Southwest Books

This book traces Twain's indebtedness to the humorists of the antebellum South and his adaptations of their literary techniques. The final chapter deals with Twain's unpublished papers, which Dr. Lynn described as "the broken ruins and unfinished monuments of a great talent." For anyone who wants to understand the provenance of Twain's art.

This is a must have book for all ASU sports fans. The depth of information and attention to detail are exceptional. Bob Eger has a great style and clearly did a ton of research for the book. There are so many little known, but very interesting, facts in this book that you will want to read through it again and again! This is a great book to leave out on the coffee table for everyone to flip through!

Mary Colter was a woman ahead of her time --- an architect and interior designer when few women attempted it. She interwove rustic techniques, local materials and American Indian themes into buildings and designs well before that was accepted by others in her professions. Her rustic buildings at Grand Canyon National Park still survive to the delight of many visitors. Colter was at times a prefectionist, hard to get along with, a workaholic and extremely demanding of herself and her co-workers. Yet the author shows us her life and work with sympathy as well as depth. This book is well illustrated with color and black and white photos. Well researched. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It answered all my questions!

Wish I'd reviewed this one right after I read it, shortly after I bought the book from Amazon last year.

The author passed away on July 3rd, 2003, just a few days ago.

I enjoyed the book, written by a civilized man with a great insights into American literature, popular culture, and the human condition historically and at large.

Some chapters of the above book, such as the ones on THE WILD BUNCH and GERONIMO, are exclusively on movies. The chapters on books include:

William Faulkner's Ike McCaslin in GO DOWN, MOSES.

L. D. Clark's A BRIGHT TRAGIC THING: A TALE OF CIVIL WAR IN TEXAS, about the Great Hanging in Gainesville, Texas in 1862.

Gore Vidal's BILLY THE KID.

Jan Candia Coleman's I, PEARL HART, based upon a true story and perhaps the most interesting essay here. "About female self-assertion in a cruel, male dominated world."

Montserrat Fontes's DREAMS OF THE CENTAUR.

David Morrell's LAST REVEILLE, another fine essay that made me think I might want to read the book after all.

Mariana Azuela's LOS DE ABADJO, "a classic about the Mexican Revolution which features a band of mavericks who drift into and along with the Revolution without any clear sense of purpose."

Other essays are entitled: "The Feminizing of Freedom and Fulfillment: Como Agua Para Chocolate," "Mirrors, Dreams, and Memory: Gringo Viejo," and "Crossing Into Fascism in Bisbee 17."

Doublas Canfield earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1963, master's degrees from Yale and the Johns Hopkins Universities in 1964 and 1966, respectively, and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1969, where he was a United States Steel Foundation Fellow and where he earned election to Phi Beta Kappa. He taught at UCLA before coming to the University of Arizona in 1974, where he became Regents Professor in 1994.

Besides the book above, Canfield was the author of several scholarly books and articles in the two fields of Restoration and early eighteenth-century British literature (particularly the drama) and comparative literature and culture of the Southwest borderlands. In the spring of 2001, he was invited to Italy, to the University of Florence to lecture in this latter field and to the University of Tuscia to lecture in the former, where a series of translations of Restoration comedies into Italian has begun in his honor.

An expert on the Restoration, he was a Renaissance Man in every sense of the word. He won several fellowships for his scholarship, the most recent from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000-2001. He was also the winner of several teaching awards, including 1993 Arizona Professor of the Year. He was especially proud of his service to the University of Arizona as chairman of President Manuel Pacheco's Task Force on Undergraduate Education in 1991-1992.

According to Rick Wallach, president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, Canfield was also a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a national referee with AYSO. He coached his sons in several sports from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, and co-coached and refereed a soccer team with his son Colin as recently as the fall 2002. His other hobbies were hunting and writing poetry, of which he has two books published. He has also authored a poetic drama on John Charles Fremont.

