Books - November 2009
Plus: Read the full interview with Featured Author John Montfort Gist
Reviewed This Month:• Tony Hillerman's Landscape |
Guest Review by Wolf Schneider
Nonfiction/Travel
Tony Hillerman's Landscape: On the Road with Chee and Leaphorn
By Anne Hillerman
HarperCollins Publishers
208 pages, hardcover, $28.99
Famed Southwest detective novelist Tony Hillerman, who specialized in Navajoland mysteries centered on tribal policemen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, passed away in October 2008, but in Tony Hillerman’s Landscape: On the Road with Chee and Leaphorn, his work lives on in vivid color photography and extensive nonfiction narrative about the mostly New Mexico and Arizona locations where he set his mysteries.
So often, coffee-table books filled with lush photography are not as attentive to the accompanying text. Happily, that’s not the case here. While Don Strel’s photographs showcase the Navajo Nation settings of Hillerman’s mysteries, Anne Hillerman—Tony Hillerman’s daughter, Strel's wife, and a longtime journalist—provides writing that is both discerning and informative about those locations. The result is a multilayered odyssey through Indian Country.
The more than 150 color images range from the artistic (a train zooms through the landscape in a blur, behind it red-rock cliffs) to the adventurous (a Navajo girl canters on horseback through the buff-colored Monument Valley), from the human (the staff of Two Grey Hills Trading Post) to the animal (endearing Navajo-owned goats) to the vast (the Lukachukai Mountains shimmering bluish green where they straddle the Arizona-New Mexico state line).
Anne Hillerman provides the context for such vistas. For example, she points out that of the more than 9,800 miles of public roads on the Navajo reservation, 78 percent are dirt or gravel. She emphasizes the reality of the locations her father fictionalized: “Don and I head north toward Shiprock. We pass a store with a hay barn, horse trailers, bags of coal, and huge piles of wood for sale, a ready made setting for a Chee-Leaphorn novel.”
Offering handy capsule summaries and excerpts from some of her father’s novels, she shares her explorations of the settings. Especially strong are Strel’s photographs and Hillerman’s descriptions of Zuni Pueblo, where she recalls attending a ritual: “I’ll never forget the clear, bitterly cold November night, the crowd of mostly Indians, and the unearthly music.” Tony Hillerman re-created this ceremony in the climax of his Dance Hall of the Dead (Harper & Row, 1973). On a more personal note, Anne writes that Tony’s interest in the Zuni took a serious turn when her sister Jan began to date someone from Zuni—although the romance ultimately faltered.
A cow sauntering across the road in downtown Tuba City, the badlands near Cameron, the all-Indian Window Rock Rodeo—this book takes us there and back, with directions to everywhere—even to tiny Gold Tooth, which Hillerman himself had trouble finding.
Tony Hillerman’s Landscape is an alluring and assiduously researched travel memoir, and a revealing behind-the-scenes chronicle of the peoples and settings that inspired Hillerman’s atmospheric mysteries. It’s a must-have for fans of Southwest mysteries and devotees of Indian Country.
Wolf Schneider has been editor in chief of the Santa Fean, editor of Living West, and consulting editor for Southwest Art.
Book Briefs by Ashley M. Biggers
TravelNew Mexico: A Guide for the Eyes
By Elisa Parhad
EyeMuse Books
224 pages, hardcover, $19.95
In this travel guide, instead of a checklist of things to see and do, author and photographer Elisa Parhad offers up a conversational phrasebook for the eyes, deciphering the symbols, foods, and land formations that, as she notes, make up the “everyday soul of a place”—in this case, New Mexico. Entries, each of which includes a photograph and description, range from the charming (such as the one on the classic pickup truck) to the cultural (the entry on curanderismo) to the culinary (enchiladas). Although New Mexico: A Guide for the Eyes is meant to be only an introduction to the state’s cultures, I found myself wanting to see more cryptic, decoder ring–type images of the state’s symbols and read more of Parhad’s all-too brief descriptions. In this pocket-size book, Parhad—a former New Mexico resident—has created an insightful and enjoyable photographic mosaic of our state’s vibrant culture in 100 pieces.
