Colorado Books

Through masterful prose, Michael Engelhard indelibly paints the landscape of the Colorado Plateau on the canvas of our hearts and minds. Those of us who, like him, love the southwestern desert and its magnificent canyons discover that, indeed, there ARE words to describe what we see, what we feel, and what we take with us from our encounters with this land. His descriptions give voice to our speechlessness in the face of the overwhelming beauty of the landscape.

What began as a plan to hike 120 canyons in tribute to those lost to the damming of the Colorado River at Glen Canyon became, as his subtitle says, a "sacred geography." But it is so much more. It is also an adventure, a personal journey, and a love letter to the physical and spiritual forces that carved these canyons and to those in whose footsteps he walks.

As a reader, I hiked beside him and listened to his heart. I paddled down the Green River with him and felt my shoulders ache from the effort. I marveled at the play of light and shadow on canyon walls. I saw again those canyons I knew, but I saw them with new eyes, and I understood more clearly my own fascination with this land.

Even readers who have never set foot on the Colorado Plateau will be touched by the beauty and lyricism of Engelhard's style. They, also, will be drawn onto the rivers or into the Maze, losing themselves, like him, in order to find themselves.

"Where the Rain Children Sleep" has quickly become one of my most cherished desert books. When something as heavy a a hardback makes it into my list of necessary backpacking items, that says something. What I appreciate the most about Englehard's writing is his gift of a new persepctive to the reader. Some of us have frequented these desert places Englehard writes of, but with eloquence and a spiritual connectedness with the land, Englehard insight is like seeing the desert in new colors. To come upon these desert places again, I think of them differently--that is to say, more spiritually aware and culturally informed. This is a real treat for anyone who considers the Colorado Plateau a place of mind, body, and soul.

Engelhard's developed and articulate voice proves to be a thoroughly competent guide for a literary journey to the nooks and crannies of the Four Corners region. He has weaved his interest in anthropology and his zest for adventure into a blend that offers readers a unique perspective on equally unique places. I recommend buying two copies of Where the Rain Children Sleep -- one to keep in good shape on your bookshelf, the other to tote around with you on your own adventures.

Dorothy Garlock proves once again that she's the queen of frontier romance. I have read this book many, many times. I laugh and cry and I am always glad to read it over again. It's the best of the best.

Kain and Vanessa are another set of characters that will crawl deep into your heart. I really enjoyed reading of their escapades together.

Kain, the stepson of the vicious Adam Clayhill, meets Vanessa and her Aunt Ellie, and cousin Henry. The threesome are determined to travel to Junction City, and meet the brother of Ellie's dead husband (whom she was only married about a month to before his death) in order to locate kinfolk for her son, Henry. With no travel sense the trio are sure for some major problems, if not to lose their lives. Kain sees no other choice then to escort them to Junction City himself... although he's already discovered his strong attraction to the red-headed, Vanessa.

Ellie's son, Henry, is a simple-minded man and one of the main reasons the trio was taking this trip were because her fear of who would take care of him after she was gone, and not wanting to burden Vanessa with his care if she ever marries. She hoped they would find some kin, that would ease this fear for her. Ellie and Henry were not prepared for what they actually did find in Junction City. It seems there is no limit to the lives Adam Clayhill has destroyed... but you'll be pleased at the outcome of this story.

The double wedding that takes place in Junction City, will reunite the wonderful characters from the previous two books of this trilogy. You'll discover what has been occuring in the lives of Logan and Rosalee Horn, Cooper and Lorna Parnell, Arnie and Syliva Henderson, and many more. This reunion is perfect for the last of the trilogy... and what happens to the two villians, Adam and Della Clayhill, will give you satisfaction as well.

Along the way, you'll love the variety of characters from the two Texan brothers - Jeb and Clay, to John Wisner, and Mary Ben - the love of Henry Hill!

This was the very first romance novel that was given to me 10 years ago when I was just 15 and I still treasure the images of the characters and the book itself. I just couldn't put the book down I have read and read this novel over and over so many times that I decided to store the book to keep it in it's original condition possible.

Anyone that enjoys the setting that this story is placed in will just enjoy reading this book I have not been able to find another that can top it. It will always be my favorite.

If you are a fan of Peregrine Falcons - this is a MUST-read. Excellent; written by a wildlife biologist - her observations of the Falcon on Chimney Rock in Colorado. One of my favorites and a permanent resident in my library - I've read it twice, so far.

