Poor Richard’s Books suggests titles that help understand nature
Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun's literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Poor Richard's Books in Colorado Springs recommends books about natural wonders, growing hemp in Colorado and the Green River.
World of WondersBy Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Author), Fumi Nakamura (Illustrator) Milkweed Editions $20 April 2024 Purchase
From the publisher: As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted — no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape — she was able to turn to our world's fierce and funny creatures for guidance.
"What the peacock can do," she tells us, "is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life." The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship.
From Jeffery Payne, assistant retail manager: In a treasure of memoir and nature study, "World of Wonder" captures us immediately with quiet poise as the author shows us her wonderment of nature while giving us morsels of memories in her life. The tidy chapter on Touch-Me-Nots, a shy little plant that falls into itself when something brushes against it, took me back to the moment when my father pointed out the delicate gangly plant to my 6-year-old self. It was curious magic to watch the fronds fold in. Nezhikumatathil's writing opens our senses to that curious magic and gives us the opportunity to share in her admiration and awe of the natural world.
Rocky Mountain High: A Tale of Boom and Bust in the New Wild WestW. W. Norton & Co. $17.99 June 2024 Purchase
From the publisher: After decades as a long-haul trucker, Finn Murphy left the road and settled in Boulder County, Colorado. Before long he noticed that many of his neighbors were captivated by the prospect of vast riches in "the Hemp Space." When hemp was legalized, after 80 years in federal exile, Colorado became the center of a hemp growing and processing boom. Figuring he'd harvest some of that easy money, Murphy bought a thirty-six-acre farm. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything...
From Jeffery Payne, assistant retail manager: Finn Murphy's business acumen, entrepreneurial spirit and dry wit make "Rocky Mountain High" a very enjoyable read. With dollar signs in his eyes, the author jumps into the newly opened pastures of hemp in Colorado. The author's on-the-spot observations of law, land and the mixed cast of individuals he meets along the way will bring a smile to the reader's face and knowing nod of the head. We are given an amusing schooling in what it's like to start up an agriculture business in Boulder County during the boom of hemp farming. I envision this book as a manual being given to anyone who has that dream or idea of "making it big" regardless of the industry.
University of Chicago Press $19.99 March 2019 P urchase
From the publisher: The Green River, the most significant tributary of the Colorado River, runs 730 miles from the glaciers of Wyoming to the desert canyons of Utah. Over its course, it meanders through ranches, cities, national parks, endangered fish habitats, and some of the most significant natural gas fields in the country, as it provides water for 33 million people. Stopped up by dams, slaked off by irrigation, and dried up by cities, the Green is crucial, overused, and at-risk, now more than ever. Fights over the river's water, and what's going to happen to it in the future, are longstanding, intractable, and only getting worse as the West gets hotter and drier and more people depend on the river with each passing year. As a former raft guide and an environmental reporter, Heather Hansman knew these fights were happening, but she felt driven to see them from a different perspective—from the river itself. So she set out on a journey, in a one-person inflatable pack raft, to paddle the river from source to confluence and see what the experience might teach her.
From Jeffery Payne, assisant retail manager: It is hard to escape the reality of what water means to us as we live, work and play here in Colorado and the West as a whole. In short, without water we are, well, hosed (sorry, couldn't resist). Heather Hansman's "Downriver" delves into the very complicated, twisty history of rivers in the West and our never-ending need to dam, tame and take what is "rightfully" ours.
We follow the author, an experienced raft guide, as she sets her raft in the headwaters of the Green River of Wyoming to learn more about the river itself and how vital it is to the region. Her interactions with not only the river but the people, land and industry that surround the Green illustrate how the teetering balance of need, neglect and overuse is woefully catching up with us all.
Hansman's genial narrative shows us there are no easy answers to the countless number of tangled, muddy questions when it comes to water in the West.
