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Show The Salt Lake Tribune BOOKS BEST SELLERS Here are the week's best sellers, reprinted from Publishers Weekly. Painted House. John Grisham am.Doubleday, $27.5 ‘The Bonesetter’s Danger AmyTan. Putnam, eeA DayLate and a Dollar pape) McMillan. Viking, ee {Be ofDanger. Jack Hig- iddenPassions. Tabitha Vendetta Defense. Lenox,oa oat $5 Listaeotiotine HarperCollins, | | A Darkness M Night. Michae! Connely.Lite, Brown,$25.95 8. MyDream of You. Nuala oT Faolain. Riverhead, $25. 10. Mystic River. Dennis ie hane. Morrow, $25 iL. omethe Corner of His Eye,Dean Koontz. Bantam. a The Cat Who Smelled a Rat. Lilian Jackson Braun. Put- nam,$23.95, 13. This Heart of Mine. Susan ElizabethPhillips. Morrow, 24 14. Claws and Effect. Ri Mae Brown &haps Pie aa Bantam, 15. BirdsofPrey JA. Jance. Morrow, Hardcover Nonfiction 1. Who Moved My Cheese? 2. Body for Life.Bill Phillips and Michael D’Orso. HarperCollins, $25 3, Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. Tracy Hogg. Ballantine, $22 The OpeilyFacts Good, the Bad, and The Cot meeRidiculous in sere canine0" Reilly. Broadway, 5. The PrayerofJabez, Bruce W.Wilkinson, Multnomah, ee Tce ound: aJan NielsarBee Daylight. JimmyCarter. Simon & Schuster, $25 8. Tuesdays with Morrie. ery Albom. Doubleday,$19.95. 9. If Theycay Knew. Chy- na. ReganBool 10.A ‘Short‘Guide to at HappyLife. Anna Quindl = House, $12.95 1. Life Makeovers. Cheryl nich, Broadway, $21.95 13. Relationship Rescue. Phillip C. McGraw. Hyperion, $22. 95 14. The Darwin Awards. oer Peero Dutton,$16.95 of Our Fathers. came Brae with Ron Powers. MassMarket Paperbacks 1. The Wedding.Danielle steel Dell, $7.99 2. The Brethren. = Grheres Dell Island, $7. 3. Hannibal. ‘Thomas Harris, Dell, $7.99 4. au pe. John Sandford. Berkley, $7.99 5. The Stanislaski Sisters. Nora Roberts. Silhouette, $7.50 6. Scan Patterson. vee Vision, $7.99 8. Moment of Truth, Lisa Scotioline, HarperTorch, $7.50 9. Wicked Widow. Amanda Gardner. Bantar 11. Battle aonDalle Brown. All " New Diet Revolution Robert C. Atkins, MLD. Avon, $6.50 13. Considering Kate. Nora naterts, Silhouette, $4.50 Endofthe Rainbow. V.C. Andrews. Pocket. 7. sed ick Puppy. Carl Hiaasen. Warner Vision, $7.99 Sunday, March 11, 2001 Without Helpful Overview,It’s Easy to Get Lost on ‘Santa Fe Trail’ TheSanta Fe Trail History,y Legends, and : By David Dary; Knopf, $30 ——n BY MARTIN NAPARSTECK SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE “Tt is less than nine hundred miles from the eastern terminus - at the site of Franklin, Missou ri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico,” according to the opening line. of David Dary’s new study of the fabled 18th- and 19th-century trade route, TheSanta Fe Trail. The trail is also, in Dary’s telling, more than 360 pages — pages filled with in- teresting tidbits, dramatic anecdotes andlots ofstatistics. Whatis absent, as assuredly as orderly migration was absent on thetrail itself, is an overview that puts thetrail in useful perspective. The reader will learn that in 1859, “A man named Thomas... created a ‘windwagon,’” which looked like a regular mule-drawn wagon but was powered bya large sail, like a ship, and which madeit across the Kansas prairie for about a hundred miles before turning over. What the reader will not learn is the full name of Thomasor why an experiment that was THE WEST UNDER COVER never makes clear exactly how the not pursued. Some readers may temporary and, for practical purflip to the endnotes in the back of -poses, nonexistent Confederate the book and learn that the au- Territory of Arizona affected the thor’s source for the Santa FeTrail. One table of staNewspaper article, tistics tells how creating doubt about many wagons, carthe accuracy of the rying what amount information. That's of goods, with how 46 years after it hapmany men made the pened. Makes you trip from Missouri to wonder: Did it go 100 Santa Fe each year yards,not 100 miles? from 1822 to 1843: Dary’s research The traffic and rendition is