What an amazing book! The author writes a fabulous novel filled with wonderful messages and insights. I absolutely love her writing style and the topics she writes about. I definitely recommend reading her other books because they are just as wonderful. Additionlly, I have actually met Mrs. Houle in person and she is an amazing, warm woman.
(Wings for My Flight is still in print by Pruett Publishers.)

Heartwarming story about conservation of the majestic peregrine falcon. Witty, funny, and tragic. A great quick read.

Because of record prices for uranium, there is currently underway a boom in applications for uranium mining in the western United States. At this time (March 2008), there are 10,000 applications for permits to mine uranium on file in Colorado alone - more in other western states. The history of uranium mining in this country is abysmal at best and possibly criminal. There has been little regard by the mining industry for the health and safety of people affected by the mining. This book details the horrors that resulted from uranium mining close to Navajo communities. This book is a must-read for anyone living within 100 miles of proposed uranium mining and wanting the facts to fight irresponsible plans for mining which ignore human health and safety and are motivated solely by greed. Read this book, organize and take action to protect your families, your communities, and your environment.

Yellowcake Towns depicts the great American Uranium Boom with style and gusto. It is one of the best modern books on the subject and an important tome for anyone interested in the history of the Western United States.

Amundson, being an historian by training, has written a fascinating tale of uranium hardrock mining in the west...mostly concentrated on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. Amundson takes you through the discovery and processing of uranium from the early days, meaning from the late 1800s through the cold war and the shutdown of the major mining centers.

Yellowcake Towns, the title of the book, refers to the processing centers which converted uranium ore into uranium oxide which is known as yellowcake from its color. This is what was then sent to special processing centers for conversion into fissionable material. The mining centers discussed are Uravan in Colorado which was a company town now closed and being cleansed of radioactive contamination. Jeffrey City, Wyoming, another company town which also has been abandoned. Then there is Moab, Utah, which was a major uranium processing center but has survived into present day as a tourist center because of its spectacular redrock landscape. Uranium mining in Grants, NM, which was considered the uranium capital of the USA because of its four processing mills,is also discussed and, again, Grants also survives due to the western film industry and tourism.

Reading Yellowcake Towns, though, is slow going if one reads all the footnotes, too. I found the bibliography to be just as engrossing as the actual writing. It's a great read....takes you through the early years when radium was king; then in the years leading up to WWII, the tailings were reprocessed for vanadium to strengthen steel; and finally reproccessing the tailings a third time for uranium extraction to support the making of the first atomic bombs; and, following WWII, the uranium craze to fuel atomic energy plants and even more sophisticated weapons of war until finally, the entire industry collapses.

A great read which few people outside of the industry know about.

Yvette, John Goulet's title character in this book, is truly wonderful. From her earliest days (in America) in Boston where she manages to mis-marry a pianoplaying window dresser to her last days (of life) in Milwaukee where she maniacally pursues a married Milwaukee judge many years her junior, Yvette is moving, marvelous, manic, and madcap. In between these (mis)adventures she writes to Father Flanagan on behalf of her landlady's bully son, confronts one of her husband's many lovers in the men's underwear section of a Colorado department store, faces down loanshark collection thugs in LA, and visits her ex-husband's widow incognito in Iowa. And that's not all.

Accompanying her on many of these journeys is her loyal, loving, bewildered, grows-up-to-be-lugubrious son, another finely crafted character.

What we have here is a well-crafted series of connected stories, about a truly remarkable woman at various ages, in various cities, and in various circumstances (often with her son). The mother-son epidsodes are like a road movie about buddies who never quite get along, who never quite understand each other, who never quite quit wondering about each other, but who always manage to care about each other. Both on her own and with her son, Yvette's life sometimes reads like the Marx Brothers meet Colette--On the Road.

Connecting the various stories are accounts of Yvette's last days in Milwaukee. Throughout, Yvette is always trying to figure the right angle to make her life work better, to discover what it all means, and, finally, to understand, if she can, what her life has meant to her.

"Tell him...O, mon Dieu, tell him where he can find me!" Yvette exclaims about her Milwaukee judge.

You can find her in John Goulet's book.

