Colorado Books

If you're house-hunting anywhere in the Denver-Metro area (or even Boulder county), this mapbook is the best one to get. It is the one ALL Realtors refer to when listing properties for sale. Each property is indexed by what page & section of the Streetfinder it is on. No need to scramble through the index each time you look for a home for sale. Really convenient! Every house-hunter should have one!

This is the mapbook all Realtors refer to when listing property in the Denver-Metro, Boulder, Longmont, and Mountain areas. It is very convenient using this book as opposed to any other mapbook.

All of the Realtors refer to what page of THIS book a home is on. No need to wast time in the index looking up each individual address.

When Logan, a half-breed, finds his way to Rosalie's doorstep carrying his dying mother in his arms, she can hardly refuse, and she's drawn to him even then. Later, when he arrives at her door bloody and beaten by a Adam Cahill's henchmen, she cares for him. Logan was resigned to living alone, his indian blood made him a target, but Rosalie found her way into his heart, and was determined to stay by his side, no matter what the townspeople said. With unwavering courage and a group of loyal friends, Rosalie and Logan would face the challenge of their lives when he's accused of attacking Adam Cahill's beautiful, deceitful stepdaughter, Della. I really enjoyed this book more than the following stories Wayward Wind and Wind of Promise. The author showed how people can come together in the face of prejudice and injustice. I especially liked the fiesty Minnie, one of the supporting characters.

Yummy. Absolutely yummy. I sat down one day with a blanket and coffe and just didn't stop reading. I maneged to fall in love with Logan while I was at it. Wonderful charactors, wonderful book.

Pride and prejudice would also have been a fitting name for this story. Poor Logan spent his entire life being shunned by the white people, because of his Indian blood. Labeled a half-breed, he's constantly given a cruel reception everywhere he goes. Then one rainy night he shows up at Rosalee's home, needing shelter for his dying mother.

From then on, the two are drawn to each other... and Logan finds the one person in his life that didn't even consider his heritage or the consequences of their romance.

As much as Logan wants to give into the love he has for Rosalee, he doesn't want her to live to resent him, when she is surely shunned by the white people. Rosalee must fight through the stubborness of Logan, and show him he does want to give into his feelings.

In addition, Logan and Rosalee - along with Rosalee's siblings and father, are suddenly facing serious danger by the huge landowner of the town. Logan has his own reasons for taunting this landowner and purchasing the land bordering his, that he so desperately wants for himself. Mr. Clayhill, the landowner, will stop at nothing to get what he wants... and the townspeople simply look away, not wanting to get involved and endanger their own family.

From beginning to end, it's almost impossible to see a way out for Logan and Rosalee... each small victory is overshadowed by a much bigger price. Along the way, they make some unlikely friends... including Cooper Parnell, who will prove to be much more to them by the end.

Rosalee and Logan are wonderful characters, and I loved reading this story. Rosalee Spurlock is sweet and beautiful and loving. Logan Horn is strong and handsome, but emotionally vulnerable under the surface.

I was thrilled to see the next book in this trilogy will be the story of Cooper Parnell.

This book is definitely worth every bit of 5 stars. David Muench's photographs are astounding. There are many pictures from Colorado, and his photos of wildflowers in Yankee Boy Basin are great. The pictures of Glacier National Park actually do an amazing justice to the beauty of that park. Also, the pictures of the Canadian Rockies, especially in Banff, are wonderful. It makes a great coffee table book or a gift. You will want to go through the book page-by-page because every picture, and there are too many to count, is intriguing. Definitely worth buying!

I've got an entire shelf of Colorado photo books, and this is one of the best. The pictures are fantastic - often taken at rare times and filters used to give them an almost "better than real" appearance. The brief text is also interesting, and each picture location is identified.

This book is FABULOUS!!! Since my visit to the Canadian Rockies over two years ago, I have searched for a book which could capture the spectacular images I remember. David and Marc Muench's amazing landscape photographs are magnificent. J. Udall's essay on this region is equally captivating, amusing and above all reminds me that I must return there soon! In a world of overhype and hyperbole, this book is truly matchless.