more complete on in 1822 to 450,000 in 1843, an indication of another, equally interesting historical the steadily growing tidbit: the 1861 declaimportance of the ration of “the Contrail. Another table De SA e Eas federate Territory of measures the disArizona,” which intances between varicluded present-day Arizona and ous points on the trail — for examNew Mexico. As Dary explains, de- ple, 33 miles from Pawnee Fork to Coon. Creek, in southwestern spite the rebellion of some Union Kansas. Armyofficers stationed in Arizona — Southerners whoresigned their The inside covers have unde- NEVE) evVie Union commissions andjoined the Confederacy — the Union maintained effective controlof the area throughout the war. Yet Dary Judy Jordan will be joined by author ton Weeks Poetry Series at Westminster College. The two will read from their work at the college’s NunemakerPlace, 1840 S. 1300 East, Salt Lake City, on Thursday at8 p.m. Smith is the author of many books and edits the journal Shenandoah at Washington and Lee University. The readings are free andopentoall. ter, started picking cotton at age 5, lost her mother when she was 7, witnessed killings and race riots, and was herself beaten by her Southern brothers at various times for associating with black jobs people. mountains.” dan said, “I spent most of my undergraduate years sleeping in university buildings, or staying up in Little John’s deli, where they give you a cupofcoffee for 50 cents andfree refills all night. But they cut youoff ofcreamer around 2or3 in the morning.” She is no longer homeless, and in the years since added two master of fine arts degrees to her résumé, one from the University of Utah, which is what brought her to Salt Lake City. She may be leaving soon — workingpoets often need other jobs, anda teaching position may be calling from R.T. Smith as presenter in the Anne Newman Sut- She is a sharecropper’s daugh- California. “T love it here,” Jordan said. “I kept looking, but there weren't any in Utah. tailed maps (the same mapin front and back)ofthe trail, showing its eastern terminus in central Missouri, winding into Kansas, of salt, mumbling, ‘I’ve got to eat something’ then runinto the street. @ Local Hero writer a Utah Commissionfor the Arts Award. “Tl get a little gold star on my books after this,” Jordan said, chuckling at the image.“It’s along time since I got gold stars on my work!” Jordan's many honors for her first book are well-earned recognition for her talent, her resourcefulness and her stamina. where, Jordan went to college at when they found out how far off they were in figuring out where the pat Reviews of books of regional interest @ Continued from D-1 the University of Virginia. Scholarships helped with tuition, but not with therest ofthe bills. In a Salt Lake Tribune interview after she won the Walt Whitman, Jor- to southwest, splitting into two clearly successful (100 miles!) was Jordan: Life of Poverty, Honored Poetry Determined to find the better life she knew wasout there some- cutting across that state northeast I will miss the These are people andplaces not often foundin poetry; they are not the heroes ofthe epics, northe lovers of the sonnets. Capturing them wasn't easyfor Jordan, although she knew them well. “Mytheory is, with these kinds of people, it’s hard to write about them poetically,” Jordan said.“It’s hard to get the rhythm and imagery with this subject matter and co, ending at, ofcourse, Santa Fe. Interesting tidbits abound in Dary’s book. So do omitted details. There’s author Charles Fletcher Lummis, who walked 3,507 miles to California, passing through New Mexico on the way. Where did he start? Probably in Ohio, but Dary is unclear. