Arizona Books

63 trails along the Mogollon Rim are well covered. Stevenson is a mapping genius. His elevation profiles prepare the biker before the trip. The accuracy is unbelievable. I highly recommend. Great book!

From Front Jacket:

"'There is nothing else quite like it,' writes David Lavender, 'a deeply entrenched water corridor 280 miles long through a desert wilderness of almost overwhelming beauty. No other American river offers, in one unbroken stretch, as great an aggregation of rapids.'

When John Wesley Powell ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, he did not have such forewarning - nor may he have suspected how many others would follow in his wake. Taking to the river by boat has become as much a lure to adventurers as climbing a mountain 'because it's there,' and guided trips through the Canyon now test the mettle of 15,000 brave souls every year.

Today's river rats are linked to Powell by a colorful chain of individuals who braved then-unknown perils of water and rock. David Lavender has traced this history of adventure, beginning with legendary prospector James White who might even have preceded Powell through the Canyon when he was forced to flee Indians on a makeshift raft. A subsequent century of river running has seen the exploits of such individuals as Robert Brewster Stanton, who wanted to build a railroad through the Canyon's Inner Gorge and lost three men in his surveying expedition; trapper Nathaniel Galloway, who perfected a technique for running rapids - by entering a rapid with his boat stern first; the Kolb brothers, who made the first films of running the river; and Georgie White, the 'Woman of the River,' who by introducing rubber rafts ushered in the modern era of river running."

From El Planeta Platica Lawrence Taylor and Maeve Hickey's The Road to Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 1997) offers a delicious narrative and evocative photos on the blue highways stretching from Tucson, Arizona to Magdalena de Kino, Sonora. "The Old Nogales Highway is a road, like the fabled Route 66, shares in an American romance different from that of that of the interstate. Here, the up-to-date sits awkwardly, unstylishly cheek by jowl with the embarrassingly eccentric and the downright ugly." (p. 58) Proving that travel is best enjoyed when it's not rushed, the authors take time to talk to the people who live in the Sonoran Desert. Anthropologist Taylor quotes a wide range of people from American Automobile Association clerks "Lots of cars get stolen down there" to muralists to cattle ranchers. The book finds its voice in this regional chorus and turns its focus on picturesque characters, such as the U.S.-borne mariachi who won't cross the borderline: "Fernando was not about to risk the Mexico of his imagination, of his mariachi, by penetrating that border. He would consider flying over it, landing in the center of the nation, in the Guadalajara of Mariachi Vargas, but Fernando Sanchez was not going to take the road to Mexico." (p. 9)

James Snead's Ruins And Rivals: The Making Of Southwest Archaeology presents the story of archaeology in the Southwest from the 1890s to the 1920s. Two major research traditions are scrutinized and compared - expeditions sent from major eastern museums, and those supported by archaeological societies based in the Southwest. Ruins And Rivals reveals how competition between institutions and those who espouse them has shaped modern Southwest archaeology. Eastern "museum men" and Western boosters all used archaeology for the approval of wealthy patrons, the advancement of their careers, and even their own personal glory sometimes at the expense of others. Ruins And Rivals is fascinating as a look into the foibles of the human psyche, as well as into the history of the Southwest. Highly recommended.

Ann Zwinger is a peerless writer. Each paragraph, sentence, and word is like a drop of sunlit dew; sparkling and yet sublime. You need a dictionary sometimes, but her great use of the King's English raises your consciousness without being tiring or boring. Each sentence invites a tour to the next, just as Zwinger's favorite river, the Green River in Wyoming and Utah, always seems to have just one more tantalizing view around the next bend.

Mrs. Zwinger combines notes from several trips on the Green into a single, seamless narrative traversing the river from its source to its meeting with the Colorado. The only areas left out are the Fontanelle and Flaming Gorge reservoirs, which are but temporary vandalizations by the Bureau of Reclamation.

The book visits the river both from a naturalist's and a historian's viewpoint, with plenty of metaphors and visualization of an an almost lyrical nature included. It is never-ending delight to read Mrs. Zwinger's loving prose about one of the few still partially wild places in our country. You can close your eyes every paragraph or two, and be magically transported to the scenes and events she unfolds. The book also has a gently humorous quality, as when Mrs. Zwinger describes clouds of mosquitoes, and losing a Dutch oven in the murky water.

Mrs Zwinger's knowledge of geography is absolutely correct when she points out that the Green River is the true master stream of the Colorado watershed, and that only a historical accident has resulted in the former "Grand" river being renamed as the "Colorado".

I should note that the author is also a gifted artist and cartographer. Her maps at each chapter's start are excellent guides, and her numerous charcoal sketches of plants, birds, tools such as the old Green River knife, and the like, more than make up for lack of photographs in the book. Indeed, such would only be distractive.

Mrs. Zwinger's last sentence in the book, penned as the Green River meets the Colorado at the foot of Stillwater Canyon, reads "I do not want to hear the river ending." This is an apt sentiment as applied to her book as well.

This was one of the first books I ever read on the West. Since then, I hunt up and read everything she writes. I have never been disappointed. You may wish to read ""Wind in the Rock" and "The Mysterious Lands", among others. I close by simply stating that any library that doesn't have this fabulous book on the West, the river, and the human spirit, is incomplete.

