A fellow lover of all things Northern New Mexico, Terry Clark, told me about this book, a memoir of life and adventures in the Pecos Wilderness by Elliott S. Barker. Barker grew up in northern New Mexico and visited the Pecos high country first as a ten year old boy in 1896, Beatty’s Cabin is more of an area of the Pecos rather than a particular place. Barker spent the rest of his life in the area. He was a rancher and a Forest Ranger and later a game ranger and in fact led the New Mexico State Game Department for years.
In this book he recounts personal history of his own adventures in the high mountains, hunting, fishing, and camping and tells of other’s adventures hunting grizzly bears, elk, and deer. The period of time covered is from the late 1800’s until the early 1950’s.
Part of my interest in the book is my father was a Forest Ranger at the Pecos Ranger Station of the Santa Fe National Forest back in the 1950s.
Here is a photo of my Dad pointing out a feature to me (with the Smokey Bear) and my brother. as you can see I wasn’t good at following directions. Dad told me that the Forest Service hired a photographer to come out and do a shoot and dad was told to cooperate.
He took a lot of ribbing from the people he knew. He said the photographer called him Mr. Cowboy and gave him explicit directions on where to stand or sit, what to point at and all the details. I would really like to talk about this book. I am sure he knew some of the people talked about in the book. Who knows?
Me, I have no memories of the Pecos Ranger station but I got these and other photos from the shoot the Forest Service made of my dad.
Anyway, I loved the book. Barker is a great writer.
“Finding Abbey” is partially a book about Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire, and one of the founders of the wilderness preservation movement in the United States and partially a book about where Edward Abbey was buried, and partially a book about the author Sean Prentiss and his search for meaning and direction in his life as he searches for Abbey’s grave.
Abbey was a cantankerous guy who had passion for wilderness, especially the desert wilderness. He railed on against mining, oil and gas production, and what he called “industrial tourism.” He was not very woke, so to speak but he was outspoken. He died young in Tucson, AZ in 1987 and wished that his friends would bury him somewhere in the desert. They did that at a secret location and vowed they would never tell anyone the location of the grave.
Prentiss, a college professor, and a lifelong fan of Abbey decides to go searching for the grave. The book is not a linear telling of the story. Prentiss weaves his own story in with Abbey’s as he visits Abbey’s friends and interviews them about Abbey. He goes back and forth between his search, his own life, and the stories of Abbey’s devoted friends and in the process travels all over the desert southwest. So the story goes forward and backwards and all around. Fortunately Prentiss is a talented writer and pulls it off.
Did he find the grave? Does he reveal the location? Hey read the book and find out. It’s a hard book to find. Tulsa’s library system got my copy on loan from the Central Arkansas Library System. I give the book five stars out of five.
I scored a free, no cost, no obligation, Advance Readers Copy of Exiles by Jane Harper. Ms. Harper is an Australian and the book is set in Australia and it is quite a read. I won’t go through the plot for you but it is about two murders that has everybody in a small town baffled about what happened especially about a missing mother who abandoned her baby during a festival.
That happened a year ago and a big city policeman comes, not to investigate the crime, but to reconnect with his family. He gets home and his curiosity just gets the better of him so he starts asking here and there trying to figure it out.
This is a who dunnit but it is also a relationship book. Lots of conversations and talking and thinking going on. When we get to the reveal about who did it, it is kind of wow, I should have seen that coming but didn’t. This is a totally satisfying book and I give it five stars out of five.
I just finished reading “Cuba, An American History” by Ada Ferrer.
What an outstanding book that reads like a novel. It tells the history of Cuba from and it’s relationship to America. It starts from Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the “New World” and goes right up to the Biden Administration. (Fun fact, Christopher Columbus never set foot on any part of what is now, the United States of America.)
Some things have always interested me such as why are the United States and Cuba been so much at odds with each other. Also why does Cuba that seemed to love Fidel Castro so much have hundreds of thousands of people who will risk their lives to leave the island given the slightest chance.
Ferrer asserts that our founding fathers had their sights on Cuba as a natural extension of the USA. She also writes that the Monroe Doctrine was more directed at Cuba than Latin America. The US was concerned about Britain trying to take over the island nation.
This is a history book that reads like a novel. I couldn’t put it down as Ms. Ferrer discusses the huge role slavery played in building up their sugar industry and the USA Banks who provided financing for the slave ships that went to Africa to bring enslaved people to Cuba. She writes how after a ten year battle to win their independence from Spain, the USA came in at the last minute and took over Cuba for ten years after the Spanish American War.
I could go on and on but this book is one great read.
