What a wonderful little collection of true stores surrounding the Baca family during the early 1900's in Northern New Mexico! La Farge's writing of the beauty and awe of this special area of New Mexico and the unique members of this family causes the reader to lament the loss of such people and places. Thankfully, Northern New Mexico is still a unique and wonderful place. This book helps me remember that - even though I live so far away.

In a newly updated, revised, and expanded edition, Bell Ranch: Cattle Ranching In The Southwest, 1824-1947 is an informative, engaging, at times fascinating history of cattle ranching in the Southwest from the founding of the Bell Ranch as part of a Spanish government land grant, down to the present day when it is much smaller, but still very active and viable. Here is also a history of the people that saw the Bell Ranch through hard and turbulent times, that lived and worked as cattlemen plying their trade in the cattle country of the southwest. David Remley (Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico) provides a skillfully written and admirably presented 416 page history that is enhanced with vintage photographs. Bell Ranch is very highly recommended reading for students of the American southwest in general, and cattle ranching in particular.

The cuentos/stories are warm and quite different from other folklore stories. The stories aren't just thrown at the reader. Each cuento has its own introduction to create a mood and preserve a memory of the past. I am from Truchas (near Chimayo) and vaguely remember some of these cuentos. Don Usner did a wonderful job of preserving these stories before DVDs conquer the world. The stories are first told in English with occasional Spanish phrases interwoven, and all Spanish is followed by a translation for the English reader. The stories are retold in Spanish in the 2nd part of the book, minus the introductions provided with the English versions. These are great stories and well written to read to children. My favorite cuento has to be El Viejo Tuerco (Old One-eyed) because I do remember looking for treasure in old trees.

THIS MARSHA'S BIBLIOGRAPHY HAS BEEN VERY USEFUL, IN FINDING SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF MINERALIZATIONS, WHICH ARE QUITE INDICATIVE OF SOME INTERESTING PHENOMENA, IN TECTONICS AND ITS CORRELATION TO HYDROGEOLOGY AND GROUND WATER FLOW, AND POSSIBLE HAZARDS, OF SOME CHEMICAL ELEMENTS, TO HUMAN HEALTH AND ITS NEAR FUTURE ENVIRNMENTAL IMPACT IN THE HABITAT OF ALL LIVING CREATURES, IN A SO FRAGILE SETTING, AS IS NOW IN THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO. THIS OPINION IS RELATED TO MY CLOSE RELATIONS WITH THE RESEARCH OF THE GEOLOGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, OF NEW MEXICO TECH.

I'D LIKE THAT MARSHA OR HENRY KOEHN, SEND ME AN E-MAIL ¡¡¡.

There ought to be a name for this genre. The jacket blurb says "nature/Southwest literature". But Annie Dillard did this in the Northeast and Edward Abbey did it all over the Southwest and down rivers. Everett Ruess and Ann Zwinger did it in SE Utah with superb sketches and wood cuts. C.L. Rawlins and Gretel Ehrlich do it in Wyoming with sketches and photographs. Stanley Crawford did it with *Mayordomo* and *A Garlic Testament* a few miles SE of Tom Ireland in the Embudo Valley between Taos and Santa Fe (or halfway to Los Alamos - whichever way your crow flies).

"People who bond with 'place' and then write about it with philosophical comments and profound/funny/zen-like observations along the way" is a bit cumbersome. These people out-Thoreau Thoreau (and I'm from Thoreau, New Mexico [heh heh]; I ought to know). All these authors (and more) do this thing superbly well, in their own unique voices, but all the same, the genre deserves a better name than "nature/Southwest" or "nature/Northeast."

Ireland has added a new dimension with Angie Coleman's joyful paintings of exactly this same country round about. [I've debated about extracting and framing these paintings - still debating. Think I'll have to buy another copy of the book.]

This author reproduces his encounters with his Spanish and Indian neighbors (sometimes poignant, somtimes frustrating, always funny). These little essays/vignettes stand by themselves, but at the very end, the writer includes a story about La Pascualita - a real person who sweeps the roads with her broom and is housed and adopted by the entire community of La Madera. Ireland weaves her into a story that is reminiscent of Rudolfo Anaya, but very much his own.

And his piece about Magdalena, the magpie he adopted, is an original for sure.

"Walking around with a bird on your head is like watching life from a tenement window." "What's the collective noun for magpies? How about 'complaint'? There's a complaint of magpies in a cottonwood on the hillside across the river."

He watches the ravens of La Junta: "I was still standing there when the raven blew up over the cliff and almost into my face. It must have scared him almost as much as it scared me, to be riding the blast sixty feet off the ground and then all of a sudden to be facing a man. He shat, climbed up over the reach of harm, and held there at the closest safe distance to look again, reassembling his world into the kind of order he trusted it to have. (Ravens up. Men down.) Then he spoke. It was a sort of rattle, as much from the bowel as from the throat, and in it there was both fear and outrage: 'This cliff is taken. You are not wanted here.' He drifted north, riding the thermal, checking to see if there were any more of me around, then fell up and away into the bottomless sky."

About roosters: "...their voices make me think of the smell of joss sticks because *things mean things:" the rooster means incense, and the helicopter means searching the river for the body of a dead man, and I deceive myself that at eight o'clock this morning the real work will begin. Things mean things: the substance of faith, what we live for, those meanings, those coincidences of sky & rain & thought that jump at us."

