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A Look at the Ordeal of Making the Real Visual in Picturing a Different West:  Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Austin and Cather   Originally published 2 June 2014 “You can scarcely understand what it means . . . that enormous territory . . . the cradle of faith in the New World . . . the beginning of momentous things.” Willa Cather in Death Comes For the Archbishop “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” Georgia O’Keeffe In Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Austin and Cather (Texas Tech University Press, 2007) author Janis P. Stout closely researches and explains the history...

Gangster Tour of Texas by T. Lindsay Baker, 2011, Texas A&M University Press, 318 pages, index, B&W photographs, paperback, $21.00 Review by Rosemary Briseño, PhD Why are outlaws a provocative bunch, their criminal endeavors enticing? What is it about lawbreakers that popular culture has embraced, whose cold-blooded exploits of criminal, vicious behavior against innocence and humanity are illuminated, even celebrated, in various mediums such as television, film, and music? Perhaps it is the criminal’s cruel gift to silence decency and conscientiousness that allows the animal inherent within all of us to roar, to intimidate, to frighten . . . a feat many of us would love to exercise, but few are actually willing to practice, since normal people worry that their peers might...

A Consideration of Philip and Alex Fradkin’s The Left Coast:  California on the Edge   Originally published 1 June 2014 “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”  Saint Augustine “Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll.  Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.  Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.”  Lord Byron Philip L. Fradkin’s The Left Coast:  California on the Edge, (2011, University of California Press, 126 pages, index, color photographs, paperback, $36.95) with photography...

  Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty:  Navajos, Hózhǫ’, and Track Work by Jay Youngdahl, 2011, Utah State University Press, Logan, Utah 84322-3078, USUPress.org.   A vast richness of experience is lost in the world view that believes there is nothing to know from primitive or natural cultures.  This book demonstrates many necessary truths about how humans cope with existence, and sometimes—rarely—find a way to ascend towards beauty despite extreme physical and psychological hardship. This is a book about Navajo railroad workers and their attempts to hold onto the important way of life, the Navajo way, of “walking in beauty.”    It may be not readily assumed that a book about railroad workers could reveal something every human would benefit to know....