Southwest Books of the Year
Top Picks 
109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos
During WWII, scientists and military personnel funneled unobtrusively through a nondescript office at 109 East Palace Street in Santa Fe to the top-secret facility at Los Alamos, where they worked feverishly to develop the atomic bomb. Journalist Conant plumbs gatekeeper Dorothy McKibbin’s unpublished memoir and other reminiscences to produce an eye-opening account of the dedicated men and women who raced to advance the boundaries of science and defeat tyranny. Oppenheimer, the charismatic physicist who administered the herculean bomb project, appropriately occupies center stage in the story, but Conant’s lasting accomplishment is reconstructing the day-to-day lives of individuals.
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Robert Oppenheimer recruited brilliant scientists to calculate, under secret conditions, the specifications for an atomic bomb. These men and their families knew only that they were to travel to Santa Fe and report to 109 East Palace Road. Delivered to the isolated town of Los Alamos, they worked and lived in spartan conditions behind barbed wire, guarded by the army. No phones; mail was censored; they manufactured bathtub gin and shopped from the Sears catalog. This fascinating story tells how an incredible number of personalities adjusted to the stress of confinement; it says little about the creation of "the gadget." A recommended companion read is American Prometheus.
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This year marks the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bombs — the Manhattan Project Trinity test and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and a flurry of books about them have appeared. Jennet Conant, granddaughter of participant James B. Conant, writes about project leader Robert Oppenheimer and the project’s establishment at Los Alamos, but does it thoroughly and creatively through the eyes and words of Oppenheimer’s secretary, Dorothy McKibbin. For 27 months, the unlikely McKibbin ran “a front for a clandestine defense laboratory” from her office at 109 East Palace Avenue, an adobe building just steps away from the main plaza in Santa Fe.
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Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas
At a hefty 7.5 pounds, this extraordinary book is not a portable field guide, but it can guide you afield to where the birds nest. This ambitious Arizona Game and Fish Department 10-year project sent hundreds of researchers into the far corners and canyons of Arizona to document 270 species of nesting birds. The observations reveal much about birds, their lives, and where to find them. This atlas ranks among the best bird books of all time and is indispensable for anyone at all interested in Arizona birds.
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Based on a 10-year study, researchers identify and report in this doorstop of a volume, the certain and/or likely nesting places for some 270 bird species in Arizona. Using the standard 7.5-minute topographical map as a base, the results of the fieldwork are laid out so that birders may locate and get to those spots which could allow them to add that elusive species to their life lists. This book is a must-own for any serious birder.
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Diezmo, The
The ill-fated 1842 Texan-Mier expedition forms the canvas for this beautifully rendered portrait of men at war. Impelled by visions of honor and glory, the book’s 16-year-old narrator sets out on a patriotic adventure that dissolves in hardship, horror, and recrimination in Mexican prisons. The diezmo (10th part)—the famous “black bean” episode in which one in ten of the expedition captives was selected for execution—underscores the capriciousness of warfare, even as captors and captives discover common bonds of humanity and barbarity. Bass’s trademark feel for language and deft plotting transform this slender historical novel into a rich exploration of universal truth.
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In this short but mesmerizing novel, Bass tackles the famous/infamous 1842 Mier Expedition, a doomed invasion of Mexico by Texans. Motivated by greed and a need for adventure, they followed leaders who were divided by strategy and political philosophy. The narrator, now an old man, recalls in detail what happened to the ragtag band of volunteers as they crossed the Rio Grande to surprise groups of Mexican militia. Finally, soundly trounced with the loss of hundreds of lives, the Texans were marched south to be incarcerated and almost certainly executed by the Mexican government.
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Forged By Fire: The Devastation and Renewal of a Mountain Community
The author writes about the destruction and renewal of the Mount Lemmon mountain community—for many years a place of retreat for the desert dwellers from Tucson, some 6,800 ft. below. She records the courage of firefighters and others who risked their lives to fight and contain a wall of flame that destroyed 344 homes and businesses. It is also the story about the residents, who added up their losses, rolled up their sleeves, and set to work to build a new and better community. Barnes' history of the Aspen fire is a fine read and can serve as a caution for those living in forested areas.
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When a massive fire roared into life on Mt. Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson in June of 2003, television, radio, and newspapers bombarded us with the latest details. We knew, long before the fire was under control, that it was nearly total devastation for the houses and businesses in Summerhaven. Barnes retells the events in far greater detail. Barnes has done her homework, including extensive interviewing of people directly and indirectly involved, and now we know “the rest of the story.”
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Hummingbird’s Daughter, The
There is magic in Urrea’s pen. In this epic novel he tells the story of Teresita, the legendary saint of Cabora, and her spreading fame as a healer in Porfirio Diaz’s Mexico where she emerges as both symbol of hope for the common people and perhaps a threat to the status quo. As her spiritual power grows, she forms a relationship with the man who fathered and abandoned her. Through Urrea’s gifted hands, the result is a book that is both a brilliant portrait of a nation in turmoil and a deeply personal story of faith and reconciliation.
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This dramatic novel of Mexico is one of faith and tragedy. The story of Teresa Urrea is a family folk tale about a real person, much of which is supported by a trunk full of documents. Teresita, the daughter of a poor, illiterate Indian peon, was impregnated by the wealthy ranchero for whom she worked. Befriended by a curandera on the ranch, Teresita discovers she has the power to heal. Thus begins a powerful drama, as the faithful crowd the ranch hoping for her touch and the magic cure. The Mexican government intervenes, suspicious of those who might threaten its power.
