New York school teacher Charlotte Lambert is practical and predictable, and never allows life to veer off course. Until she comes to New Mexico. During one summer in Agua Dulce, a village haunted by a phantom herd of wild horses and where ravens embody the spirits of ancestors, Charlotte’s world is upended as she unearths the details of her mother’s forbidden love affair, chilling murder, and courageous last act of redemption. Pursued by a madman hell-bent on killing her, Charlotte finds shelter, romance, and her own misplaced soul at the desert camp of a surprisingly sophisticated cowboy, and learns how love in its myriad forms is the only path to lasting salvation.
Тедди Джонс0.0 As a winter storm bears down on the Texas Panhandle in December, 2004, Willa Jackson embarks on a plan to maintain her independence and fully realize her artistic talent. Her first encounter on this course, with her daughter, Melanie Banks, proves that accomplishing those ends as she ages past her present seventy-four years will be fraught with obstacles. Melanie’s determined to take care of her mother although she has her hands full navigating her own problems with a demanding job as a school administrator and her secret affair with the ex-husband she divorced ten years ago. Willa’s past, and that of Jackson’s Pond, Texas, the dying town named for their ranch, provide a backdrop for the long-widowed Willa’s determination to set a course of progress for her grandson, Chris, and her granddaughter, Claire, and their families to secure their future. Meanwhile Jackson’s Pond, Texas and the ranch waterhole for which it is named decline steadily as the Ogallala Aquifer depletes. Willa overcomes resistance from several directions, including from her own doubts, and emerges by 2013 into a new life as a prize-winning painter living in Taos, NM, even in the face of advancing age and a degenerative illness
Марсия Кэлхун Фореки, Джеральд Шнитцер0.0 Images of a White Bear Kachina erupt from the dreams of virologist Dr. Rachel Bisette and invade her daytime consciousness. The kachina draws Rachel to the Four Corners to lead the search for a vaccine against an exploding and lethal pandemic. One elusive indigenous woman, Eva Yellow Horn, carries the gift of immunity. In her search for Eva, Rachel discovers power beyond science, the secret of an environmental disaster, and the truth of her parents' death.
"Masks reveal as much as they conceal in Blood of the White Bear, a novel that smoulders with mystery and crackles with suspense, so much so that readers may start seeing kachina dolls over their own shoulders in the wee small hours." Gary D. Rhodes, author and filmmaker
"Marcia Calhoun Forecki and Gerald Schnitzer know how to write a fast paced, compelling novel. Partially based on actual events in the Southwest, they have a talent for constructing strong characters and a layered plot that keeps gathering momentum, with increasing tension and excitement. All the ingredients for a page-turner are here." Dan Steinbrocker, News Media Services, Inc.
Энн Лазурко0.0 Housekeeper or whore? A dollybird is either or both in the vocabulary of the prairie west in 1906, leaving the community to draw its own conclusions about who and what Moira is and isn’t. Determined to find redemption in the midst of their derision and to find joy despite uncertainty, Moira faces impossible choices with consequences beyond anything she can imagine.
Thrown into the purgatory of a bleak prairie landscape as unforgiving as her mother, twenty-year-old Newfoundlander Moira Burns is certain she will rise above the locals of Ibsen, Saskatchewan. Until the reasons for her flight west become clear. Until she is befriended by a prostitute and courted by a ‘half breed’. Until she becomes the “dolly-bird” of superstitious Irish Catholic homesteader, Dillan Flaherty.
Scattered through with birth, death, and the violent potential of both man and the elements, Dollybird excavates the small mercies which come to mean more than they should on a prairie peopled with characters struggling under a huge sky that waits, not so quietly, for them to fail
Дон Винк0.0 Based on a true story, the author provides a captivating and crystal clear window into the lives of some of the early settlers on the plains of South Dakota. In 1911, sixteen year old Grace has the same hopes and dreams as any other bride for a future built on love, commitment and family. But she also knows that a life of ranching on the magnificent prairie she loves so deeply will require years of perseverance, hard work and suffering. What she doesn't expect is how quickly she will be required to confront these threats to her heart and her soul. Despite challenges that often seem insurmountable, Grace builds two abiding friendships in a land where other women are very few and rarely seen. Daisy, a half Lakota widow befriends her and Grace also recognizes a kindred spirit in her nearest neighbor, Mae Thingvold, a young doctor, on her own. It is these women and their connections to each other that will sustain all three of them through unimaginable pain and loss and bring them joy in the sharing of small victories and celebrations of milestones along the paths of their lives. Dawn Wink introduces you to Grace and allows you to share her journey as you walk the rolling hills of her beloved prairie at her side. You will laugh and cry with her and share her deep connection to the land that is the anchor for the ship of her life on which she sails the endless sea of grass.
