West Books

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

Donald Worster

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Editorial Review:

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing."
In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship."
For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.

American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century

Howard Blum

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 76 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come.

In American Lightning, acclaimed author Howard Blum masterfully evokes the incredible circumstances that led to the original “crime of the century”—and an aftermath more dramatic than even the crime itself.

With smoke still wafting up from the charred ruins, the city’s mayor reacts with undisguised excitement when he learns of the arrival, only that morning, of America’s greatest detective, William J. Burns, a former Secret Service man who has been likened to Sherlock Holmes. Surely Burns, already world famous for cracking unsolvable crimes and for his elaborate disguises, can run the perpetrators to ground.

Through the work of many months, snowbound stakeouts, and brilliant forensic sleuthing, the great investigator finally identifies the men he believes are responsible for so much destruction. Stunningly, Burns accuses the men—labor activists with an apparent grudge against the Los Angeles Times’s fiercely anti-union owner—of not just one heinous deed but of being part of a terror wave involving hundreds of bombings.

While preparation is laid for America’s highest profile trial ever—and the forces of labor and capital wage hand-to-hand combat in the streets—two other notable figures are swept into the drama: industry-shaping filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who perceives in these events the possibility of great art and who will go on to alchemize his observations into the landmark film The Birth of a Nation; and crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow, committed to lend his eloquence to the defendants, though he will be driven to thoughts of suicide before events have fully played out.

Simultaneously offering the absorbing reading experience of a can’t-put-it-down thriller and the perception-altering resonance of a story whose reverberations continue even today, American Lightning is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.

Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Glen M. Leonard

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter.
Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an expose, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history.

When the Mob Ran Vegas: Stories of Money, Mayhem and Murder

Steve Fischer

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Vegas like you've never seen, tales you've never heard -- until now. Sizzing, behind-the-scenes stories about the men, the Mob, movie stars, and missing money that made '50s and '60s Vegas such a hot spot in the Nevada desert. “On opening night at the Cal-Neva Lodge, Sinatra's guests included Marilyn Monroe, Joe Kennedy and his son, John F. Kennedy. Also there that weekend were Johnny Roselli and Sam "Momo" Giancana. Uninvited and hiding up in the hills around the casino lodge was an FBI surveillance team with long-range lenses . . . From the chapter Frank Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge "On Sept 22, 1953, the Riviera Hotel was approved, the name was changed from the Casa Blanca to the Riviera just before this meeting . . . and the list of newly approved owners included Harpo (Arthur) Marx, movie star, comedian; his brother, Gummo (Milton) Marx, comedian" . . . From the chapter Does the Riviera Still Kill Its Executives? ”The Tropicana partners included Rosselli’s bosses in Chicago: Sam Giancana, Paul Rica, Camel Humphries, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Carlos Marcello . . . Fronting for the Chicago Outfit was Ben Jaffe. He owned the giant Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami, and also owned a little insurance company in Indiana” . . . From the chapter Frank Costello Builds the Tropicana "In every showroom in Las Vegas, there are certain inviolate rules. Rule Number One – the headliners go for 60 minutes. Not 64. Those extra 4 minutes represent 4 minutes of lost revenue on the casino floor . . . Then Deano came out on stage with his signature, "Who are all you people, and what are you doing in my room?"– and so started the two and a half hours of the Rat Pack Show!" From the chapter Coffee Shop Stories: Rat Pack and the Sands 21 stories packed with intrigue and mystery, a thoroughly research book, vintage photos.

Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers

Ralph Moody

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A wonderful biography 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a wonderful look into how life was... I found myself thinking about the work load on children back then and thinking "and I worry that unloading the dishwasher and keeping their bath clean is too much to ask?!?" Well not any more. A great "classic"

Speechless 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Oh I am speechless. This is a book full of grace, character, This is the writers real life boyhood and apparently thought he could make a good book out of it. Boy was he right! I could read this book about three hundred times and then maybe think about putting it down! This man had such a life as a kid! man you would think it was fictional but when you know its not it makes you well... Speechless!

Editorial Review:

Ralph Moody was eight years old in 1906 when his family moved from New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Through his eyes we experience the pleasures and perils of ranching there early in the twentieth century. Auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars, tornadoes and wind storms give authentic color to Little Britches. So do adventures, wonderfully told, that equip Ralph to take his father's place when it becomes necessary.

Little Britches was the literary debut of Ralph Moody, who wrote about the adventures of his family in eight glorious books, all available as Bison Books.

Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California

Frances Dinkelspiel

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Isaias Hellman, a Jewish immigrant, arrived in California in 1859 with very little money in his pocket and his brother Herman by his side. By the time he died, he had effectively transformed Los Angeles into the modern metropolis we see today. In Frances Dinkelspiel's groundbreaking history, the early days of California are seen through the life of a man who started out as a simple store owner only to become California's premier money-man of the late 19th and early 20th century. Growing up as a young immigrant, Hellman quickly learned the use to which "capital" could be put, founding LA's Farmers and Merchants Bank, that city's first successful bank, and transforming Wells Fargo into one of the West's biggest financial institutions. He invested money with Henry Huntington to build trolley lines, lent Edward Doheney the funds that led him to discover California's huge oil reserves, and assisted Harrison Gary Otis in acquiring full ownership of the Los Angeles Times. Hellman led the building of Los Angeles' first synagogue, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, helped start the University of Southern California and served as Regent of the University of California. His influence, however, was not limited to Los Angeles. He controlled the California wine industry for almost twenty years and, after San Francisco's devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, calmed the financial markets there in order to help that great city rise from the ashes. With all of these accomplishments, Isaias Hellman almost single-handedly brought California into modernity. Ripe with great historical events that filled the early days of California such as the Gold Rush and the San Francisco earthquake, Towers of Gold brings to life the transformation of California from a frontier society whose economy was driven by the barter of hides and exchange of gold dust into a vibrant state with the strongest economy in the nation.