Rick Wallach, in a tribute to him at the McCarthy Society from which much of this review is garnered, said, "All of us who knew Doug were aware of his passionate commitment to social justice, and his favorite course to teach was "The Ideology of Human Rights," His last wish was for world peace with justice. . ."

"Doug's wonderful long essay on Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, which he read at the Society's annual conference in Tucson last year, will be published sometime in the (we hope) near future..."

i wonder i we were kin? last name same as min

Concise but comprehensive recollections of ranching life in the Far Southwest during a 90-year span by a member of a Hispanic ranching-farming family of Casa Grande, Arizona.

The author, still going strong at 91 years of age, preserves for posterity his experiences in a way of life that has all but disappeared. The uniqueness of the region is highlighted by a capable storyteller whose love for these traditions is evident throughout the book.

Yginio Aguirre previously published a family history book now out of print titled Echoes of The Conquistadores. That book set the stage for this one as he described in vivid detail the saga of the Aguirre family and the cattle history of Southern Arizona. He represented the United States during the dreaded "Hoof and Mouth Disease" episode.

Through a span of 90 years an old-timer remembers early ranches. cattlemen, and cowboys. Rich in Hispanic and ranching heritage. Memoirs and stories of more than 90 years in the cow country of southern Arizona and northern Sonora. The author is a member of the Aquirre family, one of the oldest Hispanic ranching families of the northern Mexico frontier and southern Arizona. The Aguirre's came from Nueva Vizcaya, New Spain- Present day Chihuahua, Mexico. They were involved in silver mining and ranching and later generations entered politics.

Privately printed, 2000. First edition. Limited to 250 copies. Signed by the author. Printed stiff wrappers, [7], 68 [1] pp., dedication, introduction, illustrated. Sketches by Yginio F. Aguirre. Manuscript by Kimberly Elliott [granddaughter].

David Grant Noble's THE MESA VERDE WORLD, is probahly the best photographic representation of the nortern Chacoan culture. Specialists in various aspects of archaeology illuminate in text the excellent graphics.

One of the largest minority groups in the country and so little is known about them. Timely, well written, and needed. Highly recommend.

David Rosenbaum undertook a tremendous task in researching and documenting Mexicano resistence in the aftermath of the United States annexation of the Southwest territories (over 15,000,000 square miles) from Mexico to end the Mexican-American War (1848). Contrary to popular history the southwest territory was not conquered by General Kearney "without a shot being fired." The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war and guaranteed U.S. citizenship, land rights, and use of Spanish to the Mexicanos and Spaniards who remainded on their land. Dr. Rosenbaum's first-rate research documents the resistence, scurmishes, and battles that took place as mexicanos fought to protect their families, their property and their rights in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

For people interested in the life experience of Southern civilians in the 1860's, Stephen Ash should be a prime resource. And for those interested in the totality of our civil war, there is no better place to gain a view than in Middle Tennessee. In 1860, Middle Tennessee was one of the most prosperous sections of the South, filled with successful, even rich, farms and farmers, many of them slaveholders. However, the people of the area were hardly of one view, and when it fell to Union forces in the spring of 1862, Professor Ash paints a vivid picture of the section's rapid decline into "utter social and institutional anarchy."

One of the debates among historians over the time since this book came out relates to the question, was the Civil War a total war? Regardless how one defines total war, or the conclusion one reaches, this book brings into view one great cost the people of the South paid when they entered into a war that would be lost. They had a stable government and a safe living situation before the war began. When Tennessee left the Union to join a new government, and that government was driven away and destroyed, the real terrors and scourges of war, terror and anarchy, filled the void. Anarchy was just as sharp an instrument of harsh war as were any official Union policies designed to destroy the war-making capability of the Confederacy.

I can here some of you now: "Well, I'm not interested in social history; I wanna read about the real war." If so, heed the words of Gary Gallagher, who hailed this book as a new and necessary sort of military history, "connecting the experiences of soldiers in the field and civilians on the home front ... providing a social context within which to understand military events." War isn't hell? Look here. You'll think otherwise.