I rate cookbooks not on how they look, or even on how difficult they are to follow, but on how good the recipes taste. In this category, Mr. Stein excells. The food is delicious. His recipe for Tom Yam Gung is one of the easiest and best tasting recipes for this classic Thai soup that I have ever tasted. The wonderful blend of fresh seafood and asian spice is unbeatable. Highly recommended.

Rick Stein is not only a superb chef but his writing is clear, simple and enthusiastic - like his food. He gives plenty of tips from what utensils to buy, to how to store fish and how to make excellant stocks. All the way through the book he carries you along with his passion and almost cooly, simplistic aproach. If you like fish - or even if you don't - I am sure you will find this book rewarding, not only for the food but also the interesting little tit bits he incorporates.

Ideal for anyone who wants to cook fish but is either worried about how difficult it might be - or bored with the same old same old.Rick's passion and enthisiasm is contageous.

If you are like me - love seafood, and always eat it in restaurants, but not sure about tackling it at home - this is ideal.

Its a good read even if you dont want to cook!

" 'I can't do it anymore,' he [Buyer's then husband] says. 'Not the physical work. I could still cripple by with that. It's just the mental work, the worry, and the stress. I just can't do it anymore.'

" 'I know' is all I can think to say. When he adds nothing further, I say, 'I'll help you. Whatever you need to do.'

"I do not try to hug him or touch him or console him. I know better. He prefers being alone with his own suffering."

Ranch life is dirt, labor, wind, drought, deaths, births, wants, sacrifices, uncertainty, exhaustion. Why choose it? Because it is also stars, peace, calves, kittens, satisfaction, love, spring--"a meadowlark trills notes as sweet and soft as homemade ice cream. The song breaks my heart and then mends it back."

Read SPRING'S EDGE. Experience the poetry of ranch existence.

Laurie Wagner Buyer's memoir about one key spring when her life and marriage were on a precipice and yet the calves kept being born and the snow kept falling is beautiful and affecting. Her powerful feel for the legacy of the past, her keen observation about the color of the sky or the dimension of the stars, and even her desire to create art by keeping notebooks full of the details of days that seem never to change, yet must; all this adds up to a book you won't want to put down. This would be a perfect book club selection--plenty of material to discuss, cry over, and rejoice in. University of New Mexico Press should be commended for bringing this book to life.

Sometimes a story wraps itself around you and won't let you go. For me, Laurie Wagner Buyer's memoir, Spring's Edge, is one of those stories. Her book offers a rare insight into her life as a rancher's wife, a way of living that is at once remarkably sturdy and frighteningly fragile.

Buyer and her husband Mick--he in his mid-sixties, she some twenty years younger--raised cattle on six hundred acres in the mountains of Colorado. It's a tough life, made more difficult for Buyer by the realization that her husband is fast reaching the point where he can no longer manage the physical work. Since he intends to leave the ranch to the children of his first marriage, she has essentially no stake in the ranch to which she has contributed so much. What will she do--what will they do--when her husband can no longer live the life on the land that keeps him going? What will happen to their marriage if their work on the ranch no longer holds it together? On top of this, Buyer's father develops cancer. It is a situation that would bring most of us--those used to more comfortable, more predictable circumstances--to the brink.

But the Buyers soldier on, doing every day what must be done to keep the ranch going, the new calves alive, their fragile relationship in one piece. Buyer's journal of four difficult months in 1997 is a quietly compelling story of a doomed marriage and a ranch life under pressure from rising land taxes and encroaching developments. "We're on top of the mountain looking down at the wreckage of the times," she writes. "Age, inability, financial impossibilities, an anti-ag attitude in the community..." As local ranchers sell out, hay prices rise, and local agricultural businesses fail, the people who stay on the land demonstrate a tenacious heroism, although they pay a very high personal price.

Through all these challenges, it is the land itself that sustains and endures. Buyer's lyrical descriptions of the earth's coming alive with spring are full of hope and promise. "More snow, some rain, lots of sun, and our world will dance a greening jig," she writes. Later: "Snipe song ripples through the sky. Spring comes again fresh-faced and welcoming." Still later: "I sense the atmosphere hanging on life's balanced scale, ready to tip into full spring with the weight of one more robin, one more blooming pasqueflower."

