10 Outstanding Books About the West

It’s a dream our forefathers held that has never faded for some—chucking it all and heading West, where everything seems a little more open, wild and well, sunnier. Jonathan Evison’s West of Here is just the latest installment in the notion that heading toward the mountains and the mighty Pacific makes for a better life. Here are 10 more great books about going West.

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon (1991): Chicago is, of course, America’s second city—second, that is, only to New York in economic and cultural importance. It was ...

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Chimps, Kafka and the Writers’ Workshop: The Makings of 'Bruno Littlemore'

A talking chimp—and in more than one language? With The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, debut novelist Benjamin Hale gives readers a chimpanzee who, though resident in an apehouse, is no stranger to libraries, salons and even bars, and who ponders the simian—and human—condition with a philosopher’s eye. We talked with Hale about his much-hyped book.

How did the idea for The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore come to you?

The idea came when I was sitting in the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago watching the chimps. My girlfriend at the time lived in Chicago, and during my ...

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J.D. Salinger’s Elusive Life

J.D.—Jerome David, that is—Salinger died Jan. 27, 2010, at the age of 91. His best-known fictional creation, Holden Caulfield, might have marveled at Salinger’s longevity; he might have sneered at it, too, Holden having been perhaps the first of the hope-I-die-before-I-get-old crowd.

For decades, Salinger lived a nearly anonymous life, his last publication appearing in 1965. The author’s hermetic existence and fierce protection of his privacy kept journalists and biographers at bay without causing much harm to his fame. Now that Salinger is gone, students of his life may find it easier to do their ...

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Kirkus Q&A: Ron Reagan

In My Father at 100, Ron Reagan looks deeply into the past of his father, Ronald W. Reagan, the actor turned politician and two-term president. Reagan writes affectingly of the development of a very public person who was also intensely private, and of a father-son relationship marked by many difficult moments, but also by love and respect.

Kirkus Reviews caught up with Reagan just before he embarked on a nationwide book tour that is scheduled to take him to New York City, Washington, D.C., and other points on the map, including his father’s boyhood home of Dixon, Ill ...

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Annie Proulx: Rules for Making a Good Home

In her new memoir, Bird Cloud, novelist and short-story writer Annie Proulx recounts the many experiences—from the nearly tragic to triumphant—that she encountered while making her home along the North Platte River in Wyoming. Sound boring? Far from it. A master storyteller, Proulx fills her book with birds and animals, towering mountains and unbroken horizons, among many other iconic images from the West. Here, among others, are 10 crucial things she learned while building her home.

Root out and destroy any kitchen that can be described as a “beige horror.”

Set your home among lodgepole pines—preferably not ...

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2010 Best Books: Charles Bowden

Journalist and essayist Charles Bowden has been working the border beat for four decades now, closely observing the dark side of the little towns where Anglos come to stock up on tequila and brightly woven blankets—towns that increasingly are contested land in long-running wars between the governments of the United States and Mexico against powerful drug cartels. In Murder City, Bowden paints a grim portrait of Ciudad Juárez, the teeming city across the line from El Paso, Texas. We caught up with Bowden at home in the Chihuahuan Desert.

You’re a pioneering chronicler of the dark side ...

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2010 Best Books: Rick Moody

Rick Moody surprised us this year with The Four Fingers of Death, a sprawling, madcap novel that wanders through deep space into the heart of the Arizona desert, its hero a lost-soul writer named Montese Crandall who spends his days trying to reduce novels to the size of Internet tweets. The four fingers in question refer to an old grade-Z creature feature from 1963—but more, to a very real partial hand that is now creating mayhem back on Earth, having gone awry somewhere on the path home from Mars. What happens next is…well, you’ll need to read ...

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2010 Best Books: The Last Stand, by Nathaniel Philbrick

It’s a story that has been burned into American memory since it first went down on that hot summer day in 1876, when the 650 soldiers under the command of George Armstrong Custer came under attack by untold thousands of allied Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Best known for popular books about maritime history (Sea of Glory, 2003; Mayflower, 2006), Nathaniel Philbrick steps onto dry land with his vivid account of the Battle of Little Big Horn and the many missteps and personality clashes that led to it. “It was daunting from a research point of view in that I ...

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2010 Best Books: Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier

“Officially, there is no such place as Siberia,” writes New Yorker correspondent Ian Frazier. Yet the fact that the place doesn’t exist is the merest of inconveniences, for there’s a lot of out there out there in Russia’s version of the Wild West. Frazier has spent good parts of the last two decades traveling to Russia’s far eastern extremes, hearing the stories of river rats, oil wildcatters, trappers, truckers, apparatchiks and other residents of the vast land. “On my first trip I spoke no Russian,” says Frazier. In time, he learned enough to keep himself out ...

