I'd never heard of Mari Sandoz until the other person who reviewed Slocum House sent me a copy, along with the suggestion that the tome should be on my SYLT Guide for good western fiction. After reading it twice I'm still puzzled about why Sandoz isn't more well known, even though the book was written in 1937.

Slocum House is one of the few works of fiction I've ever read that successfully portrays the nasty side of the power/wealth battle for the west. That battle and the results can be found easily enough in the nooks and crannies of actual history and autobiography. The Albert Fountain homicide in New Mexico, the various works gradually seeping out of the cracks about Mountain Meadows, Elfigo Baca, the Salt War and the Catron Gang and even the Pat Garrett homicide all portray a time in our history when county elections were a life and death matter. Until Mari Sandoz all that's mostly escaped the notice of fiction writers.

Readers familiar with Nichol's other works might be surprised by On The Mesa. The book differs from anything he's published in the past and more nearly resembles the reflections of writers better known for non-fiction works than for fiction.

On The Mesa is the story of one of the skirmishes in the long war over the encroachments of 'post-modern' civilization into Northern New Mexico. Those battles are usually portrayed best in fiction works because they constitute an epic. Bradford's books, Red Sky at Morning and So Far From Heaven are two of the first of this genre, followed by the several Milagro Beanfield novels by Nichols.

On The Mesa lacks the penetrating humor readers find attractive in the fiction books by Nichols, but they'll probably be pleased by the reverence, the maturity of tone and the underlying sweet melancholy recognition of an inevitable loss in a noble fight to preserve a facet of the past.

The Bradford books, Red Sky at Morning and So Far From Heaven are two tomes slightly before their times. When most of the New Mexico fiction enthusiasts discovered Hillerman and Nichols these two had already gone into decline and were settling into obscurity. Each is well worth pulling from the bottom of the heap, dusting carefully and settling down for a great read.

Red Sky at Morning would fit well into the John Nichols collection insofar as insight, humor and good story-telling. The characterization is great in both Bradford books; the plotting is excellent; the penetrating insights into a New Mexico forever in transition between a colorful past, chaotic present and incomprehensible future are all conveyed here.

Whether the reader wishes to know New Mexico or simply to spend the evening in smiles and laughs, Bradford will provide.

Richard Bradford's two books, So Far From Heaven and Red Sky at Morning come from a time when New Mexico was in a period of transition. So Far From Heaven refers to a statement in 1841 by Mexican Governor Manual Armijo, "Poor New Mexico! So far from heaven, so close to Texas."

A Houston executive flees to New Mexico to find a new life for himself. During the process he discovers he's actually a man. The book is poignant and accurately portrays the long struggle between Hispanic and Anglo in the Land of Enchantment. The struggle is for land, water and human rights. I'd recommend both of these books for the laughs, the entertainment and the education and thought you're bound to derive. Afterward you can begin the Milagro series and enjoy it more for having read these two.

This book is unlike any of Kelton's other works. The time setting is the 1950s and the seven-year drought we experienced during those years. The plot/theme is the end of the era of independence and freedom among cow men ... the time when they told themselves the drought forced them to sell themselves to the government to receive hay in return for their souls and their pasts.

I think of this book as a companion read to Abbey's, Brave Cowboy and McMurtry's, Hud (the book). All three writers were capturing a time and an attitude representing an end of an era when ranchers continued to curse the government out of habit while accepting welfare money as gracefully as the city poor they despised for doing so.

Kelton's book is as good as the other two, maybe better.

When Jack Burns encounters a barbed-wire fence as he comes across the West Mesa (Albuquerque)on horseback he scans in both directions for a gate before he clips the wire to ride through. He wouldn't have cut it if it wasn't in his way, or if there'd been a gate nearby. Thus begins the book with a scene that tells much about the main character.

Burns is a man who doesn't merely cling to ideals of loyalty, privacy and individual freedom. His internal machinery accepts no alternative at any level. Jack Burns is a man who won't cut a fence unless it stands in the way of where he wants to go. He recognizes the existence of the creeping encroachments and compromises to his choices and ignores them. The modern acquiescence by the rest of society is foreign to him.

Burns descends the mesa into Albuquerque, encounters modern city life and is battered by it without 'losing' in the usual sense of the word, and leaves on the run from the legal instruments intended to keep us all on the straight and narrow. The end is inevitable.

Readers who know Albuquerque will enjoy the ride across the 'Volcans', the places in the Rio Grande Valley still recognizable despite the years since Abbey wrote the book, the harrowing climb up the Sandias pursued by the military and law enforcement community. Those who don't know Albuquerque or New Mexico will appreciate the type of individual Burns portrays: a man born too late, unable to compromise.

