Oklahoma Books

Dana Gardner illustrates this survey by ornithologist Skutch, who here provides a general science guide arguing that principles of increasing harmony drive the living world. From biological concepts of how evolution proceeds despite paradoxes to issues of preserving biodiversity and understanding compatibility, Harmony And Conflict In The Living World provides a scholarly, involving analysis of concepts of nature, exploitation and conflict.

This is a fine example of intelligent but accessible writing in which science, philosophy and theory combine to inspire hope. Dr. Skutch has studied aggression and behavior of avian species,and he has witnessed a great deal of destruction in Meso-America. Amazingly, he is able to use his experience to illustrate a path for harmony in contemporary society. I may not agree with every detail, but his overall concepts and optimistic viewpoint are compelling and worthy of serious study by anyone concerned with our planet's future.

Rilla Askew writes about Oklahoma like no one else. In this novel, she perfectly captures the longing and despair, as well as the love and fragile thread of hope that keep Harlan Singer and his child bride Sharon moving, as they ride the rails, going nowhere during the hard days of the Depression. Askew's prose is lyrical (and every bit as good as Toni Morrison's and William Faulkner's) and resonates with beauty and pain. This novel will haunt you long after you turn the last page.

Harpsong. The title sings as does the story. Sometimes disturbing as good people struggled during the Depression, Harpsong is an anthem to the human spirit. Harlan Singer, a wanderer like so many of that era, steals the hearts of the Thompson family and their daughter Sharon. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride are part of an odyssey with others riding rails, hitchhiking and all with no particular destination.
Unlike Grapes of Wrath--a mostly incomplete account of Oklahoma during the Depression--Harpsong was written by a native Oklahoman, not a carpetbagger who never visited the locale written about. Rilla Askew tells a wonderful and desperate story of those who stayed behind to deal with their fate.
As one unnamed speaker says: "The Joads wouldn't have left out from Sallisaw or anywhere else around here on account of tractors and dust. They might have left, but it wouldn't have been due to tractors and dust, no matter what some stranger might have wrote in a book. Truth is, some left, but most stayed, dumb as lambs to the slaughter maybe, but we were determined to live with the devil we knew. That devil wore a few different faces."
With Harlan and Sharon, we live in hobo jungles, Hoovervilles and ride the rails in a giant figure eight with Oklahoma in the pinched middle. Always returning to Oklahoma, but never coming home, Sharon follows Harlan on his search for a somewhat mystical and mysterious friend. Along the way, Harlan Singer becomes another folk hero.
Harpsong is a love story blended with history, folk tradition, adventure and renewal. The harshness of the times and the generosity of those with anything to share is also part of the story. It is a story of despair and perseverance, of love and brutality; a story of wayfaring orphans searching for home only to find there is no home to return to. It is a story of hard luck people struggling in hard times Oklahoma, of bank foreclosures and failing farms. It is a story of faith and endurance.
Speaking to the Grapes of Wrath-created myths about Oklahoma, award-winning author Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story in Harpssong, a novel built on legend and historical event in Depression era Oklahoma. Drawing from newspaper accounts of events from this time period and her own Oklahoma heritage, Askew reveals that not everyone left Oklahoma with Steinbeck's Joad family and that many of Oklahoma's folk heroes grew out of this era.
Author Rilla Askew was born and raised in Eastern Oklahoma and knows whereof she writes. She is the author of a collection of stories, Strange Business, which won the Oklahoma Book Award and two other award winning novels, The Mercy Seat and Fire in Beulah.
For the rest of the story about Oklahoma's Depression years and its people, Harpsong tells it like it was.
Harpsong, is the first in the Oklahoma Stories and Storytellers series to be published the OU Press.

Reviewer: A reader from Southern Colorado - Northern New Mexico. An excellent aid for those of us researching our family roots in New Mexico. This book does much to explain and date the migration of our Hispanic/Indian ancestors in and from the Rio Grande Valley during the past 400 years.

In this book Nostrand describes the cultural geography and history of the "Hispano homeland" -- a region in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado with a distinct and interesting history and culture. He also traces the connections between this region and outside influences, from the early Spanish settlers, to the Pueblo Indians and Anglos, to relations with other Mexican Americans in the U.S. today. This book is useful in understanding borderland influences further away from the more often represented U.S./Mexico border. Covering over 400 years of history, it shows how border influences change and last through time. It's well written, extremely thorough with good maps tracing "intrusions" of other cultures into the region, and good tabular information, too. I found this book invaluable for my own work in northern New Mexico, but this book may also be useful for those interested in rural development, community studies, and sense of place, as Nostrand articulates well what the Hispano Homeland means to the people who live there and why it becomes necessary for some to leave. It is a good complement to Carlos Velez-Ibanez' Border Visions, which is less geographically based and focuses more on cultural place closer to the U.S. - Mexico border.