Сюзан Уиттиг Алберт0.0 In 1928, Rose Wilder Lane—world traveler, journalist, much-published magazine writer—returned from an Albanian sojourn to her parents’ Ozark farm. Almanzo Wilder was 71, Laura 61, and Rose felt obligated to stay and help. To make life easier, she built them a new home, while she and Helen Boylston transformed the farmhouse into a rural writing retreat and filled it with visiting New Yorkers. Rose sold magazine stories to pay the bills for both households, and despite the subterranean tension between mother and daughter, life seemed good.
Then came the Crash. Rose’s money vanished, the magazine market dried up, and the Depression darkened the nation. That’s when Laura wrote her autobiography, “Pioneer Girl,” the story of growing up in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, on the Kansas prairie, and by the shores of Silver Lake. The rest—the eight remarkable books that followed—is literary history.
But it isn’t the history we thought we knew. For the surprising truth is that Laura’s stories were publishable only with Rose’s expert rewriting. Based on Rose’s unpublished diaries and Laura’s letters, A Wilder Rose tells the true story of the decade-long, intensive, and often troubled collaboration that produced the Little House books—the collaboration that Rose and Laura deliberately hid from their agent, editors, reviewers, and readers.
Why did the two women conceal their writing partnership? What made them commit what amounts to one of the longest-running deceptions in American literature? And what happened in those years to change Rose from a left-leaning liberal to a passionate Libertarian?
In this impeccably researched novel and with a deep insight into the book-writing business gained from her own experience as an author and coauthor, Susan Wittig Albert follows the clues that take us straight to the heart of this fascinating literary mystery.
Розанна Перри0.0 Rosanne Parry author of Heart of a Shepherd, shines a light on Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s, a time of critical cultural upheaval.
Pearl has always dreamed of hunting whales, just like her father. Of taking to the sea in their eight-man canoe, standing at the prow with a harpoon, and waiting for a whale to lift its barnacle-speckled head as it offers its life for the life of the tribe. But now that can never be. Pearl's father was lost on the last hunt, and the whales hide from the great steam-powered ships carrying harpoon cannons, which harvest not one but dozens of whales from the ocean. With the whales gone, Pearl's people, the Makah, struggle to survive as Pearl searches for ways to preserve their stories and skills.
Дэйл Кэмпбелл Гетц0.0 A new life overseas! What could be better? Plenty of land to farm and even gold to be found in the hills!
Well except that Katherine's parents aren't farmers. Having spent everything on their transportation from England and setting up their homestead, they're struggling. Now Katherine has to sell her horse because keeping her is just too expensive.
For Emma, the promise of gold is nothing but bad luck. Her father left her and her mother back in England to join the gold rush. Now Emma's beloved mam has died, and Emma's been forced to come after him. Even worse, he thinks he's got the solution to cheer her up. He buys her a horse!
Katherine can hardly bear to give up her beloved Nugget to a girl who's clearly ungrateful for her good fortune and won't learn to ride. Emma, ashamed of a disability that means she can't ride sidesaddle, is desperate to avoid taking lessons from a stuck-up miss who obviously just wants her horse back. Can Nugget help them solve their problems together?
Set against the majestic landscape of the turn-of-the-century West, this is a story of ingenuity, courage, friendship, and the love of a horse.
Кейти Ленте0.0 As budding anthropologist, Carly Brumley, enters her junior year in high school, she continues the slow process of healing from the loss of her beloved little brother, Cord. She employs a big gray Quarter Horse, raised and broken by her uncle, to help her regain her passion for riding. Carly's artistic boyfriend, Danny O'Hara, carefully pushes his way, along with his secret, into the center of Carly's world.
Мардж Сайзер0.0 Spare and incisive, the poems in Losing the Ring in the River deal with three strong women--Clara, Emma, and Liz, women who are tough, often sassy, and have dreams that aren't quelled by the realities they face. Saiser deftly explores the undercurrents connecting three generations and is at her most powerful when she explores how lives are restricted and sometimes painfully damaged by what people cannot or will not share with one another. Saiser's poetry is as harsh as it is beautiful; she avoids resolutions and easy endings, focusing instead on the small, hard-won victories that each woman experiences in her life and in her love of those around her.
