Guest Review by Patricia West-Barker

Memoir
A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life
By Steven Kotler
Bloomsbury USA
320 pages, hardcover, $24

Santa Fe, as any observant local or visitor can tell you, is a town of dog-lovers. The pampered pets are everywhere: romping in parks, sunning on the Plaza, relaxing on café patios, browsing specialty shops that cater to their needs. But Santa Fe may be an anomaly, surrounded as it is by impoverished rural northern New Mexico, where animal cruelty and abandonment are daily events.

The irony of New Mexico’s dualistic treatment of dogs hasn’t escaped Steven Kotler, an accomplished journalist with assignments to his credit from such publications as Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine.

His first book, The Angle Quickest for Flight (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001), was a San Francisco Chronicle best seller; his second, West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), was a 2006 PEN West finalist. Kotler also writes “The Playing Field,” a blog on PsychologyToday.com that looks at “sports and culture through the lens of science.”

Sports, culture, and science are also important components of Kotler’s third book, A Small Furry Prayer, which chronicles his first three years on a small farm outside the village of Chimayó, where he and his then girlfriend (now his wife), Joy Nicholson, move to establish Rancho de Chihuahua, a sanctuary for dogs who are “very old, very sick, really retarded.”

Joy is a dog rescuer, and when Kotler takes to heart her dictum of “love me, love my dogs,” he enters the brave new underground world of animal rescue. This triggers in him an existential crisis, and a wide-ranging scientific inquiry into the history and nature of humans’ long association with dogs.

His daily experiences raise questions for Kotler: The deaths of seven dogs in as many weeks spur a thoughtful examination of humans’ bereavement for their companion animals; a $500 dog-food bill provokes research into the science of human altruism—and into similar behavior exhibited by his pack, which also had begun “caring for the sick, protecting the meek, defending the elderly.”

“I had spent the past two years having experiences with animals that most scientists dismissed as impossible,” Kotler writes—“empathy, altruism, homosexuality, imitative behavior, moral behavior, intelligence, abstract intelligence, language skills, laughter”—so he “did what many reporters do when faced by ideas they can’t quite understand: ludicrous amounts of research.”

The results of his research greatly enrich A Small Furry Prayer, making it both a simple memoir and a thought-provoking inquiry. Careful summations of current research into such diverse topics as the relationships of dogs and humans, the mirror neuron system, cross-species group-flow experience, and deep ecology—where environmentalism and dog rescue meet—flow through chapters embellished with quotes from such diverse sources as the Buddha, Martin Buber, and Cindy, a chain-smoking local donkey wrangler.

Are dogs special? Are humans? Or are we just special to each other because we care for them and they for us? Read this book, slowly, and decide for yourself.

Patricia West-Barker shares her Santa Fe home with two dogs and a cat who thinks he’s a dog. When she’s not rubbing tummies and tossing treats, she publishes TheZenchilada.com, a quarterly online magazine that feeds body, mind, and spirit.

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Book Briefs by Ashley M. Biggers

Fiction
Tengo Sed
By James Fleming
University of New Mexico Press
144 pages, paperback, $16.95

From the voice of University of New Mexico assistant professor James Fleming comes Tengo Sed, a novel recounting one day in the life of an emergency-room resident physician. Known only as “Hovercraft” because he’s “always around, always feeling on the edge” of this fast-paced, unforgiving teaching environment, the novel’s protagonist struggles to wade through a life-and-death world many of us are able to blissfully ignore. “It’s just you and the Trauma-Surgical ICE, in short, fire, worry, nausea, and the sickest patients in New Mexico, everything the A bomb missed: rollover accidents, stabbings, third degree burns, gunshot wounds, hangings, and simply freezing to the ice when they get too drunk to walk.” As we see this world through Hovercraft’s eyes, the novel’s Spanish title, Tengo Sed (I thirst), gains meaning: He thirsts for existence outside this grisly world, yet, knowing the risks, he continues to sail forth on this disaster-prone ship.  Fleming’s writing is sparse, raw, and engaging, and the novel provides an enlightening, if somewhat unsettling, view of medical education and practice. Fleming is an attending physician in the Emergency Department of Albuquerque’s Veterans Administration Hospital.

