Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Holiday Book Picks with a Western Twist

Tattered Cover's lead buyer Cathy Langer and Nicole Magistro, owner of The Bookworm in Edwards were on "Colorado Matters", a program on Colorado Public Radio, talking about great western themed books to give for the holidays. (Listen to the program here.)


Shinin' Times at the Fort
Part memoir, part cookbook with beautiful photography from Award winning photographer Lois Ellen Frank, author Holly Kinney lovingly tells the stories behind the recipes that have long been favorites at the world renowned restaurant The Fort, which was also her family's home. Historic recipes with a modern twist from rattlesnake to how to cook buffalo and game, to luscious desserts is a must for gift giving!

Meet Holly tomorrow night at 7:30 at our Colfax Avenue store. Click for details.


Soldiers on Skis
Soldiers on Skis is the first complete history of the 10th Mountain Division––America's only troops specially trained for mountain and winter warfare––as told by the veterans themselves. Vivid personal accounts range from the humorous to the horrific to the heart-wrenching, and an outstanding collection of rare photographs captures the beautiful serenity of the division’s Colorado mountain training grounds as well as the stark brutality of the battlefield in Italy.

Soldiers on Skis follows the division from its formation, its rugged training at Camp Hale, and its first taste of battle in the Aleutian Islands to its triumphant deployment to Italy, where it spearheaded the victorious Allied drive through the Northern Apennines and into the Po River Valley.

The book also pays tribute to the role many of the veterans of America's "ski troops" played in the phenomenal post-war rise of the skiing industry in America.


Path of Beauty
From sweeping vistas to intimate details of life along the Colorado River, master printer and photographer Christopher Brown takes readers on a beautiful, powerful journey through a previously undiscovered Grand Canyon.

Christopher Brown has seen the Grand Canyon, inside and out, like no other, and his photography reveals a landscape of surprising and visually stunning delights. A lifelong explorer, Brown first hiked across the Canyon when he was fifteen. After high school, an Outward Bound course inspired him to move there and spend the next forty years guiding mountaineering and river trips from Alaska to Ecuador. He was a boatman in the Grand Canyon for about twenty of those years, and has rowed thirty-five two-week trips through the Canyon on the Colorado River.

Brown carried cameras on all of these adventures and taught himself photography. Slowly his interest shifted from the adrenaline of the rapids to the aesthetics of the Canyon, and the quiet tranquility of remote grottoes. He evolved as a photographer, becoming entranced by the visual experience, the beauty of being in the Canyon. He never knows what to expect when he returns to the Canyon, just that it will be different–and that is what keeps him coming back for more!

Complimenting the seventy-four full-color photographs in the book are a series of essays that begin by exploring the geological processes that made the Canyon the natural wonder that it is today, as well as the adventure and excitement that accompany life on the river as a boatman. Mirroring the extremes of life, the text shifts from adventure, to beauty, discussing the physical and emotional components of visual perception. An explorer of both exterior and interior landscapes, Brown strives to reveal layers of meaning and beauty in life that are often obscured by our preconceptions and habitual ways of perceiving the world, our relationships and ourselves.

Through stunning photography and an engaging text, Path of Beauty brings together an imaginative perspective on adventure, beauty and reflection in the wilderness. It is an evocative visual reminder of the importance of wild landscapes, where people can go to explore, discover, and grow wise. It will resonate with anyone who has ever wanted to leave the clamor of the modern world behind and immerse himself in the fresh, restorative splendor of the wilderness.


Claiming Ground
In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.

By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots. Brimming with careful insight and written in a spare, radiant prose, her story is a heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape and the peculiar sweetness of hard labor, to finding oneself even in isolation, to a life formed by nature, and to the redemption of love, whether given or received.

Quietly profound and moving, astonishing in its honesty, in its deep familiarity with country rarely seen so clearly, and in beauties all its own, Claiming Ground is a truly singular memoir.


Rival Rails

From acclaimed historian Walter R. Borneman comes a dazzling account of the battle to build America’s transcontinental rail lines. Rival Rails is an action-packed epic of how an empire was born—and the remarkable men who made it happen.

