Southwest Books

The title is a bit of a misnomer. New Mexico is not a "New Mecca" for poetry, it has been a mecca for poetry for many years. Think of names like Rudolfo Anaya, John Brandi, Larry Goodell, Joy Harjo, Joan Logghe, Tony "E.A." Mares, Anne MacNaughton, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Peter Rabbit, and Luci Tapahonso, the tradition of poetry is long and deep. Yet, consider that none of these names is included in this brand new anthology of New Mexico poets, and you begin to understand the wealth of talent that exists in the Land of Enchantment.

The poets featured in this anthology range from the traditional to the contemporary to the modern. For example, three-fourths of the members of Albuquerque's 2005 National Poetry Slam Championship team (Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras, and Damien Flores) are included. Poetry luminaries such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ana Castillo, Inara Cedrins, Sandra Cisneros, Lisa Gill, Dale Harris, Michelle Holland, Carol Moldaw, Miriam Sagan, and Arthur Sze, are included in this volume. Youth poets such as Zeke and Nico Sahi are included.

There are several anthologies of New Mexico poetry available, but including this one will definitely help give a well-rounded picture of the poetry community. It is worth the purchase.

P.S.: If you purchase this book, you will come across my poem, "Eulogy for Syd Barrett," but my review is not based on my inclusion. Rather, it is an unbiased view of a great book. Period.

Printed on heavy stock, water-resistant paper and featuring stunning full color photography throughout, East Gulf Coastal Plain Wildflowers is a field guide wildflowers found in a region of the United States including Southwest Georgia, Northwest Florida, Southern Alabama, Southern Mississippi, and parts of Southeastern Louisiana. An introduction and overview offers maps, information about floral diversity, and tips for using the guide, yet the bulk of East Gulf Coastal Plain Wildflowers is devoted to single-column entries of individual blossoms. Each flower's entry includes a color photograph, extensive text description, information on its bloom season and habitat range, and more. A glossary and index round out this superb quick-reference field guide.

GREAT. Wish there were more books like this out ther

Spring rice reports on the history of HIV in China. Data I just read indicates that the HIV epidemic is correlated with dirty needle use : IVDU or blood plasma donation. In some provinces up to 60% of former blood donnors, mostly peasants, have HIV! Intravenous drug use brought HIV in China, but the spread into the general population was via unsafe blood plasma donations (not transfusions. The book reads like a novel, as well. Another book "Points to Consider" of David Gisselquist review the facility with which HIV spread in Africa via dirty care. "Eating spring rice" quotes Chinese local officials estimates of up to a million or more cases from dirty blood collection. Today, after talks at high level, the figures now stand at 50 000.....

This classic is a textbook example of what happens typically in the U.S. when the forces of racial change clash with a history of segregation, felt white entitlements, blacks acting out in their stereotypical ways, and when the inevitable suite of white tactics of resistance to racial equality is played out in real life.

Interestingly, the study covers an area of South Chicago that over the last forty years, has been at one time or another, the epicenter of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s northern movement; the headquarters of the Reverend Jessie Jackson's Operation Push; and much more recently, the general area of Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama's, community organizing.

Perhaps without intending to, the authors give graphic political and demographic details of why all such programs towards racial harmony are destined to fail.

The most important reason for failure lies in the hidden premise of the study: that the degree of community stability and viability depends directly on the degree to which the community is all white. According to this axiom of American society, as communities change away from all whiteness, by definition they also become less stable and less recognizable as legitimate American communities. Eventually, as they turn more and more black, they lose any sense of identity and respect as viable American communities. In short, an all-black community, by definition, is a ghetto and thus destined to be riddled with crime, drugs, low achievement, illegitimacy, etc.

With this key hidden premise as backdrop, the goal of "the community's white power structure" was thus exclusively that of "controlling the forces of change." This meant, of course, regulating the rate at which de-segregation was to take place. Or put more descriptively, it meant regulating the rate at which de-segregation was forced upon, or imposed on the white majority.

It goes almost without saying that generally whites continue to perceive racial change as a decidedly negative occurrence. Historically, white reaction to it has followed a familiar pattern: First there is uncertainty, rumors, anxiety, panic, resistance, violence, and then white flight. When all else fails, as was the case in the present study, a last resort is made to sit down face-to-face, whites to blacks, human to human, to try to work out a respectable and humane accommodation.

The book is a report on how six churches came together as a last resort, to engage in such a human-to-human "sit-down."

Since human to human negotiations was never the first item on the menu, but always the last resort, even by the churches involved, the flaw fatal to success, in addition to the premise mentioned above, can be seen as having been build-in: The lack of sincerity on the part of whites was always palpable - with their true hidden intentions being for their communities to remain forever "lily white." This hidden goal remained barely transparent and in retrospect seemed the booby trap planted in the heart of all potential negotiations.

The primary concerns of the whites involved, were first to (1) try to discourage blacks from moving in, or drive out the ones already there; or failing this to; (2) stall change until the whites could sell their homes and move away; or (3) try to regulate the rate at which blacks moved in and whites moved out; and finally last and least: (4) to sit down with blacks to work out a suitable accommodation.

Sadly, the centers of power in the white community lacked the ability to regulate the change in other than decidedly negative ways. Thus, from the beginning the results were foreordained to be a lose-lose outcome for both races.

Churches that advocated racial tolerance, soon found themselves with a greatly reduced congregation. The most powerful element in the community, the realtors, were busy making a profit off of both ends by "redlining" the properties: using scare tactics to force whites to sell low, while inflating the prices to black buyers, and making a windfall of profits in the process. White civic organizations generally were driven by rumor, panic, and anger. When racial accommodation was recommended, white moderates were treated as pariahs, and internal white distrust increased as white flight accelerated.

