Books to enjoy by Tucson-area writers

“Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect”  By Michelle Téllez (University of Arizona Press). 193 pp. $24.95 paperback.

In the tradition of scholarship that foregrounds the voices and experience of women activists, this academic ethnography examines a Mexican autonomous community through interviews with ten of its women. The community, Maclovio Rojas, located near Tijuana, is notable in that women, more than men, have assumed roles to organize, develop and govern a stand-alone society. Their humane governance differs from neoliberalism, writes Michelle Téllez — “a governing rationality in which everything is economized” — humans and human activity are seen as part of a market; persons, businesses, government seen as firms.

UA Associate Professor in Mexican American Studies, Téllez writes about transnational community formations, Chicana feminism and gendered migration. She came to the study of autonomous communities through involvement with the Zapatista movement in 2002.

— Christine Wald-Hopkins

“COVID-29: To Seek a Newer World”  By Ross Carroll (self-published). 417 pp, $12.95 paperback; Kindle available.

One bonus to writing fiction is you get to recast the world to your taste. Ross Carroll seems to have relished that in this intriguing post-apocalyptic novel set in the near future: In the background, he gets to serve up just desserts to our contemporary politicians.

After a lethal virus annihilates nearly the entire human race in one week in March 2029, lawlessness and violence break out. Carroll follows three groups of survivors who take to the roads to search for companionship and secure location to start that “newer world.”

As the survivors confront food, water and fuel deficits, and encounter raging militia types, Carroll reminds us just how irresponsible humans have been in their stewardship of Earth and its inhabitants.

(And there’ll be no spoiler here as to what Ross does with Biden, Harris and Trump.)

— Christine Wald-Hopkins

“How to Feed a Horse”  By Janice Dewey. 74 pp. $16.95 paperback; Kindle available. “Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1975”  By Eleanor Wilner. 109 pp. $16.95 paperback; Kindle available (Crooked Heart).

As they tell it in a Red Hen Press video, when UA Spanish and Humanities Adjunct Assistant Professor Janice Dewey bemoaned the difficulties of getting published to widely-published poet Eleanor Wilner, Wilner responded, “start your own house.”

Enter Crooked Heart Press. An imprint of Red Hen Press, it’s dedicated to publishing the work of women over the age of 55. These two books were its inaugural productions.

Dewey’s fine collection, “How to Feed a Horse,” is notable for its clear, sharp, descriptions of animals, birds, and plants in an increasingly desiccating West; the relation between poet and landscape; the nature of words: “… She’ll dream more water into the drying springs,” reads “San Juan’s Day,” “and into the saguaros who / bloomed this year in a fever / As if no rain were coming down anytime soon / as if it were the very last bloom.”

Superb “Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1975” presents Eleanor Wilner as a young poet. A longtime instructor in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she’s here revealed as imaginative, passionate for social justice, sharp-eyed on nature and society, expansive in her view of the world.

Her powerful “What Do Myths Have to do with the Price of Fish?”, defends — to a patronizing male poet — her use of mythology: “In some imagined Attic light so lambent / you can see the breeze move through / the groves of olive, some ancient / inmost part begins to stir, … / — for a moment, / long as centuries or like the time that only stones / remember —none of this had to happen: /” …[missiles, the split atom, Hitler, the Crusades] … “and / Nagasaki is a place admired for its gardens.”

— Christine Wald-Hopkins

“Radioland”  By M.e. Elzey (Little House Press). 391 pp. $24.95 hardcover; available as paperback and Kindle.

“I swear, Harry,” says Holocaust survivor character Mariam Katz in “Radioland,” “the brains behind New Signal News must have studied Joseph Goebbels.”

A free press, corrupt broadcasting, corporate greed, rabid Second Amendment defense, politics and contemporary white supremacists are all the stuff of this engaging, timely novel by Marana writer M.e. Elzey.

At issue are the influence of radio hosts’ venomous rhetoric and the fundamental fragility of American democracy. We follow social justice lawyer Harry Chalberg and his elderly assistant Mariam as they attempt to hold the ranting of Fox-like New Signal News afternoon host Cal Brown accountable for inciting deadly violence.