He makes you feel like you're perching on his shoulder, looking through his eyes, seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears, and understanding through his mind and heart.

"Towards evening, the sun dropped into a corridor between the clouds and the little valley was filled with pink light. I put down my shovel and stood under a juniper to witness the change. It was like being in an aquarium: immersed, the bare cottonwoods, the hillside, the vacant house across the river, the fence posts, my own hands acquired a light of their own. The air filled with sugary spines of ice, and a rainbow appeared, its northern pole planted in the willows of a neighbor's cow pasture. I could see impossible distances in every direction; up the valley to La Zorra, down the crooked Valleciros, up the canada behind Vigil's store - as if I could see around corners."

All through these reflections are little personal musings:

"What is it about the presence of parents that makes us feel something less than alive, when they're the ones responsible for bringing us here in the first place?"

About dreams and water: "To wake in the dark and peel off the skin of your dream: to go out in the dark in the wet yard where drops of water hang from the asparagus berries and the night sounds are swamp sounds, sounds of water. And this our dry land smells like water and the creek runs brown."

And about work: "Ulceration of the spirit. It seems that when I have a job, my life becomes the job and not much else. There is no true rest and no true work until it's over."

"...we have made our joy depend on our work, and having come this far, we can't renounce it, can't be free from it, but only look for freedom in it."

"When I stand outside watching the clouds and the birds, I'm doing my work. These things need to be studied and praised, at least reported on."

And report he does. The title of the book comes from a quote by Malcolm Lowry, "You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building a nest in your hair."

This is a beautiful little gem of a book with lovely paintings, anecdotes and musings - the kind of book to keep by your bed and pick up and read at random. It's also a book to read all the way through from the beginning - more than once. In a word - delight. Five stars - easy.

pamhan99@aol.com

This book provides color photographs, in-depth descriptions, and migration/nesting habits of many birds in the southwestern US.

Bird species include water birds, birds of prey, hummingbirds, songbirds, etc. that residents or visitors to the southwest may encounter.

The book is very well organized and is useful as a quick reference when viewing birds.

I thought the story was a fantastic story would like to see more western books by the same author

Bounty Hunter's Moon is an old-fashioned, clean cutmystery/western. Hogan does a realistic job portraying Shawn Starbuckas a lone jack-of-all-trades looking for his long-lost brother in New Mexico Territory. Although finding his lost brother has been his goal for many years, his sets aside his quest (I'm not so sure it's as settled as the opening page claims) in order to do what needs to be done, in the code of the Old West. Hogan's characters leap off the page, and the text flows well, more like a B&W movie than a book. The book has a surprise ending, as do all good books. And it has the heroic gunplay requisite to all great Westerns.

Although Starbuck's brother is alegedly dead according to the opening line of this book, I hold out hope that there is a mistake about the message, and there will be another Starbuck adventure. Of course, if there is, it's probably already written as Mr. Hogan is rapidly approaching 100 years old....

It would be foolish to give a book that won three prestigious professional awards (the Bancroft, Turner, and Parkman prizes) all in one year anything less than five stars, but the stars I have given this book can only hint at its remarkable contents. Captives and Cousins is based on prodigious research in original sources, and the research is wedded to a compelling and innovative analysis.
Brooks is not the first historian to show that the practice of taking captives and subjecting them to involuntary servitude was widespread in the American Southwest, but I don't think that anyone else has demonstrated so convincingly how deep and wide the cycle of capture and slavery was. Virtually all of the peoples who lived in and around New Mexico in the three centuries following the Spanish entrada (Native Americans and Europeans alike) took captives and engaged to one degree or another in the slave trade. Indians preyed on Spanish and Mexicans, and on themselves, and the Spanish and Mexicans returned the favor. To a degree, even Americans played a role in the trade after they became the controlling force in the region. They offered rewards for the return of captives and thus provided incentives for further captures. Brooks shows that the system of capture and slavery contributed in significant ways to the political, economic, and cultural development of the Southwest, providing a ready source of labor (and wives), knitting disparate peoples into webs of kinship (some biological, some adoptive, some deriving from Catholic godparenthood), helping to equalize wealth, and provoking endless cycles of revenge and retaliation. The system (a kind of "war of all against all") had its own logic, though the logic was crude and in many respects cruel.
Brooks does not saddle Europeans with all of the blame for the system. He makes it clear that capture and enslavement were practiced before the Spanish first arrived in the Southwest. But they participated in it and added refinements derived from their own Iberian traditions. In one sense, the book helps to challenge the myth of Indians as indigenous peoples "operating within subsistence-and-exchange economies that produced little intergroup conflict." Conflict there was, and in spades.
Brooks is an academic, and the book is addressed primarily to his fellow academics. General readers will find the text too dense for easy reading. I found some parts of the book slow going, but I persisted and, in the end, was glad I did. Captives and Cousins not only informed me; it made me think.

If you're a caver or just interested in caving, this book is a lot of fun. The Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico are home to some of the world's most beautiful caves, including Carlsbad Caverns and Lechuguilla Cave. This book describes Robert Nymeyer's adventures and misadventures with his buddies in the high Guadalupe caves. The descriptions of early vertical caving techniques using lariats and the photographs taken with flash powder are priceless examples of what folks will do when bitten by the exploration bug.