Review by Martha Quillen
Books – January 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
IN THE CATEGORY OF From, For, and About Central Colorado, I highly recommend four memoirs: One Man’s West by David Lavender; Tomboy Bride by Harriet Fish Backus; and two books by Anne Ellis, Life of an Ordinary Woman and Plain Anne Ellis: More about the Life of an Ordinary Woman. They’re all fun, informative, readable and give the reader a vivid portrait of what life used to be like here.
Ellis lived and traveled in Central Colorado in the late 19th and early 20th century, and her life was far from comfortable. She gives a memorable picture of growing up poor, marrying a miner, and surviving as a widow.
HARRIET BACKUS begins her tale as the bride of an engineer, who was employed at the Tomboy Mine near Telluride. Their youthful days living in a mining shack high in the San Juans were a joyous time, full of fun and adventure, but eventually the couple gains children, possessions, position, and responsibility. Her husband becomes a key figure at the Climax Mine outside of Leadville, and life gets harder. There are the children, the illnesses, the job situation, and the labor struggles to worry about. There are also the threats, the fear….
David Lavender’s tale is much like Backus’s. Life starts out fun, but marriage, children, and responsibility eventually make living in isolated mining camps difficult. Lavender hails from further afar, so his book is about Ouray and western Colorado, but he’s the best writer of this lot, elegant and thoughtful, and his tale lies closest to ours in time. Lavender’s story starts with his youth in the 1930s, and moves beyond, illuminating Colorado’s rapid and bittersweet transition from old west to new….
All of these books are Colorado classics, and have become an elemental part of the lore and tradition of our region.
And this year I plan to peruse a new volume of western lore that’s gotten laudatory reviews from both Hal Walter and Ed. Although I can’t say much about this book, since I haven’t read it yet, Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides is about Kit Carson, who definitely looms large in the history of southern Colorado and New Mexico. If you want to learn more about settlement and Indian relations in early Colorado, reading about Kit is a good start. And everybody I know who’s read this book, has been enthusiastic, so as soon as I have time….
But sometimes I enjoy getting away from Central Colorado (although, perhaps, only in my mind since I don’t have time for car trips, money for vacations, or the patience for airports).
My favorite armchair excursions in recent years have taken me to Detroit, the home of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and New Orleans, a place I’ve never been.
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is a rollicking novel about a Greek family that immigrates to Detroit. Eugenides somehow manages to catch all of the bizarreness of the place: its unique ethnicity; car consciousness; race problems; and factory ethos; and he also does justice to the city’s neighborhoods, people — and life in the 1950s and ’60s.
It’s a warm, humorous, epic of a book, with serious overtones. Unbeknownst to the Stephanides, they’ve brought something with them from the old country: a rare, chromosomal problem that will mean their bright, beautiful grandchild will never be normal — sexually. It’s a big blow to this middle American clan and one made even more difficult by timing, since they discover this bewildering and awkward deviancy just as America emerges from a prim and wholesome era.
The Stephanides are a close-knit bunch who don’t always say the right thing, do the right thing, or choose the right course, but you can’t help but love this family because they clearly love one another. And the author obviously relishes each and every eccentric character he writes into this Pulitzer Prize winning book.
THE LOST GERMAN SLAVE GIRL: The Extraordinary Story of Slave Sally Muller and Her Fight for Freedom by John Bailey is a different sort of book altogether. A compelling non-fiction narrative, it’s part history, part true crime, part Louisiana lore and all about one of the weirdest court cases in American history.
And in conclusion, I recommend a book the New York Times Book Review refused to review, because they felt it was schmaltzy, predictable, and full of ordinary writing. And they were right; there’s nothing complex, pretentious, or overwritten about Marley and Me by John Grogan. It’s just a warm, funny tale about a family and their dog that’s guaranteed to make you laugh and cry aloud and that will leave you musing fondly about your own beloved pets.