This is a book about trees and somewhat of a memoir of Suzanne Simard and it just blew me away. It starts with her as a student intern working for a logging company in Canada and she is trying to figure out why Fir tree seedlings planted in a former clear cut do not thrive as expected. Why not, they have no competition from other trees, lots of sunshine and water. What is missing? So she starts trying to find out. She designs experiments with help from people from her work and over time she finds out that the fir trees need birch trees. It turns out that to professional foresters birch trees are weeds. They rob the valuable firs of sunshine, nutrients, and water.
Simard eventually rediscovers that birch trees and fir trees are linked by a fungus, a mycorrhizal fungus, that links the roots of birch trees and fir trees and this fungus facilitates the transfer of water, carbon, and other nutrients between the trees based on the needs of the trees. A great part of the book is Simard’s description of the experiments she ran to prove all this. Experiments in the woods are hard. Lots of digging to install barriers to prevent this fungus from connecting certain trees. Lots of exposure to radioactive gases as some of the trees are fogged with isotopes of carbon to help with tracing. Exposure to powerful herbicides when vegetation needs to be killed as part of the experiment. And then the dreary following up measuring how the various trees are growing and then running the data analysis.
And then presenting the data at conferences and trying to get published and getting the cold shoulder and outright hostility from the older, mainly male, foresters who reject her findings outright. It’s a story of perseverance as she slowly gets her message out and government agencies and logging companies start using her recommendation to make replanted forests grow faster and healthier, not just for the trees but for the whole ecosystem.
She writes about birches and firs but the forests are interconnected by all sorts of fungi between all sorts of species. She also writes about mother trees who somehow recognize their offspring and provide these “sons and daughters” extra nutrition and help to survive. None of this is speculation, she has proof that it occurs.
At the end she talks about salmon, grizzly bears, trees in the pacific coast of British Columbia. A major source of nitrogen it turns out in the trees on the coast, extending far inland, is from salmon. (How do they know that, because the isotope ratio for nitrogen in salmon is different from the native ratios in the soil). During the spawning season grizzly bears eat thousands of salmon and leave the carcasses to decompose. The evidence suggests that maybe the fungus network may be able to transmit the salmon nitrogen hundreds of miles underground. No proof yet, but stay tuned.
What makes the book special is not just the science but Simard talks about her own life and struggles with marriage, children, career, and health. She’s kind of my hero right now. Talk about somebody who has a passion for many things and does her best to carry forward.
Tell you what though, I am looking at trees and fungus with whole new eyes. As I hike my favorite trails here in Oklahoma I am looking at the trees and fungus with new eyes. Simard focuses her story the mycorrhizal fungus but there are literally thousands of other fungi out there that form networks between trees and other trees, and shrubs, and grass and every other type of plant you can think of sending nutrients here there and everywhere depending on season and need. It’s all kind of mind boggling.
I’ve been hearing about Zane Grey almost my whole life. A famous western writer who was active in the early 20th century wrote about the old west. I used to watch Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater when I was a kid. I have never read his books until this one “Riders of the Purple Sage” his best seller.
There is my Dad, the Forest Ranger, at the Mogollon Rim on the Tonto National Forest in Arizona. I think that is my brother at the far right. The dog is Dupe the cocker spaniel. I don’t know who the guy on left is.
I grew up in Zane Grey country, the Mogollon Rim country in Arizona. Home of desperadoes, cowboys, and outlaws way back when.
The Zane Grey Cabin in Payson, Arizona.
So I was expecting some sort of outlaw, desperado, rustler, lawman type novel when I read my first Grey novel. And there is quite a bit of that along with some great description of the country of southern Utah. A land of hidden canyons, secret passages, and beautiful valleys. There were outlaws, rustlers, and heroic hard bitten cowboys. But I’ll tell the dirty little secret of this book.
It’s a Romance Novel!! Oh my gosh, these cowboys when they meet the women their hearts go all aflutter, falling in pure, innocent love for these various damsels in distress. Page after page after page. I was never more glad to finish a novel than this thing. There were some “good parts in it” horseback chases across the sage flats. Hard charging horses. All the shoot outs and action is “off camera” if you will. They are told about afterwards.
Other than that it reminds of way back when when I worked in an office where one of the secretary’s didn’t have much to do so she read romance novels all day long. So I’d come by and say, hey let me see that. So I’d take the book and standing there for a few seconds read aloud what page she had been reading and it was all about heaving bosoms, quivering thighs, breathless anticipation, and soaring love (that is about as far as it went in this lady’s books). That is Riders of the Purple Sage, romance for cowboys.
The women are not treated much better. They are described as simple, childlike, and weak.
So I give this book three stars out of five for historical and literary interest. Otherwise I was pretty disappointed.
“Later” is one of Stephen King’s old school thriller, horror, books kind of based on cheap paperbacks. King can spin a yarn better than anybody in my opinion. We start out with kind of cute little boy who has this thing where he can talk with the recently dead.