After the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, the rest of the country was up for grabs, and the race was on. The prize: a better, shorter, less snowy route through the corridors of the American Southwest, linking Los Angeles to Chicago. In Rival Rails, Borneman lays out in compelling detail the sectional rivalries, contested routes, political posturing, and ambitious business dealings that unfolded as an increasing number of lines pushed their way across the country.

Borneman brings to life the legendary business geniuses and so-called robber barons who made millions and fought the elements—and one another—to move America, including William Jackson Palmer, whose leadership of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad relied on innovative narrow gauge trains that could climb steeper grades and take tighter curves; Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific lines, a magnate insatiably obsessed with trains—and who was not above bribing congressmen to satisfy his passion; Edward Payson Ripley, visionary president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, whose fiscal conservatism and smarts brought the industry back from the brink; and Jay Gould, ultrasecretive, strong-armer and one-man powerhouse.

In addition, Borneman captures the herculean efforts required to construct these roads—the laborers who did the back-breaking work, boring tunnels through mountains and throwing bridges across unruly rivers, the brakemen who ran atop moving cars, the tracklayers crushed and killed by runaway trains. From backroom deals in Washington, D.C., to armed robberies of trains in the wild deserts, from glorified cattle cars to streamliners and Super Chiefs, all the great incidents and innovations of a mighty American era are re-created with unprecedented power in Rival Rails.

The Blues Go Birding at Wild American Shores
In this second of the BLUES Go Birding series, five adorable cartoon bluebirds go on another bird watching adventure. This time they follow in the footsteps of the famed Roger Tory Peterson, and see birds on every coastline of America. Filled with both information and fun, the BLUES are a delightful introduction to birdwatching and the major shorebird species.


Bones
This book is far from skinny -- it's the definitive nonfiction title about human and animal bones, delivered with in-your-face accuracy and intrigue. In this visually driven volume, kids come face-to-face with some head-to-toe boney comparisons, many of them shown at actual size. Here you'll find the differences between a man's hand and that of a spider monkey; the great weight of an elephant's leg, paired with the feather-light femur of a stork; and rib-tickling info about snakes and sloths. How many bones are in the whole human body?

Kids find out when they open the three large gatefold spreads that reveal the hard (yet enjoyable) truths about the boney insides of Earth's many creatures.


Fighter Pilot

Robin Olds was a larger-than-life hero with a towering personality. A graduate of West Point and an inductee in the National College Football Hall of Fame for his All-American performance for Army, Olds was one of the toughest college football players at the time. In WWII, Olds quickly became a top fighter pilot and squadron commander by the age of 22—and an ace with 12 aerial victories. But it was in Vietnam where the man became a legend. He arrived in 1966 to find a dejected group of pilots and motivated them by placing himself on the flight schedule under officers junior to himself, then challenging them to train him properly because he would soon be leading them. Proving he wasn’t a WWII retread, he led the wing with aggressiveness, scoring another four confirmed kills, becoming a rare triple ace. Olds (who retired a brigadier general and died in 2007) was a unique individual whose personal story is one of the most eagerly anticipated military books of the year.


The Heroine's Bookshelf
An exploration of classic heroines and their equally admirable authors, The Heroine's Bookshelf shows today's women how to tap into their inner strengths and live life with intelligence and grace.

Jo March, Scarlett O'Hara, Scout Finch—the literary canon is brimming with intelligent, feisty, never-say-die heroines and celebrated female authors. Like today's women, they placed a premium on personality, spirituality, career, sisterhood, and family. When they were up against the wall, authors like Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott fought back—sometimes with words, sometimes with gritty actions. In this witty, informative, and inspiring read, their stories offer much-needed literary intervention to modern women.

Full of beloved heroines and the remarkable writers who created them, The Heroine's Bookshelf explores how the pluck and dignity of literary characters such as Jane Eyre and Lizzy Bennet can encourage women today.

Each legendary character is paired with her central quality—Anne Shirley is associated with irrepressible "Happiness," while Scarlett O'Hara personifies "Fight"—along with insights into her author's extraordinary life. From Zora Neale Hurston to Colette, Laura Ingalls Wilder to Charlotte BrontË, Harper Lee to Alice Walker, here are authors and characters whose spirited stories are more inspiring today than ever.

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