Guest Review by Tom Clagett

Nature
Fire Season
By Philip Connors
Ecco
256 pages, harcover, $24.99

Near the end of author Philip Connors’s reminiscences about working as a fire lookout in the remote, three-million-acre Gila National Forest, in New Mexico’s rugged southwest corner, he relates the experiences of Beat Generation novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, who kept a diary during the season he spent as a lookout in Washington’s North Cascades in 1956. Connors says Kerouac “never left a doubt about the way he felt” while watching for smoke that summer. The same could be said of Connors’s account in Fire Season.

For the last eight years, Connors has lived his summers in a glass-walled, seven-by-seven-foot lookout tower 10,000 feet above sea level, his job to sound the alarm at any sign of smoke in “one of the most fire-prone landscapes in New Mexico”—an area in which lightning strikes more than 30,000 times each year. He says he can’t think of a better job.

Connors has a dog for company, and sees his wife almost every other weekend, but I was curious about how he approaches the solitude of his job. In Fire Season, he admits that the work is “a blend of monotony, geometry, and poetry.” But as he describes it, monotony becomes a blessing, geometry involves locating a fire’s distance, and poetry emerges from the sights around him—like a rising tendril of white smoke.

A former editor at the Wall Street Journal, Connors presents not only a vivid and informative guide to the history, topography, and wildlife of the Gila area, but also his unvarnished views on fire abatement, cattle grazing, and political paradoxes. “There’s still wild character to this country, despite the human impact of metal signs, cut trails, and barbed wire fencing,” he writes.

When not looking for smoke, Connors contemplates dust-devil swirls, measures humidity with a “nifty tool” called a sling psychrometer, and plays Frisbee golf. Gale-force winds test his endurance. In an eerie moment, he realizes he hasn’t spoken a word in 10 hours. Most hikers pass by with a friendly “Hello,” but some wander in like characters from a film by the Coen brothers—such as the cowboy from Montana who said he was so mesmerized by the lights of San Francisco that he tried riding his horse across the Golden Gate Bridge, but “the police didn’t take kindly to it.”

Connors also indulges in flippant observations. Of his early days at the Wall Street Journal, he writes, “I ascended to the rarefied realms of American journalism, handing out faxes and replacing empty water coolers.” Though Connors is irreverent about some aspects of his career, his skills pay off when a fire eventually erupts, and he describes the firefighters’ assault on the blaze from both ground and air with a journalist’s keen eye.

Compelling and introspective, Fire Season lingers like a good poem.

Tom Clagett, a.k.a. Thomas D. Clagett, is the author of William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession and Reality (Silman-James Press, 2003).

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Book Briefs by Ashley M. Biggers

Cooking
Straight from the Heart: Simply Beautiful Food from Taos, New Mexico
By Lesley B. Fay
Self-Published
224 pages, spiral-bound, $34.99

Under the leadership of executive chef Lesley B. Fay and her husband and business partner, Peter, Graham’s Grille in Taos has become a popular dining destination since it opened in 2007. In Straight from the Heart, Chef Fay shares her recipes for the restaurant’s most popular dishes. The cookbook begins with a brief autobiographical journey in which Fay begins in California and eventually ends up in the Land of Enchantment. “New Mexico was a part of me before I ever got here,” she writes. The recipes aren’t exclusively New Mexican—you’ll find recipes for watermelon gazpacho and Tuscan-style rib eye along with the chicken posole and Taos tamale pie—but each comes straight from the chef’s heart and life. As a child, Fay lived in Egypt, which has given many of her dishes Middle Eastern or Mediterranean influences. Dynamic photographs by Taos locals Kathleen Brennan (a New Mexico Magazine contributor) and Pat Pollard illustrate many of the recipes. Order Straight from the Heart online or pick it up at Graham’s Grille during your next trip to Taos—either way, and no matter where you live, it will help you re-create the flavors of contemporary New Mexican cuisine.

