captivating and endearing poems, short stories, and essays about authentic people doing human things and asking universal questions, this book has wide appeal. The 104 selections range from personal to historical, from bleak to humorous, from youthful to retrospective. It is puro Southwest, “A celebration, a literary pachanga with cold beer, frijoles, and … smoked meat [folded] into a couple of corn tortillas….” My favorite line, one showing the spirit of the book, is from a poem by Angela de Hoyos: “I growl at the world/ and the world/ returns the complement.” This is a Southwest book if there ever was one. [Bill Broyles]
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
By Craig Leland Childs. Little, Brown and Co.. 496pp. Index. $24.99.
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. [Bruce Dinges]
Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street
By Paul S. Powers. University of Nebraska Press. 274pp. Index. Booklist Starred Review. $19.95.
This autobiography was “discovered” by Powers' granddaughter, decades after his death in 1971. It is a never-published typescript saved by an aunt. Paul Bowers was one of those writers who actually made a living during the heyday of the pulps by writing under dozens of pseudonyms, publishing hundreds of stories (mostly Westerns), millions of words, paid for at one cent per word. He, his wife, and family were constantly on the move and lived all over the American West including much time in Southern Arizona. Strange to say, his family, friends and surrounding geography don’t get much of his attention, but this is a great read, especially for those who might have an itch to make a living in the fiction writing game. [W. David Laird]
If this book had more than just a few pages on the Southwest, Pulp Writer would have made my top eight of the year, both for its insights into writing and for its riveting style. It is an exceptionally well-told story with universal appeal. [Bill Broyles]
Sanctuaries of Earth, Stone, and Light: The Churches of Northern New Spain, 1530-1821
By Gloria Kay Giffords. University of Arizona Press. 480pp. Index. . $75.00 (cloth).
Nearly 30 years ago, with publication of her first book, Five Mexican Santos from San Jose de Tumacacori, Giffords established herself as an expert on the religious art of the Southwest. Over the years she has solidified her reputation with books both technically expert and increasingly well-written. This one is a wide-ranging survey based on personal visits to, as she puts it “...every viceregal mission, cathedral, and parochial structure in the U. S., most of those in northern Mexico, and perhaps hundreds of other churches...” She provides about 200 black and white photographs and more than 300 drawings, plans, and maps so that the eye can appreciate what the words describe. This is a resource book for anyone with a serious interest in the religious architecture of our Southwest over the course of nearly 300 years. [W. David Laird]
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. [Bruce Dinges]
Walk, The
By William Eno DeBuys. Trinity University Press. 151pp. $22.95.
A beautiful story, straight from the heart. deBuys has walked along the same path for years, each time, a walk of discovery, growth and renewal. [Patricia Etter]
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! [Bruce Dinges]