Elzey’s warning to contemporary America is clear, but his message is more nuanced. Even seasoned cops can support gun control. Fame and wealth don’t insure happiness. Cal Brown’s opinions aren’t really his — they’re scripted for market share. And it can happen here.

— Christine Wald-Hopkins

"Bottomless Cups" By Joel Bresler. Tasfil Publishing, LLC. 279 pp. $13.99; Kindle $4.99

A taste for Marvel comics brought fifth-graders Teddy and Ray together, back when men wore suits, women wore gloves and the armed conflict was in Korea. Fast-forward a lifetime and the two, now in their seventies, meet in diners to linger over coffee while reflecting on old times and current dilemmas. The effect is a split-screen narrative of an eventful journey of friendship that leads them, along with their boyhood companions, to the mixed blessing of a movie adaptation of their coming-of-age story. The back-of-the-mind awareness of their journey’s inevitable end is sensitively portrayed, but Oro Valley resident Joel Bresler’s characters are so likable and witty, and his narration so laugh-out-loud funny that melancholy can’t gain a toehold in this heartwarming novel.

— Helene Woodhams

"Enough to Make the Angels Weep" By Ernesto Patino. Black Opal Books. 218 pp. $15.99; Kindle $5.99

Someone is killing the descendants of the St. Patrick’s Battalion, a bizarre circumstance that Tucson private investigator Joe Coopersmith uncovers while investigating the murder of one descendant’s elderly widow. Digging for clues, Coopersmith looks to her husband’s friends and finds that they’re dropping like ninepins; the key appears to be a missing, historic diary. By using the battalion, which existed in fact, as a setting, the author demonstrates the power of history to impact present-day events.

During the Mexican-American War, Irish immigrants fighting on the side of the United States realized it was counterintuitive to kill Mexicans — who were largely Catholic — when they themselves were being persecuted for their Catholicism. They formed the elite “San Patricios,” fought alongside the Mexicans and were treated savagely by the conquering Americans. For the most part it’s not a well-remembered chapter in United States history, and 180 years later there’s a murderer willing to kill to be sure it stays forgotten in this novel by retired private investigator Ernesto Patino.

— Helene Woodhams

"Mi-Granted Life: The Adventures of a Happy Immigrant" By Michel Delifer. Independently published. 358 pp. $12.99; Kindle $5.99

Michel Delifer left war-torn Lebanon for the United States as a young man and pursued a successful career in insurance before retiring to Southern Arizona. With this memoir he describes the events that brought him to insurance capital Hartford, Connecticut, providing a detailed look of the reinsurance business and his rise through its ranks, interspersed with personal stories of family and finding himself.

Delifir, an affable narrator, tells his story with humor: learning the ropes of a high-powered industry involved cultural challenges, like adapting to booze-fueled lunches (he didn’t care for alcohol) and collegial conversations about sports, his knowledge of which was nonexistent. But his story of assimilation into the American mainstream is heavy on business minutiae, which causes the narrative to periodically lose steam. He’s at his best when talking about his early struggles, his personal growth and his awakening to what he considers the darker side of the insurance business.

His goal, Delifer says, is to give an honest account of himself to new immigrants whom he hopes will encounter the good fortune he enjoyed.

— Helene Woodhams

"Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River" By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck. University of Arizona Press. 288 pp. $35; Kindle $9.99

The overallocation of the Colorado River, a crisis for the modern West, could have been averted nearly 100 years ago if the authors of the Colorado River Compact had not ignored available science in deference to development boosters eager to turn 4 million acres of arid land into a green and profitable oasis.

The implications continue to haunt us, say the authors of this deeply researched, highly readable volume. To prove their point, Eric Kuhn, retired general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, and John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, show just how the sausage was made by politicians who cherry-picked data and indulged in magical thinking while turning a blind eye toward the river’s historic flow, amounting to a willful misunderstanding that became deeply embedded in decisions that led to our current predicament.

Clear, concise writing makes this book easily accessible to a general audience, beginning with a glossary that demystifies scientific terms and hydrology jargon. Cultural, historic and political backgrounds demonstrate how easily science denial triumphed over facts.

The path forward will require a grand negotiation that takes into account the wide variability in the Colorado River’s hydrology and the effects of a warming planet; moving ahead without a Plan B for what to do if there isn’t enough water will have dire consequences. A compelling read.

— Helene Woodhams