Going West

 

(Men pose in a Wild West saloon. Date and location unknown. Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

The next Books & Beyond (BAB) meeting will be on Tuesday, March 26th at 6:30pm and the topic up for discussion will be medicine, health, and related subjects.  If you need inspiration, the BAB section of our Shelf Care page is updated with suggestions: https://oneallibrary.org/adults---reading-recommendations

If you live within the city limits of a municipal library that subscribes to Kanopy, that service is hosting a Western March campaign, making available some true gems of film! Download the free app today and saddle up for the ride!

This week, BAB met to discuss westerns!

Cowboys & Aliens by Joan D. Vinge
1875.  New Mexico Territory.  A stranger with no memory of his past stumbles into the hard desert town of Absolution.  The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist.  What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don’t welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde.  It’s a town that lives in fear. But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky.  Now, the stranger they rejected is their only hope for salvation.  As this gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he’s been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against the alien force.

Call of the Wild by Jack London
First published in 1903, this adventure novel is set in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. The novel follows the story of a domesticated dog named Buck, who is stolen from his home in California and sold as a sled dog in the Yukon Territory. Against all odds, Buck adapts to his hostile environment and thrives as a sled dog, eventually becoming the leader of a wolf pack. Through his experiences, Buck learns to embrace his animal instincts, developing a strong and primal connection to the wilderness. The novel follows his journey of self-discovery as he learns to survive in the wild and embrace the call of nature.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen
Jesse James was a fabled outlaw, a charismatic, spiritual, larger-than-life bad man whose bloody exploits captured the imagination and admiration of a nation hungry for antiheroes. Robert Ford was a young upstart torn between dedicated worship and murderous jealousy, the "dirty little coward" who coveted Jesse's legend. The powerful, strange, and unforgettable story of their interweaving paths—and twin destinies that would collide in a rain of blood and betrayal—is a story of America in all her rough, conflicted glory and the myths that made her.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
The Pulitzer Prize­–winning American classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman
Carol Evers is a woman with a dark secret. She has died many times...but her many deaths are not final: They are comas, a waking slumber indistinguishable from death, each lasting days. Only two people know of Carol's eerie condition. One is her husband, Dwight, who married Carol for her fortune and - when she lapses into another coma - plots to seize it by proclaiming her dead and quickly burying her...alive. The other is her lost love, the infamous outlaw James Moxie. When word of Carol's dreadful fate reaches him, Moxie rides the Trail again to save his beloved from an early, unnatural grave.

Cosmic Crush by Clio Evans (not available in JCLC or by Interlibrary Loan)
Mari is a famous star in her intergalactic troupe. As headliner at the Comet Canyon Saloon, the last thing she expected to go wrong was being lassoed off stage by a chaps-wearing outlaw. Raider’s name has been tarnished by his good-for-nothing brother. The only way to clear it is by kidnapping the precious burlesque gem, Little Miss Mercury. After being stranded together during a desert storm, Mari and Raider discover that there’s more between them than a hostage situation gone wrong…

Wichita Slim and Gospel Bill (tv show)
A trilogy of Christian Westerns centered around US Marshall and ex-gunslinger Wichita Slim. It was a spin-off of the evangelical children's series The Gospel Bill Show and shared several characters and settings. It series was also known as The Faith Adventures of Wichita Slim.

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules -- a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders -- a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman -- have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes -- and save himself in the process -- before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. 

Two Rode Together (film, not available in JCLC)
For a fee, hard-drinking Texas marshal Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart) agrees to help Army officer Jim Gary (Richard Widmark) search for a group of whites who were abducted years earlier by Comanche warriors. After rescuing two of the abductees, McCabe and Gary find that the former captives have fully adopted the culture of their American Indian captors and are barely recognizable. Cultures collide as they attempt to return the settlers to their original -- and now long-forgotten -- lives.

This Land podcast
This Land is an American political podcast  hosted by Rebecca Nagle. The podcast debuted on June 3, 2019 and follows the United States Supreme Court case Sharp v. Murphy (previously known as Carpenter v. Murphy). In addition, the podcast discusses various Native issues such as land rights, sovereignty issues, and the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Heaven’s Gate (available on Kanopy)
Harvard graduate James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) is the sheriff of prosperous Jackson County, Wyo., when a battle erupts between the area's poverty-stricken immigrants and its wealthy cattle farmers. The politically connected ranch owners fight the immigrants with the help of Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), a mercenary competing with Averill for the love of local madam Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert). As the struggle escalates, Averill and Champion begin to question their decisions.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of TheWager and The Lost City of Z, “one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine 

American Hippo by Sarah Gailey
Years ago, in an America that never was, the United States government introduced herds of hippos to the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This plan failed to take into account some key facts about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. By the 1890s, the vast bayou that was once America's greatest waterway belongs to feral hippos, and Winslow Houndstooth has been contracted to take it back. To do so, he will gather a crew of the damnedest cons, outlaws, and assassins to ever ride a hippo. American Hippo is the story of their fortunes, their failures, and his revenge.

