Southwest Books

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.

In 1845, with war with Mexico immanent, the US government authorized three expeditions to explore the boundary territory between the two countries: two of them were relatively famous (Kearny's survey along the Oregon Trail to South Pass and Fremont's expedition to California), but the third (Abert's exploration of the Canadian River in New Mexico, the Texas panhandle, and Oklahoma) was much less known; this interesting and well-annotated book is the official report of that expedition.

Leaving Bent's Fort near the end of August, with the legendary Thomas Fitzpatrick acting as guide, the command of about 30 men made their way through Raton Pass, then southeast to the Ute River, which they followed to where it enters the Canadian near present-day Logan. Turning east, the men marched through the Canadian River Valley across the panhandle of Texas, where Abert reiterated Stephen Long's opinion that this part of the West was a "great American desert." Fearing the Indians at first, Abert writes of pleasant, friendly encounters with the Kiowas and Comanches. After making an unintended detour when the North Fork of the Red was mistaken for the Wichita River, the party got back on course again and by the third week in October had reached their destination of Fort Gibson in eastern Oklahoma.

Abert was a clear, observant writer, and he describes much of the natural scenery encountered, including plant and animal life; he also writes intriguing accounts of the Indians and traders he met along the way. H. Bailey Carroll's excellent and detailed annotations made for the 1941 reprint (which this version copies) are a chief highlight of the book. The only things wanting in this book are good, detailed maps (only one rather cursory map is included). But as an early first-hand description of this part of the country, Abert's official report is magnificent.

For anyone who is tired of the same old "tourist traps", this book is for you. There are a wide variety of treasures to be found in Arizona and Rick Harris has drawn maps for many of them. My friends and I have spent many days exploring the seldom seen sides of Arizona and have seen many things that most travelers will never dream of. Whether it's caves, mines or Indian Ruins; Ghost towns, quartz crystals or cliff dwellings, this is the book for you. I carry this book with me whenever I'm in Arizona because you never know when the fever for a good adventure will hit.

Library Journal's review of this guide: "Combining encyclopedic coverage of destinations with loads of practical information and atlas-type maps, the series illuminates the wonders of nature but emphasizes the peculiarity of a place's people and their folklore."

In "Explorers in Eden," Jerold S. Auerbach, professor of history at Wellesley College, provides an insightful and critical account of the complex relationships between "explorers"--anthropologists, artists, photographers, and entrepreneurs--and the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona from John Wesley Powell and Frank Hamilton Cushing at the end of the 19th century to the students of Franz Boas--Ruth Benedict, Ruth Bunzel, and Esther Schiff Goldfrank in the 1920s and 1930s. This followed by a chapter on the more recent feminist scholars who have found "inspirational models among their female predecessors, and grist for their gendered critique of American society" (p. 145). In an Epilogue Auerback places himself among the "explorers." This is an important and provocative book. While there are other explorers Auerbach might have considered, what he has chosen to do he does with wit and grace and, above all, a clearer sense of these encounters in a larger historical framework than any student of the Pueblos has attempted before.

The outstanding pictures, art descriptions, and summaries give a wonderful impression of Italy and Italians. The information is presented in a concise and descriptive manner without the usual lengthy and often boring paragraphs of Italian history. The maps were especially helpful and the descriptions of Florence attractions led me to places I never would have thought to visit. One of the best tourbooks of Florence and Tuscany that I have seen. A must have for anyone spending a significant amount of time in Florence or for anyone who wants to see the real Florence!

A fitting tribute to Southwest Virginia and a time that will never be again, this collaboration between Katharine Shearer
and Frank Kilgore is a wonderful addition to any personal
library. If you enjoy looking at old postcards and pictures,
as I do, then this is the book for you. The descriptions of
the photos on each card are well written, and personal notes
that were written on many of them are included. Works like this are increasingly becoming the only link we have to a time when people worked hard and lived a simple life while building this Great nation of ours. When I opened this book, I couldn't lay
it down until I had looked at every postcard in it. I highly recommend this book to anyone, especially those interested in
the history and culture of Southwest Virginia.

Charlie Chambers