But while winter is long ("A remember-winter wind cartwheels off the peaks with chilled intent"), the people are strong, and Buyer revels in their strengths. Her husband is "a man born to the land, bonded to earth by his birthright and by his stubborn, even zealous, dedication to a way of life." Her friend Gail loses her front teeth when she's helping check cows for pregnancy: "The fiftieth cow flung her massive head and hit Gail smack in the face. Teeth and hat went flying...[S]he grabbed her hat, stuffed a couple of tissues in her mouth, and went back to work because there were still ten cows to go." It is as if these men and women both draw their strength from the land and develop it in opposition to the land's brutal hardships.

A prizewinning poet, Buyer tells her story skillfully, working from journal notes (sixteen legal tablets) gathered, assembled, and polished. She focuses on the present, but also gives us intriguing glimpses of a puzzling past, enough to give us a sense of the development of this marriage but not enough to answer all our questions. (A remark on her website, that she "came west from Chicago as a mail order bride," compounds the mystery.) The book's epilogue, written some ten years after the events documented in the journal, brings the reader up to date with events in the Buyers' lives.

Spring's Edge tells a remarkable story. I won't forget it, and I don't think you will, either.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

If you like a good book to read you should buy Sweet Uncertainty it keep me from getting any sleep because I couldn't put the book down.

A great book that reminds us of the vitality of the myths of the old west. I recommend it to anyone interested in history and Native American lore. Rodeo fans will enjoy this book.

Sweet Uncertainty is an engaging fantasy about a boy, his rodeo-loving family, a winged horse, and two friends from another dimension. Hazard Stiles grows up quickly, as he saves his father from certain death, locates a stolen horse and confronts the thieves. With the help of his new friends--Polytumba and Ashalla--Hazard learns patience and grows in wisdom; and, the entire family learns about death--is it final? ... Or not? The characters in this book are so clearly drawn that they remained with me for a long, long time. I recommend this book to those who enjoy "losing themselves" in a good story, and especially to those who like horses, ranches and the American West.

This is a model of how to write about tribal politics today. It is sympathetic yet balanced, and devoid of ideological posturing. The authors are a political scientist, a historian, and a lawyer, and they bring their combined backgrounds to the study of government on Montana's seven Indian reservations.

They find success stories such as Fort Peck and Flathead, and failures of governance coexisting with potential wealth, such as the Crow. Rocky Boy's and Fort Belknap represent the all-too-common depressing story of a community trapped in a cycle of poverty. The Northern Cheyenne case is particularly interesting because they argue that politics reflects a choice between two values (economic development versus traditional values), and the tribe has legitimately decided against development.

The focus throughout the book is squarely on politics on the reservation. Outsiders-- whether natural resources corporations, the State of Montana, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs-appear in the book when they interfere in reservation affairs, but the authors emphasize the choices that Native Americans make (or fail to make) for themselves. Though they do not say so directly, the authors' guiding light is really the Federalist Papers: constitutionalism, a separation of powers, legitimacy and effective leadership are all important in governance. One might criticize this stance as a form of intellectual imperialism, though when one sees the failures of the Crow reservation in particular, it's clear that a greater concern for these institutional rules would be useful regardless of culture.

The reservations have 2000-7000 resident members each, making them the size of small towns in population terms. One might ask whether the conventional categories of municipal government (mayor and council, town administrator, etc.) would be useful models for revised tribal constitutions, making due allowance for tribal sovereignty and cultural distinctiveness.

