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Atlas of the New West : Portrait of a Changing Region
William E. Riebsame, general editor
An atlas for our times that makes sense of the fast-paced transformation of the American West. The West. Americans hold dearly to old ideas of it as a unique, wild place of majestic space, ranching and mining, small-town life, and opportunity. And so it can still be--but rarely. The West's central reality nowadays is that it is new. This newness has never been so well presented in this book's forty-six full-color, three-dimensional, computer-generated maps; its two brilliant essays; its informative sidebars; its boxed information (for example, how the first seven wolves introduced into Yellowstone died); and its dozens of charts and graphs.
192 pages, 1997.
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Lasso the Wind : Away to the New West (Vintage Departures)
by Timothy P. Egan
The American West has always been as much a symbol as a location; as much a myth as a destination. "If land and religion are what people most often kill each other over," writes Timothy Egan, "then the West is different only in that the land is the religion. As such, the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession." This struggle for possession is a recurring theme in Lasso the Wind, involving individuals such as Kit Laney, the "Last Cowboy in America," who defiantly refuses to pay for grazing rights on public land; Patricia Mulroy, the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, who works to bring more water to Las Vegas' casinos, golf courses, and subdivisions, even if it means damming the Virgin River running through Zion National Park in Utah; and Robert P. McCulloch, a zealous developer who reassembled each stone of the London Bridge in the Arizona desert in an attempt to draw people to his contrived dream town. These 14 enlightening and entertaining essays are the result of Egan's tour of the 11 states "on the sunset side of the 100th meridian," which led him from remote villages without road access to sprawling suburbs carved out of parched earth and desert rock in an attempt to see how the history of the West--binding myths and all--has left its imprint on the West's present condition.
288 pages, 2000.
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My Story As Told by Water
by David James Duncan
When David James Duncan was growing up in suburban Portland, Oregon, he had no river to call his own, so he would routinely create one by flooding his mother's garden with a hose. He would then revel in his creation until he received the inevitable scolding. The poor kid couldn't help himself: "Running water ... felt as necessary to me as food, sleep, parents, and air," he explains. In time, he exchanged his nozzle for a fly rod and went in search of grander gardens, eventually developing an "interior coho compass" which he has traveled by ever since.
As any reader of The River Why knows, Duncan is a master of the art of writing about fishing--which is also to say life, since the two for him are indelibly linked. But these essays deal with far more than leaky waders and rising trout. Part memoir, part activist treatise, My Story As Told by Water is Duncan's love song to wild places and the creatures which inhabit them. The book's highlight is his powerfully convincing essay "A Prayer for the Salmon's Second Coming," in which he argues that saving salmon is crucial to both man and fish alike: "A 'modern Northwest' that cannot support salmon is unlikely to support 'modern Northwesterners' for long," he writes. In this elegant demand for the removal of four Snake River dams (out of 221 on the Snake/Columbia system), Duncan declares the wild salmon "a holiness, a divine gift," a role model rather than a resource: "Salmon are a light darting not just through water, but through the human mind and heart. Salmon help shield us from fear of death by showing us how to follow our course without fear, and how to give ourselves for the sake of things greater than ourselves."
He also ruminates on the true meanings of "place" and "home"; offers a fable on the 1872 Mining Act, "the most anachronistic and devastating piece of 'corporate welfare' in the world"; and details how Montanans rallied to prevent a giant mining company from extracting gold near the Blackfoot River, the setting of the Norman Maclean classic A River Runs Through It. All in all, My Story As Told by Water is a moving collection by an exquisite writer endowed with wit, compassion, and the rare ability to appeal to both emotion and reason in equal measures. --Shawn Carkonen
294 pages 1 Ed edition (July 17, 2001)
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Powder Burn : Arson, Money, and Mystery on Vail Mountain
by Daniel Glick
On the face of it, this is the story of unsolved arson at a high-glamour resort, a mystery packed with suspects that range from crusty ski bums to radical tree huggers to the resort's own corporate honchos. But underlying this entertaining true-life plot is a greater theme that is playing out across America. Here, tensions mount between the progress-minded shareholders of Vail Resorts Inc., environmentalists, and locals who simply pine for the days when they weren't priced out of having a meal--or a life--in Vail, Colorado. Elsewhere, similar hostility brews over conflicting interests in pricey tourist regions like Taos, New Mexico; the Florida Keys; and the Hamptons of New York. So while Powder Burn is an intriguing tale on its own, it also serves as a snapshot of our country as it struggles with its final growing pains. The modern corporatization of Vail Mountain is in direct contrast to its past, when a hard-drinking fellow could ride his horse into a bar and turn himself into local legend. Daniel Glick, a special correspondent for Newsweek, masterfully uses his reporter's eye for detail to deliver the spirit and breathtaking scenery of the Rocky Mountain West. He introduces personalities in rapid-fire succession, but, to his credit, the reader never feels overwhelmed or confused. The descriptions are so vivid--from the environmentalist tracking lynx paw prints through the snow to the vacationing company president staking out a Disney World pay phone as he receives updates on the 1998 fire's damage--that they remain fixed in the reader's mind as the story unfolds. It's a story that makes interesting reading for skiers, environmentalists, or anyone intrigued by the unfolding drama in our last wild places. --Jodi Mailander Farrell
288 pages (January 19, 2001)
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The Eagle Bird : Mapping a New West
by Charles F. Wilkinson
Collection of revised essays on environmental and conservation issues that appeared in American West, Denver Post, NARF Legal Review. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or. This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
256 pages; revised and updated edition (October 1999)
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Wolf Wars: The Remarkable Inside Story of the Restoration of Wolves to Yellowstone
by Hank Fischer
The gray wolf - the most significant missing piece of the Yellowstone ecosystem - is back. Following an eco-political battle of epic proportions, the wolf has been returned to Yellowstone by the same federal agencies that methodically exterminated it more than sixty years ago. In Wolf Wars, Hank Fischer unfolds the intriguing story of how the Yellowstone wolf was hated into extinction, how a society came to appreciate the importance of predators, how the master predator's return will send a welcome "ripple effect: through Yellowstone's flora and fauna, and how conservationists finally prevailed in a decade-long political struggle with Congress, the courts, and the powerful livestock industry. -- This text refers to the hardcover edition.
200 pages (May 1995).
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