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, .a chain of restaurants in the Southwest — Harvey Restaurants — hired only young, single women as waitresses. What’s omitted is the criticism the practice produced, much like the hiring practices of today’s Hooters restaurants. Dary lets the reader know that the Spanish, the first European settlers in Santa Fe, so misunderstood the geography of North America that they believed that when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark toexplore the western part of North America via the. Missouri River, they would pass through Spanish territory. The Spanish, in fact, sent a military expedition out to arrest the American explorers. WhatDary doesn’t tell us is how the Spanish explorers reacted “T love it here. I kept looking, but there weren't any Jobs in Utah. I will miss the mountains.” Judy Jordan ea told in poetry — “not the concen- tration on rhythm and sounds and of the first” — and her have it soundright.” The 59 pages of Carolina Ghost inspiration was an old Greek man Woods took her about a year and a half to write (the book is from jhe imagines his childhood and Greek society during the Second Louisiana State University Press). She hasother projects going, and paralleling that of her brother there is a second bookof poetry at LSU now, being readied she worked with in a pizza parlor. World War; she sees his hard youth aoe who has labored all his for publication. “It's verydifferentfrom thefirst aeis broken by the work, but book, and it’s probably better,” she said. “My brotherused to drive there is a poetic nature aboutit,” ented.It still has mein it, but not so muchas thefirst book.” a truck — call ita dump truck — and he liked to keep the truck clean. He had to:drive 40 miles to his job, but after he washed it, he It is, she said, more of a story, would drive it at night down the Jordan said. “There is more narrative, and it is more broadly ori- Mexico to The Oregon. and Mormontrails were routes for immigrants to move along to new homes, avenues for settlement that helped turn much of the continent into the American nation. The Old Spanish Trail was largely a way for: the Spanish in North American to knit together their far-flung, loosely organized empire.It provided a communication route even more trade route. The Santa Fe Trail never quite did either. It was more an opening for Americans, uninvited and unwanted,to slip into and eventually take over Spanish America. It’s a story thatis only superficially examined in Dary’s Naparsteck reviews anecdote-rich book. Martin books from and about the Westfor TheSalt Lake Tribune. narrowstreets of the city, because he liked the way his truck looked reflected in the shop windows underthe moonlight.” That kind of truth — beautiful andtragic — that illuminates her verse is confounding her current efforts at writing a memoir. “It’s the hardestthing I've ever written, but I think maybe I have found the right voice now,” she said. After experimenting with a sort of Frank McCourt-jokingthrough-the-hardship sound, she has landed on something more subtle andless smiling. “IT can do that happy, joking Irish voice,” she said, “but then I was writing ‘This person died,’ and ‘There was this race riot,’ and it didn’t fit.” Now that she knows how to sound, the rest, she hopes,will be easier. But noless earthy and real * than herpoetry. “There's a lot of peein in ae that’s one of the things thai strong about me,” she said. “Mot, ernist thinking has certain fearof feelings. I don’t havethat.” And then she waxed poetic — not hard for her — about the way sunset paints the peaks, showing that theloss will go both ways. Her poetry will remain. Caro- lina Ghost Woods, vivid and violent, recalls Jordan's rough girl- hood. The poem “Killing at the Neighbors’ really happened. In the lines, those are her own 5 year-old hands rubbed raw trying to get the blood outof the floor, but how the stains wouldn't come up, / PERFECT WEDDING GIFTS BEGIN WITH OUR WEDDING REGISTRY just pinked, like candy fireballs licked to their core. As with almostall good verse, Jordan's is full of images. Unlike much verse, hers is also full of 3 EASY WAYS TO REGISTER: VISIT US, PHONE IN OR LOG ON characters. “Killing at the Neigh- bors’” has seven desperate people in it, plus a dog and some chickens. 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