The late Morris K. Udall, Jim McNulty's friend from college, was once described as being "too funny to be president." Reading this book, I realized that McNulty was too decent to be a long-term congressman. He lasted only two years. Mo Udall, another decent man, lasted for 30, defeated only by Parkinson's, but he was an exception. McNulty, an Irishman from Boston, practiced law and made a heavily Mormon area of Arizona his political base for nearly half a century. "Running Uphill" is an interesting tale of his service in the Arizona Senate, his political work for both Morris and Stewart Udall (JFK's interior secretary) his near-defeat of Barry Goldwater for a U.S. Senate seat and his decision to join the Peace Corps at an age where most men sign up instead for golf or shuffle board. Through it all, you realize that this is an honest, honorable and considerate man whose reward for a good freshman term in the U.S. House of Representatives was a narrow loss to a challenger who ran a negative campaign. McNulty may have been too nice to stay in Congress, but Arizona and the nation are better for his having chosen to serve the public.

The lives of Chicanos and Mexicanos have become a welcome and fertile ground for some of our most talented, young poets (Rigoberto Gonzalez and John Olivares Espinoza come to mind). Juan Delgado with his new collection "A Rush of Hands" is no exception. But Delgado also addresses those simple, beautiful experiences that cross all ethnic lines. An example is his short poem, "Kiss":

As you spoke, a cricket sang
In my tumbleweed heart,
And wild sage surrounded us.

When your lips touched me,
A bird felt a fountain
With its fluttering wing.

(If "Kiss" doesn't make you break out in a smile, then you must never have loved!) Both despair and joy permeate Delgado's honest, uncomplicated yet lyrical lines. This is a beautiful, powerful rush of words.

Here is the table of contents, for those who want to know a bit more.

Introduction "The Concepts of `Sacred Geography': Its Origin and Scope"
F. K Lehman (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

One "Mapping the Sacred in Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia"
Juliane Schober (Arizona State University)

Two "Place, Power, and Discourse in the Thai Image of Bangkok"
Richard O'Connor (University of the South)

Three "Transformations and Continuities: Sacralization, Place, and Memory in Contemporary Bangkok"
Marc Askew (Victoria University of Technology)

Four "Landscape of Pilgrimage, Landscape of Power: Social Interactions at Vijayanagara Temple Complexes"
Alexandra Mack (Pitney Bowes)

Five "New Sacred Lands: The Making of a Christian Prayer Mountain in Highland Borneo"
Matthew Amster (Gettysburg College)

Six "Muslim Spaces in South Asia"
David Damrel (Arizona State University)

Seven "An Accidental Imago Mundi: Spatializing Social and Religious Change in Islamic Java"
Ronald Lukens-Bull (University of North Florida)

Eight "Ini Masih Kerajaan (This is Still a Kingdom): Sacred Geography and Social Drama in Yogyakarta."
Mark Woodward (Arizona State University)

"The cranes called to me one windy autumn night. I lay on the couch, absorbed in a novel when a distant sound--compelling, familiar--propelled me upright to listen. There it was again, faint but unmistakable: 'khrrrrr, khrrrrr,' the throaty cry of sandhill cranes."

In "The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes," as in her earlier books, Tweit is a poet. Her opening paragraph, quoted above, compels the reader to listen and read on. Luminous reflective passages occur throughout the book, passages in which Tweit explores such subjects as the meaning of "home" (25) or where our "profound and courageous" visions may come from (43).

These exquisitely wrought personal responses to some of the mysteries we share with our fellow creatures, as well as with one another, are woven into beautiful descriptions of the birds and the landscapes they inhabit, along with a lively and detailed history of the San Luis Valley--a stunning tapestry.

To adequately describe a place like the San Pedro River, if such a complex and fascinating place can ever be adequately described, one must know it like an old friend. To reach that level of familiarity, one has to have spent countless hours with the place, gaining an intimate knowledge of the multitudes of nuances and wonders to which the casual visitor will be oblivious.

If a person gains such a level of understanding of a great natural area, and if that person happens to be an accomplished writer, a worthwhile and entertaining book may be the result, if we, the readers, are lucky. Fortunately, that is precisely what has happened in the case of the book, The San Pedro River, by Roseann Hanson.

Few areas in our country are more biologically rich than the San Pedro River. This small river and the riparian forest that surrounds it are home to more species of wild animals than virtually any other area of equal size on the North American Continent. Nearly 400 species of birds have been seen there. The San Pedro was named one of the Last Great Places in the Northern Hemisphere by the Nature Conservancy. Having been there, I would not hesitate to drive thousands of miles to walk its banks again.

Ms Hanson knows the San Pedro River from having roamed its forests over much of her life. Too, she is an alert observer and an excellent writer with a deep understanding of people and wildlife, and a real gift for description. Her rendition of the call of a yellow-billed cuckoo was so well done that I instantly recognized the bird before reading its name later in the text. I could hear the call; it took me back to the West Virginia Appalachians where I grew up, and to the haunting song of what we then called the rain crow.

If you have any interest in birding, in wildlife, in ecology, in the Southwest, in the preservation of certain of our most precious natural areas, or in the San Pedro River itself, or if you simply have a desire to sit down and read something that can transport you to an incredibly interesting outdoor area, buy at least two copies of this book. You'll want to share it with friends, and you won't want to be without a copy yourself.