Tinfoil Butterfly by Rachel Eve Moulton
"A brutal, incredibly bizarre exploration of insanity, guilt, love, and the darkness inside all of us . . . This novel is a hybrid monster that's part Lovecraftian nightmare and part literary exploration of evil." —Gabino Iglesias, NPR

Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour
U.S. Air Force Major Joe Mack is a man born out of time. When his experimental aircraft is forced down in Russia and he escapes a Soviet prison camp, he must call upon the ancient skills of his Indian forebears to survive the vast Siberian wilderness. Only one route lies open to Mack: the path of his ancestors, overland to the Bering Strait and across the sea to America. But in pursuit is a legendary tracker, the Yakut native Alekhin, who knows every square foot of the icy frontier—and who knows that to trap his quarry he must think like a Sioux.

The Dark Side by Anthony O’Neill
In this dark and gripping sci-fi noir, an exiled police detective arrives at a lunar penal colony just as a psychotic android begins a murderous odyssey across the far side of the moon.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

White Fang by Jack London
Considered both a companion and mirror to The Call of the Wild, this stirring adventure of friendship and survival reveals the conflicts between domesticity and instinct, as well as society and the natural world. Wronged by human and beast alike, White Fang has endured through brazen ferocity. An enemy of his kind, he is sold to a dogfighter who pits him against other canines to the death—until a Yukon gold hunter comes to his rescue and provides an opportunity for a new life. As the wolf in White Fang sleeps, kindness and compassion allow him to understand what it means to be in the confidence of man.

The Revenant by Michael Punke
The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company’s finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge. With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out, crawling at first, across hundreds of miles of uncharted American frontier.

The Tourist (tv show, streaming on Netflix)
A man wakes up in the Australian Outback with no recollection of who he is, and he must try to piece together his memory as merciless figures from his past pursue him.

The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
After her breathtaking debut novel, Black Water Rising, won acclaim from major publications and respected crime fiction masters like James Ellroy and George Pelecanos, Locke returns with The Cutting Season, a second novel easily as gripping and powerful as her first—a heart-pounding thriller that interweaves two murder mysteries, one on Belle Vie, a historic landmark in the middle of Lousiana’s Sugar Cane country, and one involving a slave gone missing more than one hundred years earlier.

Atlas Obscura: “Inside Laredo, the Secret, Members-Only WildWest Town in England" (4/15/2016)
Its founders have spent weekends re-enacting American frontier life for over 30 years.

Stagecoach
John Ford's landmark Western revolves around an assorted group of colorful passengers aboard the Overland stagecoach bound for Lordsburg, New Mexico, in the 1880s. An alcoholic philosophizer (Thomas Mitchell), a lady of ill repute (Claire Trevor) and a timid liquor salesman (Donald Meek) are among the motley crew of travelers who must contend with an escaped outlaw, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), and the ever-present threat of an Apache attack as they make their way across the Wild West.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Questions arise when Senator Stoddard (James Stewart) attends the funeral of a local man named Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) in a small Western town. Flashing back, we learn Doniphon saved Stoddard, then a lawyer, when he was roughed up by a crew of outlaws terrorizing the town, led by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). As the territory's safety hung in the balance, Doniphon and Stoddard, two of the only people standing up to him, proved to be very important, but different, foes to Valance.

High Noon
Former marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is preparing to leave the small town of Hadleyville, New Mexico, with his new bride, Amy (Grace Kelly), when he learns that local criminal Frank Miller has been set free and is coming to seek revenge on the marshal who turned him in. When he starts recruiting deputies to fight Miller, Kane is discouraged to find that the people of Hadleyville turn cowardly when the time comes for a showdown, and he must face Miller and his cronies alone.

Unforgiven
When prostitute Delilah Fitzgerald (Anna Thomson) is disfigured by a pair of cowboys in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, her fellow brothel workers post a reward for their murder, much to the displeasure of sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), who doesn't allow vigilantism in his town. Two groups of gunfighters, one led by aging former bandit William Munny (Clint Eastwood), the other by the florid English Bob (Richard Harris), come to collect the reward, clashing with each other and the sheriff.

Brokeback Mountain
In 1963, rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and ranch hand Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are hired by rancher Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) as sheep herders in Wyoming. One night on Brokeback Mountain, Jack makes a drunken pass at Ennis that is eventually reciprocated. Though Ennis marries his longtime sweetheart, Alma (Michelle Williams), and Jack marries a fellow rodeo rider (Anne Hathaway), the two men keep up their tortured and sporadic affair over the course of 20 years.

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. 

Centennial by James Michener
Written to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, James A. Michener’s magnificent saga of the West is an enthralling celebration of the frontier. Brimming with the glory of America’s past, the story of Colorado—the Centennial State—is manifested through its people. In Centennial, trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters are brought together in the dramatic conflicts that shape the destiny of the legendary West—and the entire country.