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

Ivan Doig

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great American literature 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is my all time favorite book. Period. Beautifully written, thought-provoking. It will make you want to move to Montana. It will make you love open sky and a horizon that goes on forever and the importance of family.

Beautiful 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book was one of the few memoirs I have read when in the end I placed the book down and sighed "wow." What a wonderful story. The author rolled experiences together in western Montana with his dad and grandmother and turned it into a lovestory for fathers and grandmothers, for people of Montana, and all that using very little dialogue. (That gave the book a sense of truthfulness, as who can recite full conversations that took place years ago?)

The constant struggle with man against nature, man against man and man against himself come alive in these pages. Despite many obstacles of every kind, his father never abandoned him and sacrificed what he had to to raise his son and to give him what he needed. Montana and its bittersweet closeness never leave the reader; its isolation and wide open sky are always in the background. Thus the title is so perfect for this beautiful memoir.

This was my first Doig book and I will definitely read more of him. I definitely consider this book one of the top ten in American 20th century writing.

Editorial Review:

This work introduced a major modern author to the reading public. Doig’s life was formed among the sheepherders and other denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches as he wandered beside his restless father. New Preface by the Author.

Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West

Ethan Rarick

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Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth.
Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. "The Donner Party," Rarick writes, "is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity."
A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.
Praise for Desperate Passage:
"His is the first significant book, written, like Stewart's, in a novelistic mode and likely to gain popular readership, to incorporate this new data.... Rarick's account is not really about science; it's about humanity.... Rarick has done his homework."--New York Times Book Review
"Rarick takes an evenhanded and thorough approach to the story of the Donners' covered-wagon migration across the country and their winter entrapment in the Sierras. His telling is evocative and easy to read."--Seattle Times
"With a reporter's doggedness and a scholar's thoroughness, Rarick has clarified the historical details. ... Rarick makes this compelling frontier drama all the more so."--National Geographic Adventure Magazine

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Kathleen Norris

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Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

After 20 years of living in the "Great American Outback," as Newsweek magazine once designated the Dakotas, poet Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk) came to understand the fascinating ways that people become metaphors for the land they inhabit. When trying to understand the polarizing contradictions that exist in the Dakotas between "hospitality and insularity, change and inertia, stability and instability.... between hope and despair, between open hearts and closed minds," Norris draws a map. "We are at the point of transition between east and west in the United States," she explains, "geographically and psychically isolated from either coast, and unlike either the Midwest or the desert west."

Like Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge), Norris understands how the boundary between inner and outer scenery begins to blur when one is fully present in the landscape of their lives. As a result, she offers the geography lesson we all longed for in school. This is a poetic, noble, and often funny (see her discussion on the foreign concept of tofu) tribute to Dakota, including its Native Americans, Benedictine monks, ministers and churchgoers, wind-weathered farmers, and all its plain folks who live such complicated and simple lives. --Gail Hudson

Lakota Woman

Mary Crow Dog

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Survival Against a World of Cultural Contradictions 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is Mary Crow Dog's story, told in her own "uneducated" words. It is a tale of struggle and survival on the outer edges of "conquered Native Land," in the Northern tier of the continent of North America, now referred to as the US of A. It is not only a story about the struggles, defeats and eventual triumphs over Northern white racism and sexism, but also one about the struggle against Native America's own sexism and cultural chauvinism against Native American women.

What is most poignant about Ms. Crow Dog's story is the utter universality of the twin human plagues of racism and sexism and how they can trap and alter the course of not just one life but generations of families of women. By simply changing the names, the shade of darkness, and the region of the country, this could be the story of any "poor woman of color" in the USA.

For a "still recovering male chauvinist pig," this is heady medicine.

As she tells it, for at least three generations (or as far back as she could remember), children of her South Dakota family were taken off their squalid Reservations at an early age, "to be trained and educated" by white Catholic Missionaries, who by all accounts (hers as well as from others along the family tree), provided, in addition to their stern teaching of worthless religious dogma, also meted out an unhealthy dose of contradictions that consisted of sadistic and regular beatings, racism, child sex rape, sexual perversions, and numerous aborted babies of nuns discover accidentally in the schools clogged sewer drains.

Unlike her foremothers, who chose the path of "being willingly socially adjusted" into alien white ways, Ms. Crow Dog chose the course of rebellion, and of course for this she expectedly ran into "heavy weather" where the normal price was extracted. Before all was said and done, she was either forced, or chose, to do it all: drinking, drugs, fights, rapes, prostitution, riots and jailed, until she too finally managed to pull the chaos called her life together to marry a descent man and raise a family. Her payoff for all of her rebellion might be considered meager by some but for her it was enough. It was "peace of mind" for the first time in her life, and a final recalibrating of the family life story.

As she described it, there was not just a "generation gap," between her and her parents, but a "a generation Grand Canyon. " Her mother in particular failed to understand the imperatives driving this wayward daughter. But Ms. Crow Dog's struggles made her a much stronger individual, than meekly going along with her Catholic teachings had made her mother. Arguably it was her rebellion that broke a rather "hopeless" cycle of cultural submission and made her strong enough to confront the worse instincts in the land stolen from her forefathers and foremothers.

Five stars.

Editorial Review:

A unique autobiography unparalleled in American Indian literature, and a deeply moving account of a woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world.