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Teresa Urrea was known throughout the U.S.–Mexico borderlands since the late nineteenth century as Teresita, the Saint of Cabora. As Teresita grew (she reaches 19 in this novel) she learned healing methods. Mexican president/dictator Porfirio Diaz saw Teresita’s increasing popularity among the poor as a serious threat of revolution. The author ends at a climactic point in Urrea family history, when Teresita and her father are forced into exile in the southwestern United States. Luis Alberto Urrea, award-winning poet, essayist, and novelist, is a superb storyteller with a remarkable gift of language.
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Teresa “Teresita” Urrea is author Luis Alberto Urrea’s great-aunt, the real-life “Saint of Cabora,” and a renowned late 19th/early 20th century curandera. This roving novel covers the first 19 years of her life as one of the illegitimate children of main character and patrón Don Tomás Urrea and the 14-year old “Hummingbird,” and is based on meticulous research and family history. Teresita is oft-abandoned, but studies under the tutelage of Huila, the curmudgeonly healer of the rancho. I loved the urchin from the beginning, and became enchanted with the tales and travels of her awakenings north through Mexico, and her entrance into Arizona.
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Navajo Legacy, A: The Life and Teachings of John Holiday
John Holiday, now 86, was raised by his Navajo medicine-woman grandmother who encouraged him to take up the healing arts. Growing up in a traditional livestock economy in the San Juan River region, he neither attended school nor learned to speak English. Nevertheless, he recalled living through major periods in Navajo history: livestock reduction; service in the U. S. Army—until they learned he could not speak English; work in uranium mines and with the CCC; and as an extra in a John Ford film. Holiday said he was anxious to share his experiences with future generations. The book also includes Navajo words for reservation sites.
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Oatman Massacre, The: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival
For all the incident’s lurid sensationalism, it’s remarkable that it has taken 150 years for a historian to present a full and dispassionate account of the 1851 massacre of the Oatman family in southwestern Arizona, and its aftermath. Worth the wait. McGinty has mined archival materials and published sources to produce a compulsively readable narrative of the dissident Mormon family’s trek westward, their fatal encounter with Indians along the Gila River, and young Olive Oatman’s seven-year captivity and eventual return to white society. He strips away layers of myth and conjecture to explore Victorian Americans’ attitudes about themselves and toward Native Americans.
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Both history and historiography, this well-written book adds detail and corrects errors of commission and omission found in Royal B. Stratton’s now nearly 150-year old account, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, the “standard” account often criticized for its popularizing and sensationalizing. Of the two Oatman sisters captured near what is now Gila Bend, Arizona, only the older, Olive, survived. McGinty writes well, with precision and clarity, so we know without doubt when he is speculating and the evidence on which he bases his speculations.
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Slavery, Scandal, and Steel Rails: The 1854 Gadsden Purchase and the Building of the Second Transcontinental Railroad Across Arizona and New Mexico Twenty-Five Years Later
This saga of how Arizona got its first railroad in 1877 starts with slaveholder states looking for a rail link to California (the purpose of the Gadsden Purchase), and Arizona looking for a way to export minerals, cattle, and timber. The grades were steep and curvy, but brash entrepreneurs, including Leland Stanford, laid the rails. This intriguing book is tightly edited and thoroughly documented. The notes are an archive in themselves. A very solid, readable contribution.
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The Gadsden Purchase, its purpose to provide a southerly transcontinental railroad route, supplied the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle of the continental United States. Not built until 25 years after the purchase, the completion of the steel rails was the result of scandal, yet its intended purpose to extend slavery was long since unneeded. While giving credit to previous or ongoing works as seminal for their individual topics, southern Arizona historian David Devine admirably links the themes for this much-needed overview. Something else much needed is an index, the lack of which mars the overall work, but 14 maps provide more than adequate coverage.
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Voice of the Borderlands
Borderland rancher Drum Hadley poetically remembers good horses, bad men, and long-gone women. He has an ear for the language of cowboys and vaqueros, American and Mexican. From his lifetime of saddles, campfires, fiestas, and sitting on the corral fence, he has gathered and created yarns, images, and stories that he pencils into poems grouped as “Cowboys and Horses,” “Mother Lode,” “Changes,” and “Eternity.” He always returns to mythic land and abrupt lives. His voice echoes cowhands along the border from Mexicali to the Rio Grande.
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Drum Hadley is the real thing—an accomplished poet who has spent his adult life as a working cowboy and rancher. In this impressive collection, he paints a lush portrait of the Arizona/New Mexico/Sonora borderlands viewed through his own keen eyes, and related in the stories of the men with whom he has ridden the ridges and canyons of the Guadalupe Mountains and Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The voices convey a sense of awe and wonder, sprinkled with an earthy sense of humor, at man’s stubborn persistence in an unforgiving land. Spoon River has its Edgar Lee Masters; the Guadalupes have Drum Hadley.
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Wild Girl, The: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932
Fergus employs an actual incident in depression-era Douglas, Arizona as the springboard for his adventurous novel chronicling the adventures of a 17-year-old photographer as he accompanies a gentlemen’s expedition in search of the lost Apaches of the Sierra Madre. By turns humorous and poignant, it is both a classic coming-of-age tale and a sensitive exploration of cultural differences and the common humanity that we all share. This compulsively readable book has the earmarks of a southwestern classic.
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In 1999, photographs by the virtually unknown Giles, 80, are shown at a New York gallery, including one photo of an Apache girl curled in fetal position in a jail cell. Giles is fairly cynical about the recognition, though not about the girl or his work. His notebooks of the 1932 expedition from Douglas, Arizona into the Sierra Madre Mountains of Sonora/Chihuahua tell us how he came to be the official photographer and how the girl came to be in jail. Wonderful characters, well-structured narrative, satisfying reading.
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