Books
Southwest Books of the Year
- Complete List
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Browsing All Nonfiction Books - O :
Clicking on a book cover will search for the book in the catalog. If it is not part of our collection, you may request it by clicking on the Can't Find It link. An icon indicates if the book is chosen by a panelist as one of the year's best.
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Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future
- By , Melissa K. Nelson. Bear & Company. 359 pp. . $18.00.
- This collection of presentations from the annual Bioneers conference shares the ideas of the world’s indigenous leaders for restoring our ailing planet.
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Oro Valley
- By Barbara Marriott. Arcadia Publishing. 127 pp. $19.99.
- Oro Valley has long been one of the more interesting and scenic suburbs of Tucson, Arizona. A number of local characters have lived there, including rancher Buster Bailey, florist Hal Burns, heiress Daisy Field, hunter Bee Dee Adkins, sheriff John Nelson, and pioneers Matilda and William Sutherland. The stage coach route has become a highway, the old ranches have become apartments and malls, and homes stand where prospectors once searched for gold, but the history lives as photographs of this book. []
- Otero Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grassland
- By Gregory McNamee, Stephen Capra, Stephen Strom. University of New Mexico Press. 92 pp. $24.95.
- Solid account of the past and foreseeable future (bleak) of a vast grassland lying between El Paso and the Guadalupe Mountains which run north for about 100 miles from a spot well into the Texas Panhandle to a place well-north of the New Mexico-Texas border. []
- Otero Mesa is 1.2 million acres of one of the largest remaining natural Chihuahuan Desert grasslands left in the U.S. It is also one of a diminishing number of large public lands in the Southwest that are not open to oil and gas exploration. As we go to press, the outgoing administration plans to change that. The move is opposed by the government and people of New Mexico. This book’s story is important because it is representative of the on-going battle over the long term management of public lands and choices between development and extraction or preservation and nature, old paradigm consumption or new paradigm sustainability, corporate influence vs. public interest. Thanks to award-winning nature writer Greg McNamee, and the remarkable photography of scientist Stephen Strom and naturalist Stephen Capra, it is a story well told. Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico and former U.S. Secretary of Energy, wrote the forward. []
- Out of the Limelight: An Autobiography
- By Shaw Kinsley, Jane Constance Loew. Jane Loew. 287 pp. . $27.00.
- The granddaughter of motion picture pioneers Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew recounts her privileged childhood in New York, her teenage years at Tucson High and the University of Arizona, and her adult life connected with charity work and the movie industry. Although Loew focuses mostly on her personal relationships with family, husbands, and celebrities (the index reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century Hollywood), readers of her plain-spoken autobiography also receive an intimate view of Tucson from the 1930s to the present--particularly through her connections to the Old Tucson movie set with second husband Robert Shelton. []