So it starts out kind of cute and fluffy and as the novel progresses, the cute becomes less, and things get strange and then they get scary and all the sudden the novel hangs a hard left and sprouts knives, axes, teeth, and chainsaws and I swear it turns again right back at the reader. All before we know what is happening.
And after the story’s climax, King drops something else on us. Not a horror, but something else, just as horrible.
I finished it with like, what just happened here?
I strongly recommend this book. I got my copy at the library.
Jessica Bruder, a journalist, wrote Nomadland, a book about the (almost) hidden army of people who have decided for one reason or another to abandon permanent homes in favor of a life on the road. They don’t have real estate, they have “wheel estate.” they are not homeless, they are “houseless.” Many of them made this choice to follow a dream that doesn’t entail a house, maintenance, insurance, rent, and all the rest. I know a few of those people. Others made the choice because staying in a house or apartment did not add up. The type of arithmetic when you take your income and subtract food, medicine, insurance, other bills, and you don’t have enough for rent. They did it out of necessity. They are being squeezed out by the high cost of housing.
Where do they live? Many live in RV’s, new and old, travel trailers, truck campers. Some even live in their cars. Where do they park their vehicles? In RV parks, and on BLM and Forest Service land in the west. Walmart parking lots are popular, in commercial areas where their rigs blend in, public parks. Anywhere they are allowed to, and a few places where they are not. There are apps that guide them to free camping spots.
What do they do for money? Some live off their savings or in whatever jobs they can find. Thousands work for Amazon during the peak pre-Christmas season at their gigantic fulfillment centers. Amazon has a name for them, they are the Camperforce. Amazon loves them because of their work ethic and willingness to work for not very much money. Others work seasonally as camp hosts for National and State forests. They work the sugar beet harvest. All sorts of things.
Where do they go when they are not working. Thousands head to Quartzsite in southern Arizona where they boondock in the public lands surrounding town. The meet up in groups, learn the tricks and rules of the road from each other and enjoy the warm winters.
The author Jessica Bruder spent three years and researching this lifestyle. She even got her own van in order to embed even closer with them. You can tell she kind of fell in love with the lifestyle and the people. She tells the story with great empathy and insight.
I loved this book. And hey a movie is coming out starring Frances McDormand.
I just finished The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child. It’s another Jack Reacher story. Lee Child has written a bunch of books featuring Reacher, an ex-Army MP officer who is big and tough and travels around the country and runs into many bad guys harming good people. This is another one of those books and this one falls flat on its face. I am not going to tell you the plot, but there is not a whole lot of action in this book. It’s mainly narrative and dialog. Boring narrative and boring dialog.
I hate to say it but maybe the book falls short because it has two authors. Lee Child collaborated with his younger brother Andrew Child on this book. Apparently this is the first book of a four book deal struck with the two authors. I’ve never really enjoyed fiction with two or more authors. This was a quick read and I am glad that I did not buy it. Thank goodness for our libraries!!
I just got through reading Bolton’s memoirs of his brief time in the Trump Administrator as National Security Director. The book is certainly eye opening as Bolton describes working with Trump on issues such as China trade, North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction, the threats from Iran, and finishes off with the crisis in the Ukraine that led to Trump’s impeachment.
Bolton gets way down in the weeds and what comes out is his contempt for the way Trump does things. To Bolton, our president cannot maintain a train of thought for very long, cares little for issues except to the extent that he can use him to advance his own interests. He also doesn’t know the first thing about negotiating and mistakes personal relationships with international relationships. Bolton describes Kim Jong Un of North Korea laughing at Trump when he figured out that he could easily use that personal relationship to get concessions in negotiations.
Bolton also excoriates the House of Representatives for a lazy kind of impeachment where due to electoral schedules the calendar was abbreviated and so in the interests of time the issues were all focused on the Ukraine where in reality there was probably grounds for impeachment in a consistent pattern of self dealing by the President. The House also did not pursue their subpoenas in court so there was not much of an investigation and the process because ultra polarized and resulted in an acquittal by the Senate.
Bolton fears an unleashed Trump in a second term. The only thing that restrained him from many things in his first term was the fear of not being re-elected. Trump was barely constrained anyway and he’ll be much worse.
The book was interesting also as it gave me an insight into Bolton. The guy is pretty smart and has a lot to say. Once I understood where he comes from I could see where he got a lot of his beliefs. He is big into American Sovereignty for example which makes him very suspicious of any treaties that limits that for example. Despite some reports Bolton is not endorsing Biden. Bolton doesn’t say much about Biden but really goes after Obama and his policies.
The book scorches Trump pretty good. Trump did everything he could to stop publication of the book. It does not cast him in a good light.
