We’ve got some recent and upcoming titles worth adding to your reading list.
Last year was one for the books. Cozy up with one of these Native and Western book recommendations from the C&I library.
The Ranch Table: Recipes From A Year Of Harvests, Celebrations, And Family Dinners On A Historic California Ranch By Elizabeth Poett with Georgia Freedman (out now, William Morrow Cookbooks)
Poett, the star of Magnolia Network’s show Ranch to Table, offers recipes inspired by life on her family’s Santa Barbara Central Coast ranch.
Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call To Unforgetting The Past And Reimagining Our Future By Patty Krawec (out now, Broadleaf Books)
Anishinaabe writer Krawec gives a new and needed perspective on colonialism and how we can learn from and incorporate our fraught history in a meaningful way.
Being Indigenous In Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People And The Color Line By Laura J. Feller (out now, University of Oklahoma Press)
An apt description of the subject from advance materials: “How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells.”
Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You By Lucinda Williams (out now, Crown)
The Grammy-winning, gravelly-voiced singer-songwriter turns in a “bracingly candid chronicle” of her life growing up in the South and making criminally underrated music for decades.
Fusion Notes By Preston Singletary (out now, Minor Matters)
Tlingit glass artist and musician Singletary pours his creative spirit into what he dubs a “visual memoir.”
The Missing Morningstar And Other Stories By Diné author Stacie Shannon Denetsosie-Mitchell (out now, Torrey House Press)
The author’s debut collection delivers gritty, fantastical, and beautifully intimate short stories that shed light on the young Indigenous experience. (Find an interview with the author at cowboysindians.com.)
The Old Lion: A Novel Of Theodore Roosevelt By Jeff Shaara (out now, St. Martin’s Press)
Shaara brings one of the greatest presidents and U.S. historical figures to vibrant life with historical fiction.
Project 562: Changing The Way We See Native America By Matika Wilbur (out now, Ten Speed Press)
An important collection of imagery and essays by Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Wilbur, whose work delves profoundly into the struggles and issues of modern Native communities.
Pushed: Miners, A Merchant And (Maybe) A Massacre By Ana Maria Spagna (out now, Torrey House Press)
The author consults a wide variety of experts and historians to find out the truth behind the historic incident dubbed the Chelan Falls Massacre. What she finds is anything but simple.
The Ballad Of Placida Romero: A Woman’s Captivity And Redemption By Aulton E. “Bob” Roland (out now, Museum of New Mexico Press)
From the book’s introduction: “This is the story of Plácida Romero’s capture, heartbreaking agony, and miraculous escape passed from generation to generation and how she became the subject of one of the most fascinating and captivating traditional (Hispanic) native ballads in New Mexico history.”
ALSO WORTH A READ:
• A Council of Dolls by Standing Rock Sioux author Mona Susan Power (out now, Mariner Books)
• By Western Hands: Functional Art from the Heart of the West by Chase Reynolds Ewald (out now, ORO Editions)
• Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty (out now, St. Martin’s Press)
• The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant (out now, Little, Brown, and Company)
• The Longmire Defense by Craig Johnson (out now, Viking)
• Playing with Wildfire by Laura Pritchett (expected in February, Torrey House Press)
This article appears in our January 2024 issue.
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