Dan Flores has lived most of his life in the Horizontal Yellow. Another, more historical term for this land would be the Spanish-Mexican Frontier. Florida was not settled from Mexico, of course, and the settlement of California was decades to more than a century later.

Flores explores this land from both the history and natural history points of view, with the historical part generally beginning with the first Spanish-U.S. contact as part of post-Louisiana Treaty boundary negotiations.

Not all Texas is the Southern spillover of Dallas and Houston; get acquainted with the rest of it, and adjacent areas, in this book.

Dan Flores' long-awaited new book once again proves he has few peers when it comes to a deep understanding of his native Near Southwest, a vision for its long term health, and the ability to weave a tale which is scholarly, literary, and deeply personal.

as a collector of militaria this book is one of the indispensable tools that i need to identify historicaly significant US cavalry uniforms and accoutriments.

I was a friend of Randy from meeting him in 1991 til his death. He was one of the most persistent men I ever knew. Born in Oklahoma of mixed descent, Anglo and Native American, he attended the Naval Academy and served for many years. He became an accomplished artist and illustrator. He spent many years preparing his monumental work. Just when it was finished and ready to submit, he went to town on an errand, upon returning, he discovered his entire collection gone--the studio had burned to the ground. And he had to begin all over again. It is a testimony that he finished it and sent it in. Even though Volume Four was published post-humously. Not every man gets to fulfil his life's ambition as Randy did. Every illustration in this multi-volume work has been drawn by him from original materiel. Where relevent the complete text of regulations is quoted. For example, in the period which I research, that from the 1880s to today, the volume three, reprints the complete uniform regulations in the teens, not just the portion on mounted men. Thus, the work is useful also for those interested in the military up to 1943. One must elucidate on the title a bit. As stated, it is not just on the mounted horse cavalry so celebrated in John Wayne movies, but covers all the mounted troops, dragoons, mounted rifles, and cavalry in the period of the frontier expansion, before the Civil War, then both North and South, and the post war frontier patrolling days. Not only is the equipment, both individual and horse, of the cavalryman covered, so is that of the artillery man where it differed. The coverage is relevent to all mounted men--engineers, signalers, and hospital corpsmen, and their clothing and equipment.

This book is a must have for trail riding in Oklahoma. I have lived here most of my life and was surprised at how many horse riding areas I was not aware of. The author gives excellent directions into camps as well as crital info on parking, tying, facilities, and requirements. The trail descriptions are well written and accurate. Some trails have seen improvement since the publishing date so it's a good idea to call the contact numbers for updates. Highly recommened!

We found this book to be very helpful. Not only does it list many horse trails, it gives information about services available at the camp grounds and directions to the camp of your choice.

This book evokes the horror of the bombing, and the beauty of the generosity of a world, to this horror.

I was in Oklahoma City the day of this incident, arriving within hours after the bombing and am more intimately familiar with many of the events connected with it than those who were not there. The plane I arrived on was full of people from many Federal agencies who were going down to investigate the event, as well as press on their way down to cover the story. It's a day I will never forget. What I found most touching about this book were the individual photos of those innocent 168 people who were executed for no good reason with a brief personal statement about each, e.g., the adorable 14-month old who "loved to have her picture taken," the 6-month old who was just beginning to crawl and had just learned to say "Dada," or the lovely young woman who had just been married for two months. It makes me want to cry all over again, as I did that day. I just came back from there earlier today and, last night, went to visit the site again (my third time), and was just as touched this time as the first time I went there. And the best thing is that the proceeds go to help the victime.

I have absolutely NOTHING good to say about ANY of Dan L. Thrapp's books ( just read my extensive, debunking reviews of his "Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches" and "Conquest of Apacheria" right here at amazon.com and find out!). As for Eve Ball, she has done an excellent job compilling accounts from Apaches themselves, which she expended great time-consuming efforts to draw out of them - especially from Daklugie, the embittered youngest son of Juh, chief of the Nedhnis.

This book is of profound value and importance to anyone who is seriously interested in the Apache and/or in Apache/European conflict because it contains NOTHING BUT first-hand accounts provided by Apaches, as opposed to books by crank writers such as Dan L. Thrapp (who routinely camouflaged his own tastes, likes, and dislikes within his rambling writings on historic facts and incidents).

Understand that while I do not adore the Apaches (in the twisted, Politically Correct sense of today) and that I also do not venerate any of their leaders or warriors of frontier times, I do respect them and have an intense interest in their own perspectives on making the change from the life way of "Wild" Indians to civilized citizens of an industrial and technological superpower. And after reading this book of Eve Ball's, I am very pleased about having purchased it.

