Archive for the ‘Wild West’ Category

THE LAST STAND by Nathaniel Philbrick

“Custer had always lived life at a frenetic pace. He thrived on sensation. Whether it was courting Libbie in the midst of the Civil War, learning taxidermy during his first expedition in the northern plains, or writing his articles while surrounded by his dogs and listening to his band, he needed to be in the midst of an often self-created uproar. But by the night of June 21, at the age of thirty-six, Custer was finding it difficult to marshal the old enthusiasm.â€

May 3, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Non-fiction, Reading Guide, US Frontier West, Wild West, y Award Winning Author

IRON RIVER by T. Jefferson Parker

In LA Sheriff’s Deputy Charlie Hood’s third adventure, set in the California desert border town of Buenavista, Hood joins an ATF operation to stem gunrunning to Mexico. When an ATF weapons-buy ends in the accidental death of a cartel leader’s son, the bad guys take revenge, abducting and torturing the agent responsible. Naturally a rescue is in the offing.

April 17, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: California, Character Driven, Mexico, Sleuths Series, Wild West, y Award Winning Author

BONE FIRE by Mark Spragg

BONE FIRE, he revisits the fictional town of Ishawooa. Even as much as the town retains many of its tough Wyoming characteristics, change is sweeping in slowly. For example, there’s new café in town, which serves plenty of salads, meatless soups, herbal teas. It is here that one of the novel’s primary protagonists, Griff, gets together with her mother, Jean, once in a while for lunch or a cup of tea.

March 17, 2010 · Judi Clark · 2 Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: 2010 Favorites, Wild West

WAR DANCES by Sherman Alexie

WAR DANCES, Sherman Alexie’s collage of short stories and narrative and prose poems, covers familiar Alexie territory: the melancholy comedy of ordinary lives, where irony and coincidence strike like rattlesnakes, swiftly and unexpectedly. His characters, often but not always of Native American descent, grapple with a changing culture and their place in it. They journey toward the ideal but end up, more or less, in a place no better than where they began. And although the sons pay for the sins of their fathers, the fathers suffer, too. Redemption comes when least expected, and the best intentions sour. Alexie is both cynic and comedian, toying with his characters and their impossible circumstances, rarely willing to bestow upon them the good fortune of an unequivocal happy ending

February 25, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: 2010 Favorites, Pen Faulkner, Short Stories, Wild West, y Award Winning Author

THE BUTTERFLIES OF GRAND CANYON by Margaret Erhart

THE BUTTERFLIES OF GRAND CANYON names many of the beautiful invertebrates: Rheingolds, cloudless sulfurs, painted ladies, pygmy blues, green darners, and queens. Near the great natural gash in the earth’s crust, some of the human collectors of these delicate creatures find themselves passing through stages of development similar to those of the specimens they’ve netted. For example, twenty-five-year-old Jane Merkle, who has come with her older husband, Morris, to visit his sister, Dotty, and her husband, Oliver Hedquist, is arguably pent up in a chrysalis but may be on the verge of emerging and flying.

January 28, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, US Southwest, Wild West

A COUNTRY CALLED HOME by Kim Barnes

When Helen and Thomas Deracotte—the protagonists of the novel A COUNTRY CALLED HOME—first meet, each is desperately trying to break clean from a trying past. Thomas, the son of an alcoholic single father, is brought up by an illiterate grandmother and through hard work, makes it to medical school. When his grandmother passes away just as Thomas graduates from medical school, he can find nothing to anchor him to home. On the contrary, Thomas wants, both literally and figuratively, to put as much distance between him and the life he has known, as possible.

December 22, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Reading Guide, US Frontier West, Wild West