Books of the Southwest: Forty-Nine Years of Southwestern Americana Reviews
In 1957, Books of the Southwest, a current scholarly review of Southwestern Americana, went into publication, reviewing books written by authors from or about the Southwestern United States. For many years, Californian David Laird edited the journal with reviews written by the best and brightest across the Southwest. In 1995 David decided to hang up his spurs on the publication and it was passed to Dr. Francine Ramsey Richter, Associate Professor of English at Sul Ross State University. As a money-losing venture, the journal struggled to stay in publication. Most of its subscribers were libraries and the rare, wonderful Southwestern enthusiasts. Five years ago, the journal was discontinued in print and went completely on-line. Today marks another of its incarnations: Books of the Southwest as web journal. There are many reasons to celebrate the continuation of the journal. Books being published on the Southwest can be groundbreaking for everyone. The mythology of the Southwest contains many, many layers–cultures and histories of many peoples, struggles with the land, struggles with identity, survival. And yet there is something deeper than this survival. To live in the Southwest is to know this identity implicitly, for it plays out in all areas of life. It is in the Southwest that ancient cultures thrived and many years later entirely different cultures would find their fortunes in cattle,oil, and gold. It is where ancient rights concecrated the ground for centuries, only stories in stone left to tell their colorful riches, now many uncovered in the literature being published. It is a history and story fertile of the centuries. The Southwest offers a model of the power of story as this vivid and vast mythology changes and expands to meet the new requirements of peaceful and respectful yet passionate existence, both honoring the past and bringing it to the moment full of its own beauty. And so, we are grateful to the authors writing on the Southwest who offer unique insight into this wild, vast and wonderful territory. For if the world no longer has any workable mythology, as is often said, the Southwest certainly offers rich worlds of mythos and tradition. For this is where humans have told their stories with their hands, survived, loved even the dryest, harshest land, and understood how it takes a community to have anything worthwhile. We offer here in these book reviews a look at the wide variety of important topics and issues being published on and about the Southwest today. We would like to provide you with a sense of place, invite you to experience and come to know it. For it is a world unlike any other.
Books of the Southwest Current Title Selections:
Author Dan Dagget, in his new book Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature brilliantly offers a balance to the continuing debate between environmentalists and humans using the land: humans learning to be beneficial to nature, and both nature and humans benefiting in the process. Dagget offers case studies, real people healing the land and learning from it. Importantly, the book honors the presence of humans on the land.
Editor David Taylor’s Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing gives insight into the changing nature and landscape of Texas as told by those writers who love and know it best. Addressing the major regions of Texas in a voice of honor and awe of being from this diverse landscape. Fourteen essays include such writers as John Graves, Carol Cullar, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Barbara “Barney” Nelson.
Also celebrating place are The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes by Susan J. Tweit, a small lovely publication, compact enough to take on any outdoor excursion to enjoy the calming yet passionate experience conveyed by Tweit. While she conveys the awesome harshness of this Colorado landscape, her voice invites the reader in for an experience in wonder both in flora and fauna.
Sunshot: Peril and Wonder in the Gran Desierto by Bill Broyles with photographs by Michael P. Berman , also offered by University of Arizona Press is a textual and black and white pictoral shrine to the awe-inspiring experience of stark beauty in the desert. The personal tone in the writing and the selection of quotes distributed throughout with the majestic photography makes this a treaure for those passionate about this staggering landscape.
America’s 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey by Monte Hartman, while about the plains states Oklahoma, Kansas, North and South Dakota, also celebrates the plains of Texas in this vivid coffee-table worthy artistry. The color formatting stands out–beautifully framing the perfectly selected photographs. Each page offers something that will delight the heart and draw one closer to warmly feeling this wonderful sense of place.
Home: Native People in the Southwest edited by Ann Marshall and with poetry by Ofelia Zepeda is visually stunning. The colors from cover to cover honor the rich traditions. Marshall uses the words and arts of the people who live this cultural life of the earth. Her use of personal quotes, pictures of the artistry, and poetry make the book a devotion, a statement of loyalty, respect and celebration. This book is representative of the remarkable collection at Heard Museum, who has published the book. Their opening words say it all: “This is our place. This is our story. This is our HOME.”
Museum of New Mexico Press offers a new look at William Henry Jackson’s The Pioneer Photogapher. For almost ninety years Jackson took pictures and documented nineteenth-century western America. Bob Blair, the compiler, editor, and annotator of this edition, takes a new perspective on the man and the 1929 edition. His reexamination puts Jackson’s life work in new format and descriptions of passages, photographs, and paintings. Blair clearly shows the importance (and problems) of Jackson’s documentation of life and landscape in the wild west.
Felix D. Almaraz, Jr. gives to us The San Antonio Mission and Their System of Land Tenure published by the University of Texas Press. Almaraz examines the system of landownership in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of the San Antonio’s five Spanish missions. The text is more technical study than historical story, offering data and schlolarly research to show the change of the system during the progression of owners. After filming a portion of our movie Road to El Paso at Mission San Jose, one of the San Antonio missions, I was surprised to learn of the dirth of historical scholarship Almaraz seeks to fill.
Southern Methodist University Press offers Documents of the Coronado Expedition, a grand-scale documentary history in this volume of thirty-four original documents. This impressive work (both in size and scope) takes a critical insider’s perspective on the people, circumstances, and environment, examining the words and experiences as well as the far-reaching effects. New English transcriptions are given of some never before published documents.
On a quite different expedition, a rather wild kind on whitewater rapids was Norman D. Nevills. Nevills’ adventures are given life once again in this edited version of his river travels in: High, Wide, and Handsome. Editor Roy Webb presents Nevills’s own river journals to show the wild ride that was Nevills’s life and passion. Nevills is credited with beginning whitewater adventure tourism. Chronicled here is the human side of a ground-breaking outdoor enthusiast.
A completely different take on life tied to a river is Lucy Fischer-West’s Child of Many Rivers: Journeys To & From the Rio Grande with a Foreword by Denise Chavez. This is a memoir that begins in El Paso and follows through into a myriad of other international places, but always returns to the heart of experience. This is the Rio Grande river and the border area where Fischer-West’s parents, from two different cultures, met and made a life together. It is a statement of the powerful influence of both family and place.
Other Notable Titles:
History is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley
The Peopling of Bandelier: New Insights from the Archaeology of the Pajarito Plateau
Thirty Years Into Yesterday: A History of Archaeology at Grasshopper Pueblo
The Archeology of the Donner Party
Voices from Four Directions
Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literature of North America
Alternative Leadership Strategies in the Prehispanic Southwest
Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature
Writing on the Wind: An Anthology of West Texas Women Writers
Old Las Vegas: Hispanic Memories from the New Mexico Meadowlands
The Apache Indians: In Search of the Missing Tribe
Californio Voices: The Oral Memoirs of Jose Maria Amador and Lorenzo Asisara
White Justice in Arizona: Apache Murder Trials in the Nineteenth Century
Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West
Chicano Art for Our Millennium
?Que Onda? Urban Youth Cultures and Border Identity
Discovering North American Rock Art
Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America
Anonimo Mexicano
Mexican Americans and Language