Blacks of course were no help in these matters either. Indeed, in exact accordance with the predicted stereotypes, as the communities changed, so too came the predicted increase in crime and all of the other social ills that scared the be-Jesus out of even moderate or liberal whites.

By the time the "sit-down" actually occurred, there was nothing left to negotiate. The atmosphere was completely poisoned. There was no one in the white community to engage in negotiations: most of the property had been sold; only a shell of the original white community - old whites and those too poor to flee -- remained. Distrust about whites among blacks was so high that they were glad to see the whites flee. In order to survive the Churches were forced to close their doors; or against their will, they reluctantly were forced into becoming "multicultural institutions."

This book is about social reality, not about social fantasy. It pulls no punches. And although it is thirty years old, it speaks volumes as to what is going on in contemporary American life. Everyone is a victim in this story about the reality of our society. What a pity for our country.

Five stars.

This is the Spanish text edition of a beautifully written debut novel. Exquisite in its imagery and clarity of language, the author tells two parallel tales. One takes place in sixteenth century France, during the Protestant reformation and religious persecution of the Huguenots (Protestants). The other takes place in present day France. There are historical ties that bind these two stories, as well as a haunting familial legacy that reaches out across time to makes itself felt in the present.

The sixteenth century tale is based around a young woman, Isabelle du Moulin, who marries a boorish lout named Etienne Tournier, the oldest son of one of the more prominent families in their provincial town in France. She is a young woman upon whom the Virgin Mary made a great impression, when she was but a girl. The Tourniers, however, are believers of the new, harsh, Calvinist faith, and so Isabelle must also fully subscribe to it, if she is to survive in her husbands family and in the town in which she lives. When the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre occurs, in which Huguenots are slain without mercy throughout all of France, Isabelle is forced to flee to safety with what remains of her husband's family. Unhappy in her marriage, she goes on to have an event occur in her life that is so tragic that her pain and sorrow is made palpable in the present, touching one of her ancestors, Ella Turner.

Of course, the parallel tale focuses around Ella Turner, a young, married American woman, who moves to France with her husband Rick, in order to advance his career. Ella agrees to the move, because it will take her to the region in France from which she knows her family originated. Once in France, Emma has some difficulty acclimating to life in the small provincial town to which they have moved, as well as to its denizens. Ella also finds herself having inexplicable nightmares and begins to feel herself somewhat alienated from her husband. To occupy her time, she begins a quest to discover more about her French ancestry. As Ella's story unfolds, alternating with the parallel story of Isabelle, commonalities between the past and present begin to emerge. These parallel stories then converge in a stunning denouement to resolve a tragedy of the past in the present.

The author combines historical fiction, suspense, romance, and touch of the supernatural all in one beautifully realized novel. The author writes with the heart of a poet and the soul of a great storyteller, one whose prose is delicately nuanced as she weaves gossamer threads of a tale well told. This is simply a superlative and stunning debut novel that will keep the reader turning its pages until the very last. Bravo!

This book is full of gorgeous black-and-white photographs from all over the West in the 1940s. Central New Mexico is here--including the Canoncito Church near Santa Fe, Madrid, the La Bajada ruins, and the town and mines of Cerrillos--and so is White Sands, New Mexico, and southern Utah, and the mining towns of Colorado.
Many of the places photographed are in ruins, and the black-and-white coloration serves to make them even more desolate, dryer, dustier, bleaker. Sometimes the photos are of wide expanses; oftentimes they're of small details like where the rusted hook of an old door has carved a circle around it, from years of use once upon a time.
This book also has a good autobiographical essay by the photographer that serves as an introduction, and the book itself is a terrific historical record of the West, and a great photo collection for any coffee table in need of a conversation piece. I first saw it at a friend's house, and knew I had to get a copy for myself.

1. I want map of England, London which lemit of longitude and latitude. 2. including name an location of the road, and park.

"Environmental Change" is a collection of 13 essays by scholars in honor of Donald Alan Graybill, an archaeologist of the desert, especially in the American southwest. As with most collections of this sort, you may enjoy and learn from some of essays and others you may find inpenetrable and uninteresting.

As a marginal area for agriculture, the climate and weather are the crucial factors for the pre-Colombian Indians of the Southwest. Thus, most of these essays reconstruct climates past through the meticulous examination of tree rings, flood terraces, myths, and celestial events. Agriculture was no small-scale enterprise for some of the Southwestern Indians. The Hohokam of cerca 1000 AD irrigated and farmed 100,000 acres in the area around Phoenix and their population must have numbered several tens of thousands.

Well, this book isn't going to be a best-seller, but I found some of the essays interesting and intriguing. Suprisingly, one of the best is a long treatise on "Sky as Environment: Solar Eclipses and Hohokam Culture." It sounded dull to me, until I got into it. Did the psychological impact of solar eclipses have something to do with the mysterious disappearance of the Hohokam? Other essays take up the spread of maize cultivation, and the environmental challenges of the cultures of the Anasazi, the Mimbres Valley, and the Rio Grande Pueblos.

There are lots of charts and graphs depicting the good times of adequate rainfall and the bad times, drought, in the Southwest back to about 500 AD. This book is scholarly, dense, and sometimes incomprehensible, but worth reading if you are interested -- really interested -- in the Indians of the Southwestern United States and the influence of climate on culture and society. None of the recent periods of drought, by the way, holds a candle to what has happened before.

Smallchief

From the cover: This book explores traditions guiding the medical arts of Yaqui, Anglo, Black and Mexican American Communities and points out the relationship between alternative and scientific medicine. Beliefs prevail that illness may be punishment for sin, or caused by witchcraft or overwork. Treatment may include dreams, herbs, massage, or prayer.