In the study of contemporary Aboriginal peoples, this book is a breath of fresh air. I am a second year Native Studies and Canadian Studies double-major at Trent University in Canada. Most books dealing with tribal government and modern native people talk about Native conflicts with the European colonizers and the US government. While this is certainly a worthy topic and one that needs to be brought to attention of far more people throughout the world, this book answers a question that has been left untouched: "Do these tribal governments promote soverignty and do they respresent their people in a positive way?" I find this book, which focused specifically on the Montana Reservations, invaluable for three reasons. The first is that it makes important distinctions between the different tribes and forms of government, thus dispelling the myth that all Native tribes and people think alike and/or face the same circumstances. Second, the book talks about the phenomenon of conflict within tribes, as well as conflict between tribal governments and their members. It does not ignore the effect that outside policies and peoples have had on tribal governments, but it is not the main focus of the text. This has largely been ignored in academic scholarship, and this reveals how complex contemporary Native society is and also a good starting point for other explorations, such as Native activism that deals specifically with their tribal governments. Finally, the book is humble in its demeanor, which is unfortunately, becoming more uncommon in academic scholarship today(i.e. Ward Churchill). The authors are non-Native, and admit that they are NOT trying to provide a definitive answer or conclusion for tribes, but are simply trying to provoke further examination and discussion on the topic. They never claim to hold an academic or intellectual monopoly or superiority over others. Overall, this book a refreshing view of Native peoples, their contemporary governments, and the issues that plague Indian Country. It is also interesting for myself in seeing what the future might hold for Canadian Native tribes, who are still struggling to obtain soverignty and self-government.

This compilation provides students and professionals with a fine overview of 20th century politics in Montana. Recommended for upper-level undergrads, graduate students, and those seeking a deeper understanding of a legacy of injustice. A must!

A searing indictment of white racial hatred, gross stupidity, avarice, and a cultural superiority complex bordering on madness, which forced Colorado's Ute people, like other Native people, off their ancestral homelands. White American history has too often had a grandiose view of its origins, conveniently omitting or minimizing duplicitous government policies and the general mood of the populace, with a few exceptions, calling for the extermination of the Utes and other tribes to make Western expansion and wealth possible. This book reveals these omissions in gripping detail and sets the historical record straight. Our children need to know that having fought and won freedom from the British and for black slaves, the US fell flat on its face and became the very tyrants they despised when dealing with Native people. This book should be mandatory reading for every high school student.
We all live on both forcefully taken and sacred ground long inhabited and revered before any white man set foot on these shores. We know where the Utes and Lakota are, but where are the Agawam & Nipmuc (MA), the Ponca & Kansa, the Chinook (WA)? Native people today have yet to fully recover from the sordid beginnings of the US. We owe an immeasurable debt to them, not only financially for treaty funds mismanaged but spiritually as we belatedly see the wisdom in their deep respect for the land that guided them to live in harmony with it and the greater circle of life, of which humans are but one member. I pray we wake up as a people before the initial and unabated greed for short-term profits fouls our nest irreversibly.

Written by Peter R. Decker (Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University), "The Utes Must Go!": American Expansion And The Removal Of A People encompasses three centuries of Ute Indian history, as it chronicles the involuntary removal of the Ute Indians from Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Its title drawn from a newspaper advertisement championing the removal of Utes in the Denver Tribune, "The Utes Must Go!" is a powerful true drama of a proud people who suffered from pioneer settlement and racisim, and who also experienced tragedy from misguided intentions, such as Indian Agent Nathan Meeker's ill-fated attempt to turn Indian hunters into farmers, which brought about tragedy at Milk Creek in 1879. A colorful and detailed account, offering glimpses into figure thats made their mark on history such as Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin, General William T. Sherman, newspaperman Horace Greeley, and much more. A well-researched, fact-filled, and undeniably attention-gripping in its depiction of raw territorial and colonial greed.

Peter R. Decker has written a magisterial, riveting work about the removal of the Ute Indians from Colorado. He paints the American West of the mid-to late-19th century with such colorful, vivid strokes that one can't help but be transported to the "scene of the crime."

This is truly an impressive and important accomplishment of documentation and narrative. Decker's biographical sketches of the key players in the drama -- from Ute leaders Ouray and Captain Jack to hapless Indian agent Nathan Meeker, to Interior Secretary Carl Schurtz, are masterly in themselves. For sheer energy and artistry, nothing I've read on the subject approaches it.

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.