I haven't seen the movie mentioned by other reviewers. I also didn't see the shortcomings of the book mentioned by several. I saw only a writer who created a character much as Abbey saw himself, as many people today see themselves, and a plot that carried those traits through to the end. No one, I imagine Abbey would say, can dodge the steamroller.

Wilhelm Reich worked with the German atomic bomb development program during WWII. After the war he came to the United States, probably because Hitler's scientists in the bomb and rocket programs were thought to be better suited to work with the western nations than the Soviet Union. For most of the scientists this probably proved to be true.

Not so, Wilhelm Reich. The Soviets couldn't have been more thorough or cruel in suppressing his work and punishing him for discovering Orgone.

Reich's publications involving Orgone energy during the 1950s came into disfavor with the powers-that-be. The word 'Orgone' was banned from the English language for use in the US. All publications containing the word, the concept and the devices described in this book were destroyed and forbidden.

Reich was placed in a prison where he finally died.

Maybe Orgone Accumulators and other devices described in this book really don't work. This work explains how to try them for yourself and make your own decisions.

Meanwhile, the US Government certainly had strong feelings for many years about whether you ought to be trying out Reich's ideas, methods, techniques for improving your health, or even allow the words to exist in your most secret thoughts. If you trust them you can conclude it's for your own good.

If you don't know whether you trust them you can buy this book and build yourself an Orgone Accumulator for your own garden, house or yard and form your own opinions. If Orgone doesn't exist, as the US Government claims, or if it exists and is of great importance to human health, as Reich claims, you can't hurt yourself by trying it.

On the other hand, if Reich is correct you can't afford not to know about Orgone.

First hand accounts of the workings of the German High Command and the interactions between the parties, including Adolph Hitler, are rare and becoming rarer. Many of those involve left memoirs, but those are becoming difficult to find, as most are now out of print. Speer's Spandau writings are among the endangered species.

Anyone who wishes to understand the minds of the men who made the Reich work and particularly the mind of Adolph Hitler can do so by the evidence of their deeds at one level. However, the records of their thoughts, conversations, behavior and rationalizations while they did so is certainly a facet of understanding. The writings of Von Manstein, Doenitz, Rommel, Guderian, and the diaries of Joseph Goebbels are each worth the reading in this sense. As is Albert Speer.

Speer was imprisoned longer than any of the other members of Hitler's inner circle. He had many years of solitude to contemplate his deeds and reflect on how and why he came to be imprisoned in Spandau. Maybe these musings qualify as revisionist history. Maybe they're merely self-serving rationalizations. But his anecdotes will definitely add to your understanding of the 3rd Reich. You don't have to believe everything he says, but it's worth reading it and making the choice for yourself.

Speer thought of himself as a 'nice guy'. You can't make an informed decision as to whether it was true without reading what he had to say. In the end most of us believe we are 'nice people' and are justified in whatever horrendous deeds we pursue.

During the dark days of 1943 in Japanese occupied Peking a small community of German speaking people who didn't associate in any way with the remainder of the German community there congregated occasionally in the home of Wilhelm Haas, explains Hellmut Willhelm in the preface of this book. The members of the group were almost entirely unfamiliar with the I Ching.

In their midst, however, was one of the foremost non-Chinese I Ching scholars alive, Wilhelm. Hass asked him to give a few lectures to the group to help them understand the history, use and concepts behind the I Ching.

As an introduction to the Book of Changes by a master these eight lectures cover an enormous amount of ground in an easy, understandable way. The translations from German to English by Cary F. Baynes are, as always, excellent.

I'd recommend this book as an accompanyment to the Baynes or Richard John Lynn translations of the Book of Changes, certainly. But for anyone using the I Ching in any translation, whatever the level of scholarship, this book will probably be a source of useful information you didn't have before.

Letters from the Earth is an assortment of unpublished-for-60-years writings by Mark Twain. They cover a wide span of subject matter ranging from critiques of the prose style of another writer to the author's construction of the Old Testament and God from the perspective of Satan. In addition to Letters From Earth (Satan's), the contents includes Papers of the Adam Family, The Damned Human Race, Something About Repentance, Was the World Made For Man, In the Animal's Court, The Intelligence of God, The Lowest Animal and others.

Readers who are offended by careful examinations of the meaning and implications of holy or sacred writings of the Old Testiment will not enjoy this book. The author, whatever his actual religious beliefs, probably wasn't an Old Testiment Christian. In this series of short writings he takes specific stories from the OT and holds them into the light away from the long traditions that accompany them in most of our minds. He examines the evidence of the stories for hints of what sort of creature God must be if the OT is true. He extropolates what Satan might be.

I'm an admirer of this author and I believe everything he ever wrote is worth reading and digesting. I put this book alongside his best. But I also admit that if I harbored a microbe of religious fanatic somewhere inside me I'd be hard-pressed to enjoy reading Letters From the Earth.