Within these pages you will recieve "insider information" on the Apache religion, their social mores, their views of non-Apaches, the logic their leaders employed when trying to make sense of what took place during the European invasion of their territories, and much more.

Most importantly, you will find yourself given intimate information on many of the leaders, on their personalities, their capabilities, their alliances and so forth.

If you read this book and then read anything by Dan L. Thrapp or other cranks who write about the Apache, you'll soon realize what these other so-called "authors" are capable of in terms of distortion of historic fact and also in terms of injecting their own biases, likes, dislikes, and fantasies into historic accounts in order to stear their readers to an opinion on people and events that is desired by these disgusting information manipulators.

Another aspect I really liked about this book is the way the personalities of the various Apaches whom Eve Ball interviewed came through. You can see by their words who still had intensely negative feelings about civilization and who was more accepting. But best of all, there is the correction of details connected to what really did happen during the many Apache wars and their confinement on reservations before being shipped east. These corrections are worth ten times the price of this book alone because they offer sensible and accurate evaluations of various occurances between Apaches and Europeans, and occurances surrounding various prominant Apache leaders and warriors. Much distortion concerning Geronimo, his leadership qualities (always called into question by the crank, Dan L. Thrapp!), his personal life, his views and strategies, his religious observances, his "Powers", and his later years in the east are all set right by never-before-heard intimate details provided by Indians who were with him on the warpath and on the reservations. After reading this book, Geronimo becomes a very interesting, highly astute and intelligent, multi-dimensional personality. A far cry from his popular image of either a one-track-minded, blood thirsty savage or the more recent (and equally inacurate)Politically Correct version which holds him as some sort of poor, persecuted, helpless soul constantly hounded across the Southwestern mountains and plains. The Apache statements concerning Geronimo alone, blow ALL of the drivel spewed out by Dan L. Thrapp right out of the water in terms of credibility.

Actually, I can't say enough about this book in the positive sense. I'm glad Eve Ball produced it. She did both the Apaches and we Whites a great service in giving us a document that really does allow us to understand one aspect of Frontier history accurately. Equally, it serves as a means to FINALLY discredit the blathering swamp of details which comprise fanciful, distorted, and biased works by the likes of Dan L. Thrapp!

If you want great reading on the Apaches and on their role in frontier history, read "Indeh, An Apache Odyssey". Its superb! The bottom line is, "go to the source" and who better to explain aspects of the Apaches than the Apaches themselves?!

Dick Schaap was right when he said, "Robert W. Wheeler is Jim Thorpe's Boswell." Not only did Wheeler exhaustively research Thorpe's life but he and his wife, Dr. Florence Ridlon, got his Olympic medals restored. This is the gold standard.

Tom Benjey, author of "Doctors, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs" and "Keep A-goin': the life of Lone Star Dietz."

THIS IS THE FINEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN, OF THE FAMED NATIVE AMERICAN, JAMES FRANCIS THORPE...1912 DOUBLE-GOLD MEDAL OLYMPIC CHAMPION, FIRST TEAM FOOTBALL ALL-AMERICAN-1911 AND 1912, FIRST 'BONUS-BABY' IN BASEBALL'S MAJOR LEAGUES-1913, SAVED PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL VIA HIS PLAYING PARTICIPATION-1915, FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE PRE NFL-1920... THORPE, 'THE LEGEND'..FEARED AS THE 'SCOURAGE OF THE PRO GRIDIRON', AND LOVED BY AN ENTIRE COUNTRY...AS WELL AS TOLD BY A KING, THAT HE WAS INDEED, "THE WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE!"...NUFF' SAID!

The author has obviously done a tremendous amount of research, and his portrayal of Sutter, the Californios, and the Native Americans puts a reader into a position of feeling that he is right there at the time. No one is portrayed as being an idol to be admired, but just as they must have been, complex human beings interacting with others motivated by their own personal self interest. We learn not all Indian tribes are the same, and that they were reacting to the opportunities and racism prevalent at the time. The historical interplay of Mexico, England, Russia, and the United States is very well shown, not just stated. The author writes in a very accessible style. When he does not know what happened, he says so, and then makes conjectures clearly labled as such. Albert Hurtado deserves a Pulitzer Prize.

Albert L. Hurtado's JOHN SUTTER: A LIFE ON THE NORTH AMERICAN FRONTIER is a top pick for any high school or college-level history collection, and for California history holdings in particular. John Sutter founded a modern settlement in California's Sacramento Valley whose economy depended on Indian slaves and free laborers: it drew immigrants and fortune seekers alike, and made Sutter one of the richest men in the early West - a wealth brought down by his poor business sense. Professor Hurtado uses a range of source materials to provide the definitive coverage of Sutter's life, times, and rise and fall. An essential coverage.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch