True West | Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop.
Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the well-being of people and communities across the country, and Gaines Quammen interrogates it all as she seeks to reconcile the anger and misunderstandings that continue to be fueled by the West’s enduring myths and complex history. Whether sitting down with a local resident seeking to protect his rural Utah town from Antifa or talking with grassroots organizers working across ideological divides, Gaines Quammen brings to life connections and contradictions that shape our politics and our lives far beyond the West.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Historian and writer BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN examines the intersections of extremism, public lands, wildlife, and western communities. She received a PhD in History from Montana State University, a MS in Environmental Studies from University of Montana, and a BA in English from Colorado College. Gaines Quammen is the author of True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America and American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, writer David Quammen.
October 2023 | Nonfiction | 9781948814874 | 318 pp
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop.
Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the well-being of people and communities across the country, and Gaines Quammen interrogates it all as she seeks to reconcile the anger and misunderstandings that continue to be fueled by the West’s enduring myths and complex history. Whether sitting down with a local resident seeking to protect his rural Utah town from Antifa or talking with grassroots organizers working across ideological divides, Gaines Quammen brings to life connections and contradictions that shape our politics and our lives far beyond the West.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Historian and writer BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN examines the intersections of extremism, public lands, wildlife, and western communities. She received a PhD in History from Montana State University, a MS in Environmental Studies from University of Montana, and a BA in English from Colorado College. Gaines Quammen is the author of True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America and American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, writer David Quammen.
October 2023 | Nonfiction | 9781948814874 | 318 pp
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop.
Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the well-being of people and communities across the country, and Gaines Quammen interrogates it all as she seeks to reconcile the anger and misunderstandings that continue to be fueled by the West’s enduring myths and complex history. Whether sitting down with a local resident seeking to protect his rural Utah town from Antifa or talking with grassroots organizers working across ideological divides, Gaines Quammen brings to life connections and contradictions that shape our politics and our lives far beyond the West.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Historian and writer BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN examines the intersections of extremism, public lands, wildlife, and western communities. She received a PhD in History from Montana State University, a MS in Environmental Studies from University of Montana, and a BA in English from Colorado College. Gaines Quammen is the author of True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America and American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, writer David Quammen.
October 2023 | Nonfiction | 9781948814874 | 318 pp
PRAISE FOR TRACING TIME…
“In Tracing Time, Craig Childs invites us to join him on a journey to visit, experience, and try to understand the ancient rock writings scattered throughout the storied northern Southwest—a journey that includes many colorful components and even more colorful characters. This is not an investigation, in the typical and tiresome sense, but a meditation. Punctuated with reflections on Childs’s own experience and insights shared with him by descendant knowledge-keepers, Tracing Time is an engaging glimpse into a world both fascinating and fundamentally unknowable to those who aren’t born into it.”
—R. E. BURRILLO, author of Behind the Bears Ears
“In a beautifully written new book, Craig Childs climbs desert boulders to find meaning inscribed in the rock, but finds instead mystery. He treks through redrock canyons to see rock art, but is surprised to find himself listening instead, as the artists' voices echo through deep time. As refreshing as a desert storm, Tracing Time is a welcome invitation into the continuities and conundrums of time.”
—KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of Earth's Wild Music
“The enigma of rock art of the American Southwest has puzzled archaeologists and amateurs for decades. In Tracing Time, Craig Childs adds to our knowledge by listening to the elders as he travels to hundreds of sites, yet the sense of mystery and imagination still swells.”
—ANDY NETTELL, Back of Beyond Books
“Early in Tracing Time Craig Childs writes, ‘This, I am told, is one way to find rock art. Walk around clapping and when you hear a good echo, go look.’ This book is a long, glorious clapping session. It is also many many careful, patient, thoughtful, loving looks. Tracing Time holds in it voices that echo across years and also the adorned walls off of which so many stories have been refracted through time. Childs guides readers through a long lived in landscape and helps us see more clearly what’s been drawn upon the ancient stones.”
—CAMILLE T. DUNGY, author of Soil: The History of a Black Mother’s Garden
“Childs brings refreshing humility . . . Readers might find here, along with a soul-saving historical perspective, a place of calm amid our noise.”
—BOOKLIST