Ребекка Лоутон0.0 River guide Madeline Kruse has to choose. She's always had the nomadic river life rather than a settled home, and now she's on the run from the long-running pain of a missing father and critically ill and dangerously workaholic mother. Madeline's flight takes her to northeastern Utah, a corner of the West time has passed over and for a time she feels safe and content. But in the tiny town of Junction, she meets alfalfa farmer Chris Sorensen, whose family has split apart since September 11 and the enlistment of his brother in the U.S. Marines. Through Chris and a drama taking place deep in the Utah backcountry, Madeline learns that the canyons and community she loves are more threatened than she knew, and she must overcome many obstacles if she is to find peace and her place by the river.
Сара Лауэн0.0 For many the idea of living off the land is a romantic notion left to stories of olden days or wistful dreams at the office. But for Sara Loewen it becomes her way of life each summer as her family settles into their remote cabin on Uyak Bay for the height of salmon season. With this connection to thousands of years of fishing and gathering at its core, Gaining Daylight explores what it means to balance lives on two islands, living within both an ancient way of life and the modern world. Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of living at the northern edge of the Pacific.
Loewen’s writing is richly descriptive; readers can almost feel heat from wood stoves, smell smoking salmon, and spot the ways the ocean blues change with the season. With honesty and humor, Loewen easily draws readers into her world, sharing the rewards of subsistence living and the peace brought by miles of crisp solitude.
Кристин Бил0.0 A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national-park trail crew and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work
Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined.
During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path.
Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.
Дарси Липп-Экорд0.0 Circling Back Home is the story of one woman, at a time when values of home, family, and care of the land seem increasingly absent, looking to her past to create a life of significance for her family. Her search takes her back to the prairie of her grandmothers, who survived personal hardships and lived off what the land provided. Lipp-Acord mourns the loss of one child and celebrates the birth of others, all while balancing her own desire to put down roots with her husband’s life as an itinerant ranch hand. Written over ten years, these essays compose a picture of endurance and grace as the author addresses her history and finds her way home.
Линда Уильямс Риз0.0 African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of their slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty.
As if Removal to Indian Territory weren’t cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly they were freed, but had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribal oversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers.
Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival.
Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as no lesser pioneers of the American West than their Indian or other Plains sisters.
Шери Робинсон0.0 Winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award in History
This history of the Lipan Apaches, from archeological evidence to the present, tells the story of some of the least known, least understood people in the Southwest.
These plains buffalo hunters and traders were one of the first groups to acquire horses, and with this advantage they expanded from the Panhandle across Texas and into Coahuila, coming into conflict with the Comanches. With a knack for making friends and forging alliances, they survived against all odds, and were still free long after their worst enemies were corralled on reservations.
In the most thorough account yet published, Sherry Robinson tracks the Lipans from their earliest interactions with Spaniards and kindred Apache groups through later alliances and to their love-hate relationships with Mexicans, Texas colonists, Texas Rangers, and the US Army. For the first time we hear of the Eastern Apache confederacy of allied but autonomous groups that joined for war, defense, and trade. Among their confederates, and led by chiefs with a diplomatic bent, Lipans drew closer to the Spanish, Mexicans, and Texans.
By the 1880s, with their numbers dwindling and ground lost to Mexican campaigns and Mackenzie’s raids, the Lipans roamed with Mescalero Apaches, some with Victorio. Many remained in Mexico, some stole back into Texas, and others melted into reservations where they had relatives. They never surrendered.
Энн Киршнер0.0 Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp by Ann Kirschner is the definitive biography of a Jewish girl from New York who won the heart of Wyatt Earp.
For nearly fifty years, she was the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp: hero of the O.K. Corral and the most famous lawman of the Old West. Yet Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp has nearly been erased from Western lore. In this fascinating biography, Ann Kirschner, author of the acclaimed Sala's Gift, brings Josephine out of the shadows of history to tell her tale: a spirited and colorful tale of ambition, adventure, self-invention, and devotion. Reflective of America itself, her story brings us from the post–Civil War years to World War II, and from New York to the Arizona Territory to old Hollywood.
In Lady at the O.K. Corral, you’ll learn how this aspiring actress and dancer—a flamboyant, curvaceous Jewish girl with a persistent New York accent—landed in Tombstone, Arizona, and sustained a lifelong partnership with Wyatt Earp, a man of uncommon charisma and complex heroism.