"What must a refugee not remember in order to survive?" asks the narrator of John Goulet's sequential novel, Yvette in America. "Simple: the past." Yvette Plevin--refugee from the Nazis, captive of her memories and loves--consistently fashions of herself the appropriate character that will allow her to survive from one moment to the next, story by life-story. She is an emotional and geographical transient by necessity, the narrative suggests, because, along with wit, tenacity, pride, and humor, flight and adaptation are skills necessary to ensure a refugee's emotional and physical survival. Finally, however, Yvette is the tragic hero of her own "sweet stories of love and love's implications."

The six "sweet" and surprising stories that comprise Goulet's book are told through a third-person, limited point of view that reads like the score of a duet. One of the two voices of this narrative duet is purely Plevin's. Her psychological patterns impress themselves on Goulet's syntax--"Plenty of tears, you bet"--her language is fresh and lyrically exuberant, as opposed to George's, Yvette's son and co-narrator, whose voice is a "lugubrious" and "morose" counterpoint weighted with the patient searching for explanations that make sense of his mother's motives. In the music of Goulet's sentences, George is the baseline who sustains Yvette's brilliant, improvisational riffs. The rare moments when these two authorial voices separate are evocative of where the stories are ultimately located, as when George is "thinking himself very clever but missing the point, as he always does, which is that the most important thing in the world is one's independence. 'Write that down,' she [Yvette] says, when he finally sits, takes out pen and pad, preparing to requiz her on the past. And she repeats for history's benefit: 'The most important thing in the world is one's independence.'"

George may be pardoned for missing his mother's point. Necessity dictates that George be an onlooker, an observer of his mother, who necessity dictates is perpetually forced into action. In "House of Happiness," for example, while Yvette's mostly American contemporaries are engaged in creating the ambiance of a bohemian lifestyle in Boston, she is busily fashioning an Americanized version of herself that will allow her and her son to survive in the country of their asylum; in "Dear Father Flanagan," Yvette, during a "rainy Easter week" in Lexington Kentucky, shoulders the burden of savior who would rescue a child from his abusive father ("'Whose idea was it to call Good Friday good?' Yvette wonders. 'Certainly not Christ's'").

"L'Academie Francaise" finds Yvette in Grand Junction, Colorado, momentarily taking on the role of small-time celebrity that is bestowed upon her by the local French club; in "The Snake in the Snow," set in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Yvette finds herself inhabiting the role of the "other woman," as she perceives herself through the eyes of her deceased ex-husband and his surviving wife; in the second to last story, "Trust," the reader journeys to the MGM studios in L.A. and finds Yvette's impulse toward self-invention transferred to her son, who Yvette is convinced will be "a handsome Mickey Rooney, not a clown. A prince!"; the final story, "Yvette in Love," which is set in Milwaukee, distorts the role of actor and role, as Yvette, now in her eighties and suffering the onset of dementia, is no longer able to separate what is real from what is fiction.

The first of eight short narrative "frames" that serve as connective tissue between the stories begins where the last story ends. The book's prologue establishes a cohesive narrative present--the last several days of Yvette on her hospital death-bed, her son by her side--so that, like the two narrative voices, the reader is aware of two coexisting chronologies. For all its technical mastery, the thematic result is breathtakingly human: our present is a refugee of a past we can never go back to.

John Goulet's Yvette in America is wise, subtle, innovative, by turns funny and profoundly sorrowful. It is, in short, such an astonishingly good book that the reader comes away from it thankful that we have Goulet in America contributing to American letters. It is also a remarkable premiere for the University Press of Colorado's Series in Contemporary Fiction.

You know Yvette, or you know somebody like her.

She's ancient, she's a little odd, and she seems to exist in a parallel universe. Maybe, once in awhile, she mumbles a little something to herself.

You almost certainly don't know Yvette as well as John Goulet does. Goulet, 58, is a former Iowan who teaches contemporary literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Yvette, the dominant figure in Goulet's new novel, ``Yvette in America'' (189 pages, $22, University Press of Colorado) is based on his mother, Isabelle.

Just like Isabelle, Yvette was born on a small island off the coast of Brittany, divorced there, fled from the Nazis, immigrated to Boston with a young son, married a composer and had a son.

Yvette (and Isabelle) was restless, moving from Kentucky to Colorado to California and Iowa, where she landed jobs first at a hotel, then as a clerk-typist and sometime French translator for Collins Radio,

``We lived in Cedar Rapids forever,'' says John Goulet from Milwakee, although someone in the company of Isabelle and her wanderlust can be excused for calling the years from 1954-60 ``forever.'' Goulet got a Ph.D from Iowa in 1974, after having taken an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State. He was in the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1968-70, then ``got into more the academic side.''