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Architecture
Roadcut: The Architecture of Antoine Predock
By Christopher Curtis Mead
University of New Mexico Press
210 pages, hardcover, $75

The work of Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock has gained international recognition. When, in 2006, he won a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects, he joined the likes of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who was honored with the prize in 1949. In Roadcut, author Christopher Mead, an architectural historian and a professor of architecture and art history at the University of New Mexico, traces Predock’s career and design aesthetic from Albuquerque’s La Luz housing development (1967) to Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights, for which architecture work is still underway. Mead documents how Predock’s grounding in New Mexico has influenced the architect’s practice, which is now global. At the heart of Predock’s philosophy is how a building can exist within and conform to the land and the landscape. Mead quotes Predock’s remarks on his design of George Pearl Hall, at the University of New Mexico: “In the Southwest, I have always thought of the fundamental connection between the earth and sky through the mute blank adobe walls that you find here. This has influenced me enormously. There is such a completeness in adobe architecture; the wall acts as a bridge between earth and sky.” In addition to detailing Predock’s vision and design process in words, the book documents his initial sketches (sometimes drawn on mailing envelopes or napkins); schematics, elevations, and models; and, in striking photographs, the finished buildings. Academic in tone, this handsome book is best suited for aficionados of architecture.

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Fiction
Pie Town
By Lynne Hinton
William Morrow
384 pages, paperback, $13.99

Out this month, Pie Town fictionalizes life in the eponymous real-life New Mexico village, perched on the Continental Divide about 80 miles west of Socorro. New Mexico author Lynne Hinton captures the essence of small-town life—from visitors who, even if unexpected, are always welcome to stop and stay a while, to Alex, a little boy with spina bifida whom the whole town watches over. But Pie Town’s routine is interrupted by the arrival of Father George Morris, who has more faith than experience in leading a flock; and hitchhiker Trina, who seems to be up to no good. As the newcomers try to make places for themselves in Pie Town, they expose deep rifts in the community. When Father George loses what’s most important to him, and Trina is faced with an unexpected challenge, the entire town has the chance to learn lessons of acceptance and redemption. Reading Hinton’s light, quickly moving prose feels like sitting down to catch up with an old friend over coffee. The author of several other novels, including Wedding Cake (2010), Christmas Cake (2009), and Forever Friends (2004), Hinton is a pastor in the United Church of Christ.

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History/Travel
A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque
By E.B. Held
University of New Mexico Press
124 pages, paperback, $19.95

Santa Fe’s downtown Plaza and adobe buildings may be must-see destinations for visitors, but as Albuquerquean E. B. Held reveals in the fascinating A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, they are also destinations for spy-vs.-spy intrigue. A former clandestine operations officer for the CIA, Held was, from 2002 to 2009, Chief of Counterintelligence at Albuquerque’s Sandia National Laboratories; currently, he is Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy. He thus offers not only expert perspective on historic events, but also insights into today’s intelligence community. Held claims that New Mexico has been synonymous with espionage since 1940, when the KGB used a Santa Fe drugstore to plot the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. A few years later, Albuquerque became a hot spot for spying when an American physicist, working in an atomic weapons laboratory, passed along to a KGB agent key technical details of Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and thus accelerated the Cold War. But that’s only the start of what Held reveals in this compact, eminently readable guide to some of the best-known incidents of espionage in U.S. history, and the role New Mexico played in them.

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Nature
Raptors of New Mexico
Edited by Jean-Luc E. Cartron
University of New Mexico Press
728 pages, hardcover, $50

Though there are many field guides to the observation and appreciation of Southwestern birds, Raptors of New Mexico is the first to focus exclusively on the Land of Enchantment’s birds of prey. A brief stay at New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in 1988 captured editor Jean-Luc E. Cartron’s imagination, and he has devoted the more than 20 years since then to researching the state’s raptors. New Mexico, he notes in the Preface, “harbors a high diversity and abundance of raptors, from the familiar Red-tailed Hawk, encountered daily in nearly all areas of the state, to rarities such as the Gray Hawk, the White-tailed Kite, or the Mexican Spotted Owl.” The book comprises entries about 37 different raptors, and more than 700 color photographs of these intriguing birds. In addition to documenting scientific research about the anatomy and ecology of each species, Raptors of New Mexico also captures dynamic stories from the field, including rare observations of adult birds’ in-flight skirmishes and predations, and clumsy fledglings’ first attempts at flight. At 728 pages, this fine publication is a large and scholarly work; for bird-watchers and enthusiasts of raptors, it’s a must-read.

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Discover more Southwest books in our archives.