Arizona Books

Just comparing photos taken decades apart, these authors lay bare the extent of transformation in Arizona's countryside over the past century. The cool-weather plants retreat northward and up the hillsides. The desert plants move in like a tide from Mexico. It's a merger of good science with viscerally clear communication.

--Brian Griffith, author of "The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History"

This an excellent book that captures the essence of the Chicano Art Movement during it's formative years. A massive effort was undertaken to produce this book with contributions from too many to mention but including Ceasar Chavez, Martin Sheen, Edward James Olmos, various departments and committees at UCLA, and most notably The Wright Art Gallery. Lavish reproductions of original art work is displayed throughout the book. The artists featured are some of the best the movement produced, including David Avalos, Yolanda Lopez, Jose Montoya, Mario Torero, Ricardo Favela and Judith Baca, just to name a few. There are many other artists featured, these just happen to be some of my favorite from this book. The themes of the works run the gamut from Zapata to cholos, Frida Kahlo to lowriders, United Farmworkers to Chicano Gothic, McCarthyism to pachocos, murals, oils, pencil and multi-media works. A fabulous collection of works that represent the roots of the Chicano Art Movement. An excellent source book for anyone interested in the art of the southwest in it's early years. The various pieces of art are fully explained and given full analysis from a historical perspective. Find this book and add it to your art section of your personal library, the pictures alone are worth the price.

In their introduction to Chicano Sketches, the editors assert that the late short-story writer Mario Suarez "represents a unique case of an early Chicano author who remained faithful to his original purpose of creating a distinctively Chicano literary space." How early? The first eight of the 19 stories included in this collection were first published by the Arizona Quarterly between 1947 and 1950. The "distinctively Chicano literary space" Suarez created was grounded in the harsh realities of a barrio in Tucson called El Hoyo (literally "The Hole") which the editors term "an urban wasteland." Suarez, who was also a journalist, social activist and educator who relocated his family to Southern California in 1958, possessed a sharp eye for quotidian human experience. He populated his "sketches" (his term) with preening pachucos, avuncular barbers, unrepentant womanizers, chisme-loving comadres, clever swindlers and many other examples of humanity.

Suarez did not romanticize the Chicano experience; indeed, he acknowledged such social dysfunctions as alcohol abuse ("Cuco Goes to a Party" and "Loco-Chu"), indolence ("Kid Zopilote") and economic struggle ("The Migrant" and "Los Coyotes") while celebrating the beauty of Chicano culture ("Mexican Heaven"), human kindness ("Dona Clara" and "Senor Garza") and the work ethic ("Something Useful, Even Tailoring"). Quite often, Suarez relied on biting irony and comedic juxtapositions to illustrate his characters' vices and virtues. No collection of Chicano literature will be complete without this volume. [The full version of this review first appeared in Southwest BookViews.]

Lisa Schnebly Heidinger knows Arizona--in fact, Sedona was named after this talented writer/reporter's great-great grandmother. In this compendium of short pieces, Schnebly Heidinger gives a broad sampling of what it means to be from Arizona. Residents will likely nod in agreement, while tourists will delight to find vivid accounts relating to many of the people and places they have sampled as they've journeyed through the cities...and the country. Highly recommended if you are traveling to Arizona sometime soon.

Researched, compiled and edited by Robert Fallon (Professor Emeritus, Lasalle University, Philadelphia), The Christian Solider is an inherently fascinating and scholastically important primary source consisting of religious tracts published for soldiers on both sides of the English Civil Wars from 1642 to 1648. Hallmarked by a carefully annotated scholarship, The Christian Solider offers insight into the justifications used to resolve the seeming paradox of having a Christian faith while employing a deadly sword, then contemporary views upon royalty, and so much more. A revealing glimpse into history, religion, and human psychology, The Christian Soldier is an impressive and strongly recommended contribution to British History reference collections.

