“Gila Lost and Found: Search and Rescue in New Mexico” by Marc Levesque

Gila Lost and Found recounts the author’s experiences as a Search and Rescue (SAR) field coordinator in the Gila Wilderness. It’s part a “how to survive” and part an adventure book, although some parts read like entry attempts for the Darwin Awards – an annual prize given posthumously to those who die the stupidest, most…

Review of “Perdido: Sierra San Luis” by Michael P. Berman

When the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V asked Mexico’s conqueror, Hernan Cortes, what Mexico looked like, Cortes crumpled a piece of parchment, threw it on the floor, and said, “Mexico.” Mountains, bluffs, peaks and ridges.   Five-hundred years later, Michael Berman, longtime photographer/adventurer and teller of the tale above, is trekking through the mountains of Sierra…

Six Short Pieces for Jimmy Santiago Baca: a review of Baca’s “Laughing in the Light”

(Re)birth: Jimmy finds a new meaning for the word “sentence” When Jimmy Santiago Baca was in his early twenties and serving time in a high-security prison, a Good Samaritan from the outside world—Henry Gould—wrote to him. Gould ran a soup kitchen. His legs had been blown off during World War II, but his heart was…

“All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed” by Rus Bradburd

This superb and harrowing book chronicles the life of Shawn Harrington, a charismatic college basketball star who becomes a victim – albeit a survivor – of Chicago’s gun violence. Harrington was recruited in 1995 from Marshall High School, Chicago, by the author, Rus Bradburd, who at the time was coaching at NMSU. When Harrington got…

“The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections” by Eliane Brum, translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

The philosopher Theodor Adorno once stated that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Brazilian journalist and novelist Eliane Brum does just that in The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections, a compassionate trek through Brazil’s peripheries, where the poor and the marginalized reside. As she mines favelas…

Shakespeare in the Age of the Tyrant

Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power, is a timely tome. As Greenblatt well knows, we’re living in an age of ruthless strongmen. The world’s recent and lamentable swing to the right is embodied by all-powerful authoritarians. Here’s the cast list: Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela) – presiding over an avoidable domestic catastrophe, a post-apocalyptic hellscape…

Gray Pans Pinker

In a recent review in The New Statesman, John Gray dismissed Steven Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress in one of the more colorful putdowns of recent times (excuse the pun – grey, pinker and all that). The title of the piece reads “The limits of reason: Steven…

“In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” by Christina Sharpe

Part memoir, part thesis, and part lyrical examination of what it means to be black in the 21st century, In The Wake is simply a great, great book. It bridges so many fields – social justice, poetry, fiction, Critical Race Theory, semiotics, semantics – yet retains complete coherence. It is beautiful, ingenious and tragic. In…

“The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome” by Alondra Nelson

DNA has many uses. These include criminal investigations (ever watched CSI? It’s full of the stuff.); paternity suits; tracking genetic mutations of species; and predicting the fate of unborn foetuses. One use I’d barely considered was that of finding your roots when your family has been severed from its history. And who might that serve?…

Still, small voices

The world is too damned noisy. Here are three books I’ve been reading about peace and quiet. Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (Broadway Books, 2013) by Susan Cain. Cain was a big-shot Wall Street lawyer who, for years, had a nagging sense that her job wasn’t exactly her…