Whatever. Goulet is still a writer, and a good one. ``Yvette'' is billed by its publisher as a ``sequential'' novel. Many of its chapters, if that's what they're called, were initially written and published as stand-alone short stories.

``It's hard to get a short story collection published,'' he says. ``People always tell you your stories are good, then ask you if you have a novel.''

If Goulet is tricking readers, it's a darned good trick. He knits the stories together with italicized passages in which Yvette, confused in a Milwaukee at the end of her life, looks back. Goulet does a nice job of describing that confusion without being either confusing himself or maudlin.

Yvette is a refugee, but she turns the concept on its head. She's different, perhaps even a little ``crazy,'' as her father told her many times. But she's crazy like a fox, and she always controls her own destiny.

``Mother suffered for her independence,'' Goulet says. So does Yvette. They both gain from it, though. So will you, if you read about it.

This was a real western page-turner, with more action in a single chapter than many books have in a hundred pages.

The people from Missouri hope to go to Texas which they think is a land of freedom and the fullfilment of their dreams. But first they have to conquer the many hazards including, ragging rivers, indians, violent thunderstorms, etc. But Mr. Compton finds a way. a great read.

A wonderful collection of stories about american that take place in the West. Stories are included from writers back in the day, and writers of today. I hadn't read any of the stories included in this collection before. Don't miss it if you are a reader of short stories.

The African American West provides a century of short stories from DuBois, Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley and others, depicting Afro-Americans in the western U.S. These portray black Americans seeking new lives in the West and provide a range of authors and approaches covering the region's literary foundations.

A clear and lucid book on a problem of serious proportion without the sensationalism that attended Columbine. A most read for professionals serious about school violence.

Zinna has written a very worthwhile book that sensibly expresses solutions and takes on the growing problem of school violence. Perfect for school projects, personal interests, and teachers and students alike. Everything changed after Columbine, and this book will help it change even more for the better. If Columbine affected you in any way, you will appreciate this book as a supplement to your thoughts.

When Agnes May Gleason's father is injured working on the family dairy farm, her mother must take him to the hospital, leaving Agnes charge. Things were already difficult because of the Depression, and now Agnes's parents tells them to dump the day's milk. They can't afford to do that with these hard times, and Agnes decides to disobey her parents and make the deliveries with the help of her little brother and sister. This was an inspiring story about a girl during a difficult time in this country's history and how she overcomes difficulties to help her family.

Agnes May Gleason is almost thirteen, and she's living on her family's dairy farm near Walsenburg, Colorado, in 1933. Life has been hard for her family since the Depression started, and now Aggie's father has injured himself. When he must go to the hospital, Aggie is left alone to run the dairy with only her ten year old sister, Mary, and seven year old brother, Charles. If only her older brother Ralph hadn't left home! But it's up to Agnes now to make decisions, and pray that everything goes right. I highly reccomend this book.

This is the book for the best and most concise and interesting "guide" history of Jackson's Hole. I have been an interpretive guide in Jackson's Hole for 6 years and I use the stories in this book to help folks understand the story of the area.

This is a well-written history of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from its geography to the concerns its residents have today about unlimited growth. Robert Betts writes about the earliest explorers, the coming of the fur trappers, early settlers, homesteaders, the development of the dude ranch, and the bitter debates that eventually led to the formation of Teton National Park. More detailed chapters include fascinating accounts of John Colter, perhaps the first white man to view the Tetons; thumbnail sketches of some of the more famous mountainmen criss-crossing Jackson Hole before the Civil War; some local legends involving the likes of Nick Wilson and Beaver Dick; the disastrous and foolish Doane expedition along the Snake River in the winter of 1876; the summer (1883) President Chester A. Arthur visited the area with members of his cabinet to hunt and fish; the problems the sheepmen faced when they came to the valley; and the recent settlers who display the rugged individualism of their ancestors. Though relating the history of the Jackson Hole area, Betts is just as concerned with presenting a captivating and entertaining narrative, which he succeeds in doing marvelously. Many illustrations grace the text. Anyone with any interest in the Jackson Hole area will find this book worth reading.