History 4130

Books about Utah
books,dictionaries,education,fotolia,learning,novels,piles,reading,reference,research,stacks,studies,volumes  

Stephen Trimble, Bargaining for Eden. Beginning with an Olympic ski race in northern Utah, this heartfelt book from award-winning writer and photographer Stephen Trimble takes a penetrating look at the battles raging over the land--and the soul--of the American West. Bargaining for Eden investigates the high-profile story of a reclusive billionaire who worked relentlessly to acquire public land for his ski resort and to host the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. In a gripping, character-driven narrative, based on extensive interviews, Trimble tells of the land exchange deal that ensued, one of the largest and most controversial in U.S. history, as he deftly explores the inner conflicts, paradoxes, and greed at the heart of land-use disputes from the back rooms of Washington to the grassroots efforts of passionate citizens.

Annie Clark Tanner, Mormon Mother. With all of the highly polarized descriptions of Mormon polygamy in the late 1800's, it is refreshing to read an honest first-person account of how "plural marriage" affected everyday life for those involved. Mrs. Tanner's experience was decidedly negative, yet she writes without the bitterness one might expect.

Judith Freeman, Red Water. In 1857, at a place called Mountain Meadows in southern Utah, a band of Mormons and Indians massacred 120 emigrants. Twenty years later, the slaughter was blamed on one man named John D. Lee, previously a member of Brigham Young’s inner circle. Red Water imagines Lee’s extraordinary frontier life through the eyes of three of his nineteen wives

Judith Freeman, The Chinchilla Farm.  Verna Flake is fleeing Utah, a failed marriage (her husband has left her for a former beauty queen named Pinky), and the constricted yet reliable Mormon way of life. Seemingly naive but also gifted with an almost second sight for the emotional heart of things, Verna relates her adventures on the road, in Los Angeles, and eventually in Mexico, as she confronts her future and muses over her past.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire. When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road and many other critically acclaimed books vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah.

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge. In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.

Terry Tempest Williams, Red. The beloved author of Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Red makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah.

Levi Peterson, The Backslider. Deep in the recesses of the Mormon heart, Jesus is an experienced but unpretentious cowboy who, like our own rugged fathers, watches over us with kind and sparing advice. Enter Frank Wind-ham, a hard-working Mormon, trying to be good but convinced he's on the road to hell. He has an ultra-pious mother, a brother who is more than just a little touched in the head, and a comfortable Lutheran girlfriend who professes to have been saved. An expression of the human struggle with imperfection and hope of redemption, The Backslider is a landmark in Mormon fiction.

Edward A. Geary, Goodbye to Poplarhaven. Recollections of a Utah Boyhood.

Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation. The moving sequel to the bestselling Big Rock Candy Mountain. Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City not for his aunt's funeral, but to encounter after forty-five years the place he fled in bitterness. A successful statesman and diplomat, Mason had buried his awkward and lonely childhood, sealed himself off from the thrills and torments of adolescence to become a figure who commanded international respect. But the realities of the present recede in the face of the ghosts of his past. As he makes the perfunctory arrangements for the funeral, we enter with him on an intensely personal and painful inner pilgrimage: we meet the father who darkened his childhood, the mother whose support was both redeeming and embarrassing, the friend who drew him into the respectable world of which he so craved to be a part, and the woman he nearly married. In this profoundly moving book Stegner has drawn an intimate portrait of a man understanding how his life has been shaped by experiences seemingly remote and inconsequential.

Virginia Eggertsen Sorenson, A Little Lower than the Angels.  When A Little Lower than the Angels appeared in 1942, its author and recent Brigham Young University graduate Virginia Sorensen was overwhelmed by the positive national attention. Clifton Fadiman, writing for The New Yorker, noted how "convincingly [she] explores . . . the tragic, comic, and grotesque problems of plural marriage." Set in Nauvoo, Illinois, she tells the story of a single family, a woman and her Mormon husband, loosely based on her in-laws' family history from the period and augmented by on-site research.

Maurine Whipple, The Giant Joshua. The Giant Joshua was first published in 1941. Maureen Whipple grew up in Southern Utah and was able to capture a great deal of the culture, folklore and local color in this rather stinging indictment of polygamy.

Eileen Hallet Stone, A Homeland in the West. Oral histories and "historical conversations" form the heart of A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember by Salt Lake City transplant Eileen Hallet Stone (coauthor, Missing Stories: An Oral History of Ethnic and Minority Groups in Utah). In chapters like "Minyan in a Railroad Town" and "Standing Up to Bigotry," Stone profiles pioneer merchants, soldiers, hoteliers and housewives to fashion a moving account of men and women who came from afar to settle down in the West's new and unfamiliar landscape.

Helen Papanikolas, Small Bird Tell Me: Stories of Greek Immigrants. These are fictionalized accounts of her parents and their 1920's generation of Greek Americans.

Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family. This is a compelling autobiographical narrative. Uchida tells the story of her family, which includes her Japanese-born parents and her sister. After the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan and the outbreak of World War II, the family endures the fate suffered by many other Japanese-Americans: they are forced to abandon their home and are relocated to an internment camp in Utah.