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2010 Best Books: Joe Louis, by Randy Roberts

Joe Louis could throw a punch so hard that, as boxers say, he could kill you and your entire family. At midpoint between Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali, he was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world for a dozen years, from 1937 to 1949, a time of depression, war and the first stirrings of the modern civil rights movement. In that last regard, Louis became a hero to millions of African-Americans, representing dignity and hope in a time when both were in short supply, commanding respect with his fists. As historian Randy Roberts observes in his biography of Louis ...

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2010 Best Books: David Remnick

Political reporter and New Yorker editor David Remnick has been a longtime student of world politics, particularly those of Russia, about which he has written two books, Lenin’s Tomb (1993) and Resurrection (1997). A writer of far-ranging curiosity, he became interested along the way in the world of boxing, writing about Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali. That led him into the rough-and-tumble of American politics—and that, in turn, led him to the current president and to The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. (Ed. note: This article first appeared in our Nonfiction issue, April 2010.)

When ...

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10 Things You Might Not Know About Stieg Larsson

The author of the bestselling Millennium trilogy still provides posthumous intrigue for his fans and friends. In Stieg Larsson: Our Days in Stockholm, his colleague Kurdo Baksi continues the dialogue, answering questions for fans about Larsson’s life. The slim volume is out this week. Here are 10 things you may not have know about Larsson:

Larsson wrote under a pen name—sort of. His birth name was Karl Stig-Erland Larsson. He changed it to what he thought was a more writerly form as a teenager, when he decided to become a journalist.

A journalist specializing in covering right-wing extremist ...

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Anniversaries: Green Eggs and Ham at 50

Accommodate. Dwindle. Suspicious. Obscene. We owe these and a few dozen other words to William Shakespeare, who coined some, twisted others into new shapes, heard still others in the mouths of bricklayers, milkmaids, merchants and shepherds in the English countryside. Moreover, Shakespeare mastered whole technical vocabularies, drawing on the language of sailing, of falconry, of hunting, of painting.

The corpus of Shakespeare’s work, quantified, contains 31,534 individual words—or, as the helpful authors of the textbook Statistical Reasoning for Everyday Life put it, “a grand total of 884,647 words counting repetitions.” But that doesn’t seem a ...

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2010 Children's Best: Arroz con Leche / Rice Pudding, by Jorge Argueta

This is no ordinary cookbook, not unless the latest editions of Fanny Farmer and Julia Child rhapsodize about puffy grains of rice metamorphosing into fishes and birds, or describe a runnel of milk from a bottle transformed, à la Ovid, into a splendid white waterfall. But that’s the sort of magical food-based realism in which Salvadoran émigré poet Jorge Argueta works, and that’s just the sort of thing that happens in the pages of his elegant, entertaining bilingual celebration of a favorite childhood treat. “I spent part of my life in a popular restaurant where flavors and words came ...

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Anniversaries: James' Dickey's Deliverance Turns 40

He is perfect, or at least perfectible. He reads. He lifts weights. He runs. He does push-ups. He kills things. Says a friend, with more than a touch of envy, he is “the only man I knew who could do with his life exactly what he wanted to.”

Yet this man, Lewis, the brooding moral center of James Dickey’s bestselling novel, Deliverance, does not live a perfect life. More precisely, he lives in the endless suburban sprawl of Atlanta, a place that might inspire Nietzschean thoughts but, with its traffic jams and look-alike strip malls, does not adequately reward ...

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race

When the space aliens finally come to Earth, they may utter something reassuringly peaceful—“Klaatu barada nikto,” say. Likelier they’ll say something a touch different on surveying the wreckage that Homo sapiens have made of their nest, something along the lines of, well, whatever “WTF?” might sound like in Alpha Centaurian.

Whatever the extraterrestrials say, we won’t be there to hear them. So runs the premise of Earth (The Book), whose title may or may not be subtle homage to Hot Dog (The Movie), but whose earnest goofiness is worthy of The Onion. Earth is a guidebook for ...

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Appreciations: Fahrenheit 451

A very old story attributes the burning of the great library at Alexandria, Egypt, to a zealous Muslim ruler, the Caliph Omar, who set to work destroying the ancient world’s greatest collection of books by saying of them, “They will either contradict the Quran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.”

Whether Omar really did and said so is anyone’s guess. Probably not—the anecdote appears only 300 years after the event, in the pages of a book by a vigorously anti-Muslim Christian cleric. But no matter; anecdotally, at ...

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Prepping for the Civil War

Next year, Americans will commemorate—celebrate doesn’t seem quite the right word—the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. That conflict, of course, was the bloodiest in our history, with the loss of some 700,000 men on both sides, reason enough for my Virginia grandmother to spit, “Wasn’t anything civil about that war” whenever the subject came up.

We have long known that this anniversary was coming, but so far few books have been announced that will revisit the conflict. Granted that we’ll have until 2015 to mark 150th anniversary events, some old ...

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