The book has some wonderful recipes for outdoor grub. Some are old and some don't use traditional units of measure. They are all great dishes, though. Stella also intersperses stories about camp cooks she has known, how they did things, what was important to them, etc. These stories are a great documentation of the western cowboy life. The section on sourdough is especially good.

When this book was first published by the University of Arizona Press back in 1991, I happened to be in a small bookstore when in walked Eugene Shoemaker. This was before the names of Shoemaker and Levy had been publicly linked in the name of a famous comet. Shoemaker spotted this book on the shelf and exclaimed happily: "Look! They've got David Levy's book on Clyde Tombaugh!" I vaguely recall that he even picked up the book and eagerly showed it to a friend. No doubt Shoemaker would be pleased that Sky and Telescope Books has now 'got' this book back into print.

While David Levy may be better known as an astronomer than as a biographer, he has a couple of stronger-than-usual qualifications to write Tombaugh's biography: he knew Tombaugh over many years and got Tombaugh's cooperation for this book, and he appreciates better than anyone what an extraordinary task it was for Tombaugh to search through a large portion of the sky, both before and after the Pluto discovery.

Clyde Tombaugh took a unique arc through the world of astronomy. Lowell Observatory hired him precisely because he was a Kansas farm boy without academic qualifications and would be thrilled to work for peanuts on a task that most astronomers considered futile. Tombaugh was indeed thrilled by the chance to observe the sky full-time. He was motivated by a basic deep love of astronomy that never left him amidst all the twists and frustrations of his further career. There are few biographies of astromoners in which the sheer joy of astronomy speaks so clearly. Levy also does justice to the scientific challenges involved in searching for Pluto. But Tombaugh's systematic sky survey had larger, cosmological implications: he was seeing the clumpy distribution of galaxies and challenged Edwin Hubble's opinion that the galaxies were distributed more uniformly. Tombaugh also had an adventure in pioneer rocketry, spending several years at White Sands in the 1950s, helping Von Braun's team develop some basic techniques that would become familiar to the public watching the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs.

I put Levy's biography to a unique, tough test. I read it after visiting the small town in Kansas from which Tombaugh came. I spoke with Tombaugh's nephew and with locals who had known the Tombaugh family. I went through the local newspaper file and and visited the school Tombaugh attended (and I even showed the latest issue of Sky and Telescope, with its cover story on Pluto, to Mrs. Miller's third grade class). I visited the now-abandoned Tombaugh farmstead and found the weed-hidden cement telescope mount Tombaugh had built for the telescope he used to make the drawings for which Lowell Observatory hired him. After such a personal exposure, there's a danger that a biography will fall short, ringing false in emphasis or slipping up on various details. But it's clear that Levy got to know Tombaugh pretty well. More importantly, he turns Tombaugh into an Everyman Hero for anyone who finds astronomy to be an adventure.

In his preface, the author makes clear that he intends this as "a companion volume" to his "History and mythology of the Aztecs: the Codex Chimalpopoca", a translation and annotation of this text. The book before us presents the original Nahuatl text, directly transcribed from the manuscript (i.e. without addition of glottal stops and vowel length, or other significant modification), to which the author has added a glossary, but no notes beyond the definitions given there.
Excellent, but only for those already well-versed in Nahuatl and the political and cultural context of Aztec rule and myth.

A true story and one of the best books I have read. I lost (by loaning out) my first copy and purchased a second copy. The cooper skyrocket refers to a man sitting on copper mines when the United States stated its change to electricity. You will learn a lot about Southern Arizona, the US Mexico border, Mexico, and the associated relationship between those three. I have lived in Southern Arizona since 1973 and this book tells the story like it is. If you purchase this book, I am certain you will not be sorry. Bob from Tucson AZ

No final answers, conflicting interpretations, and basic theories that head in different directions, all in an effort to understand one of the newest and most difficult geological mysteries: how did the Grand Canyon form? The general direction leads to a very surprising general theory, one that flies in the face of common sense. Could this theory be the real story? Can you take all of the evidence in the book and come up with a better theory?