Essays
The Essays
By Rudolfo Anaya, Foreword by Robert Con Davis-Undiano
University of Oklahoma Press
320 pages, hardcover, $24.95
Acclaimed as the grandfather of Chicano literature and best known for such novels as Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya is seldom heralded for his essays. However, this volume, which gathers his shorter pieces into one volume for the first time, superbly demonstrates Anaya’s acumen for storytelling, no matter the genre. “The storyteller’s gift is my inheritance,” he writes in “Shaman of Words,” which recounts the journey that led him to become an author. In these 52 essays, the Albuquerque author and University of New Mexico professor emeritus draws on his Hispanic heritage to tackle such issues as censorship, racism, education, sexual politics, and the tragedies and triumphs of his own life. The poetic voice of his fiction is heard here as well, in pieces of autobiography, commentaries on American life and Chicano culture, and advocacy. Anaya is at his best when speaking to other Chicanos, as in his celebrated essay “Requiem for a Lowrider”—and when, as in his fiction, he invokes the myth and folklore of New Mexico, as he does here in “La Llorona, El Kookoóee, and Sexuality.” Fans of Anaya and Chicano literature will enjoy The Essays.
Cooking
Beaumont's Kitchen: Lessons on Food, Life, and Photography with Beaumont Newhall
Essay by David Scheinbaum
Radius Books
160 pages, hardcover, $55
“A great cook and a great photographer share the same intuitive process, they know when to follow a recipe and when to improvise,” begins David Scheinbaum’s introductory essay for this category-defying volume, which takes readers into the kitchen of famed photography historian Beaumont Newhall. Newhall, best known for his canonical The History of Photography, taught at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, and retired to Santa Fe. But he was a foodie at heart, a chef to friends and family, and, for more than 12 years, the author of the how-to cooking column, “Epicure Corner,” for the Brighton-Pittsford Post, in Rochester, New York. Here is a collection of his columns and recipes in every category, from basics to desserts. Woven into the text are photographs by a few of Newhall’s friends—and when you’re Beaumont Newhall, your friends include the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Minor White, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom created still-life images of food. (I never quite appreciated the graphic quality of a halved onion until I saw it as Weston did in his 1930 photograph.) Lovers of photography and of food will savor this delightful tribute to a little-known aspect of Newhall’s life.
Children's
Loco Dog and the Dust Devil in the Railyard
By Marcy Heller, Illustrated by Nancy Poes
Azro Press
32 pages, hardcover, $19.95
Set in the Santa Fe Railyard, this delightful tale of Loco—short for Locomotive—describes the large, black dog’s adventures. Loco spends his days playing with the local kids, keeping watch over the tracks, and even saves one child’s life. All is well until one evening, when a gritty dust devil swirls through the Railyard and forever changes the lives of the lovable dog and everyone around him. Emanating from this magical tale is the message that love and faith will prevail. Accompanying the text are colorful, impressionistic paintings of the Railyard by Nancy Poes, including of the iconic Santa Fe Depot building. Loco Dog, which won the 2008 New Mexico Book Award in the category of “Best Young Reader Book,” is suggested for children aged five and older, and “all the adults who remember the old Santa Fe Railyard.”
Fiction
Tierra Red
By K.P. Vorenberg
Outskirts Press
428 pages, paperback, $21.95
Fresh off the train from Philadelphia, Lily Vandermere arrives in territorial New Mexico in a flurry of petticoats, eager to marry her fiancé, Robert Crenshaw. But Robert, whom Lily has never met but only corresponded with, isn’t all he seemed in their letters. Instead, he’s a murderous con man who’s swindled people out of their possessions in a land-grant scheme. Lily narrowly escapes being killed, only to find herself the unsuspecting guardian of encrypted documents and a stolen fortune. Enmeshed in a web of deceit, Lily sets out to unmask the villains behind the crime and to make a home for herself in an unfamiliar land. Las Cruces-based author K. P. Vorenberg hits the right notes throughout this tale of corruption and murder in the 1880s West: The villains are fittingly menacing, the heroes cunning, the landscapes dazzling. It all leads up to a standoff in which the once vulnerable Lily proves her courage and hard-won self-reliance as she protects those she loves. Fans of the Western genre and historical fiction will enjoy this novel.
Essays
A Goat Tale and Other Stories Heard Around the Supper Table
By Glenda Price, Illustrations by A-10 Etcheverry
AuthorHouse
132 pages, paperback, $16.48
Although cowboy writers and poets have a faithful audience, rarely do we hear a cowgirl describe her “country-girl life.” This collection, from Mesilla Park resident Glenda Price, provides that missing voice. Price has a self-described “warped sense of humor” that bursts through these down-home tales of her rural life. This cowgirl version of Baxter Black spins yarns about her grandchildren’s rampaging 4H show goat (the subject of the title essay), romance on the range, and varmints ranging from snakes to husbands. Whether you’re citified or a stalwart country resident, this collection will have you smiling all the way through, and includes comical illustrations from New Mexico Magazine contributor A-10 Etcheverry. Price, who grew up on ranches in northeastern New Mexico and competed in rodeo barrel racing in her youth, is a contributor to New Mexico Horse Breeder and Livestock Market Digest.