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Mystery
A Dead Man's Tale: A Charlie Moon Mystery
By James D. Doss
Minotaur Books
320 pages, hardcover, $24.99

Scientist-turned-entrepreneur Samuel Reed has an unusual bet for Granite City chief of police Scott Parris and his friend, Ute rancher and investigator Charlie Moon: Solve and prevent an impending murder within a month, and he’ll pay them 10 to 1 on the wager. The potential victim? Samuel Reed. The Wall Street investor claims to be able to predict the market, but his prescience has now led him to predict his own death. With a payoff that could allow Moon to settle his debts and save his ranch in southern Colorado, the Ute lawman jumps at the chance to solve the crime. But when he ends up with not one but two homicides on his hands, Moon scrambles to identify the murderer before the body count is three. As always in his Charlie Moon novels, Los Alamos and Taos author James D. Doss presides over the narrative with voice-overs that, à la Little House on the Prairie, blend omniscience with moral observations. Doss also serves up his typical homespun humor and witticisms—my favorite was when the mayor “shudduped”—which fans of the series will enjoy.

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Nonfiction
Yelow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
By Judy Pasternak
Free Press
336 pages, hardcover, $26

In the 1940s rush to create an atomic bomb, and the subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapons that resulted in the Cold War, the U.S. government mined uranium from the remote and rugged landscape of the Navajo Nation, population 250,000, which encompasses part of northwestern New Mexico. Mining this material may have served the security interests of the United States, but irresponsible mining practices may have also destroyed a nation. In Yellow Dirt, former Los Angeles Times journalist Judy Pasternak tells the hidden history of the mining, which has taken place on the Navajo Nation for decades and has had a near-devastating environmental impact. As the book jacket states, “Even now, long after the uranium boom ended, and long after national security could be cited as a consideration, many [Navajo Nation] residents are still surrounded by contaminated air, water, and soil. The radioactive ‘yellow dirt’ has ended up in their drinking supplies, in their walls and floors, in their playgrounds, in their bread ovens, in their churches, and even in their garbage dumps. And they are still dying.” Pasternak takes sides here: Yellow Dirt voices the perspective of the Navajo, who are arguably those most affected by the environmental crisis but whose voices have so far been largely ignored. As she presents her wealth of evidence, the U.S. government is revealed as neglectful, shortsighted, and duplicitous. At times, the chronicle verges on rambling, but Pasternak’s ability to humanize this complex issue with compassionate insights about and from the Navajo people will keep you reading. Yellow Dirt is a journalistic achievement, and a worthwhile book about an often-overlooked chapter of our history.

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Fiction
The Sixth Surrender
By Hana Samek Norton
Plume
480 pages, paperback, $16

In her debut novel,  New Mexico author Hana Samek Norton transports readers to 11th-century France, where chivalry and treachery reigned. Here we meet Lady Juliana de Charnais, who is contemplating taking vows and becoming a nun when she learns that she has inherited her family’s viscounty. However, the young woman, who is known in her cloister as Sister Scholastica for her voracious desire to learn, cannot inherit land or title without a husband. The queen gives her a choice: remain cloistered and lose her rightful inheritance, or marry LaSalle, a man who has already murdered one wife. The queen’s advice? “We are all murderers. We couch it in bloodlines and privileges, and wattle and daub the rest in courtliness. . . . Honor, like love, comes in many guises.” Juliana chooses marriage. After all, in that era, “The purpose of a marriage is to produce a legitimate heir.” But as battles ensue to protect the crown of Normandy and England, scheming lords and LaSalle’s past threaten to cost the king the crown and Juliana her life. Fans of historical fiction and juicy love stories will enjoy this one.

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