Southwest Book Reviews

It’s April.  If you’re dreaming of white water rapids, vermillion cliffs, and death taunting summer fun, I’ve got a book for you: Clyde Eddy’s A Mad, Crazy River.

Mr. Eddy was no seasoned river man.  He was a New York office worker.   But he’d spent his honeymoon at the Grand Canyon, and there he found his river.  It was a river with a reputation.  Scores of boaters had died trying to navigate it.  John Wesley Powell beat it in 1869. 

A ghostly father leads his living son through weeds to an owl’s hiding place.  The owl spreads its wings, taking father and son in.   This is the final image in Miles Waggener’s new poetry collection, Sky Harbor.  Sounds like the ending to a good ghost story, doesn’t it?  Indeed it is.  Ghosts of one sort or another inhabit these spooky but brilliant poems.

This fall, the writer Ann Patchett did something radical.  She opened a bookstore.  This goes against the trend. The indie bookstores are practically extinct. I miss Flagstaff’s old landmarks, McGaugh’s Newsstand on Aspen, Aradia Books just across the tracks.  I’m glad we’ve still got Starlight Books on Leroux.

I was thinking, if you want to buy your child a book for Christmas, what are the options?  The big chain bookstores?  I guess.  The internet?  Sure.  Download Where the Wild Things Are and hand your kid a Kindle. 

Writer Sergio Troncoso graduated from Harvard, studied philosophy at Yale, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico.  But he started in a Texas barrio.  In his latest novel, he tells the story of upward mobility in a family much like his own. 

When Beth Alvarado was a child in the Fifties, her parents moved to Grand Junction, Colorado at the time, a uranium hotbed. They came with a proud legacy: They were from a line of people who had seized opportunity and done well.

The family roots are pre-Revolutionary War. One grandmother had been a Mormon pioneer, another, a store-bought bride. A gambling grandfather won a handsome family home in Hayward, California. Through the generations, gambling and hard work had paid off. By the 1950's, the family was upper class, propertied and educated.