Nevada Books

Mr. Moreno has a great appreciation and love for the beauty and history of northern and western Nevada, and it shows in this handy book. This is a book about exploring today's Nevada with a little history and a lot of information about over 50 day trips from the capital city.

If you are looking for a hotel and restaurant guide, look elsewhere. And Las Vegas is only a piece of Richard Moreno's story, not the focus. Clearly the author is in love with the Nevada character and he does a great job of describing a pretty interesting place.

I bought this book for a friend, but I wound up reading the whole thing before I gave it to her. The author provides stiking examples of the Old West fetish with French naming, the Chinese influence on SW fare, and dietary superstitions of the time.

This book gives you a glimpse not just of the food, but the life that shaped it and the way food shaped life on the frontier and in mining towns of the Sierra Nevada.

I read this book for my sixth grade class assignment. This book teaches kids about the Gold Rush and how people became so popular when they discovered just the smallest amount of gold. I got very involved in the character's personality's and their solid and diverse friendship. It taught me that racism has old roots in our country. But friendship can overcome the hate and distrust. I recommend this book to kids especially, but everyone would enjoy it.

This book is absolutely fantastic. Robert Laxalt does an excellent job of taking the reader back to the years of Prohibition and places them right in the midst of the lives of a Basque family living in Carson City. Pete, the main character, is a boy who experiences several adventures, mishaps, and important life lessons throughout the pages of this book. It is an easy read, with several enjoyable episodes, and one could simply take it on that surface level. It also, however, gives great insight into the conditions that Basques had to deal with living in Nevada. It deals with prejudice, family issues, and more in a bitterly nostaligic manner that leaves the reader not only entertained, but pondering the life depicted by Laxalt. For anyone interested in Nevada or Basque culture, this is a must read!

Basque Nationalism and the Spanish State is a scholarly study of Basque nationalism specifically in the context of the historical rise and evolution of the Spanish nation-state. Andre Lecours (associate professor of political science, Concordia University) examines how Basque nationalism has been greatly influenced by the different forms of the state, from its confederal, centralist, and authoritarian historical phases to its democratic phases. Of especial interest is the up-to-date scrutiny of the movement in the wake of recent events such as ETA's announcement in 2006 of a permanent cease-fire. "A fourth process of globalization is peculiar to Europe: political integration. The European Union influences nationalist movements in different ways. From a discursive perspective, the EU can be presented as being either antithetical to, or coherent with, substate nationalism." A welcome contribution to Spanish history and political science reference shelves, especially in college libraries.

This book held my attention and is a rich experience in the geography, history, comparative religion and spirituality of the Great Basin. If the mythologist Joseph Campbell sat down with the poet Barry Lopez the resulting discussion might look a lot like this book. Yet the book is richer than such a discussion because of Francaviglia's rich nuances and deeply personal take on the Great Basin. This is a stunning book and taught me a great deal about appreciating the many levels of the Great Basin.

Read this book! One of the best short story collections published in a decade.
There is not a single weak link in THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE. It is rare to accomplish in one story what Morris achieves in every story here. There is resounding psychological depth in his depictions of characters who have held off their deepest feelings for too long and are, at last, overtaken by them.
Each passage is surprisingly, quietly moving, whether the story is about lost love ("Losing Julia Finch"), or about the disappearance of a life plan and the appearance of another ("Objects Past the Shoreline" and "The Children of Dead State Troopers"), or about the raptures and unbearable pressures of family ("The Best Seats in the House"
and "Astronauts").

No Western woman writer has shared more of her life as a rancher and environmentalist than Linda Hasselstrom, whose books about living and working on her South Dakota ranch have been an important part of my library since the early 1990s. This collection of essays, written between 1985-1999 and revised for this publication, is a splendid sampling of her prose, by turns brash, provocative, passionate, chilling, and funny. If you haven't yet read Hasselstrom's work, Between Grass and Sky is a fine place to start.

The twenty essays in this book are divided into three sections: Learning to See, Hunter and Hunted, and Who Cares for the Land? The first section takes us deeply into Hasselstrom's homeplace--a landscape of birds, cows, grass, sky, and eternal enigmas. But whether she is writing about stacking hay with an antique tractor on the hottest day in July or tracing the tunnels of mice under the snow or finding snakes in the pressure cooker, Hasselstrom sees all with a fine, practiced eye. "What a busy and engrossing place the prairie is," she writes, and her readers must agree. The second section focuses on the predator-prey relationship and the part that humans play. It includes essays about hunting buffalo, sleeping with grizzlies, and living with loss. Section Three takes a hard look at the consequences of thoughtless land development and the promise of new relationships between communities of people and communities of the land.

This book proves what Hasselstrom has been saying for years: that there is no contradiction between being an environmentalist and a rancher. It is an eloquent testimony to the rancher's daily work on the land, with domestic and wild animals, in all sorts of weather, amid every sort of calamity. It is an appreciation of the strong bonds that unite the communities of those who love the land and use it wisely, as many ranchers do, and a warning of the consequences of reckless, exploitative development.

Once I picked up the book, I couldn't stop until I'd read all the essays, but for me, two stand out. "Sleeping with the Grizzly" is about (at least in part) the challenge of being a menstruating woman on a wilderness trek--it's full of Hasselstrom's characteristic perceptive humor. (No male nature writer could ever have written this!) "The Cow is My Totem" includes the hilarious story of what happened when a coyote blundered into a calf nursery. Savor this comic hyperbole: "From every direction, cows were running toward the nursery. Bags swinging, heads raised, they all bellowed in outrage, assuring their calves that rescue was on the way . . . Rumbling threats, [three bulls] galloped up the slope, persuaded some magnificent stranger was seducing their harem. I estimate that at that moment, fifty thousand pounds of fury was stampeding toward one forty-pound coyote."

Linda Hasselstrom writes with a naturalist's perceptive eye, an environmentalist's concern, and a rancher's long and practical experience of working and living on the land. Between Grass and Sky belongs on the bookselves of all who care about our American prairies.

Reviewed by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women

This the definitive work on the Comstock Lode. How it started, how they did it, and what happened. If you are a history buff you will not be able to put it down.