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In August 1863, during Kit Carson's roundup of the Navajo, Santa Fe's Provost Marshal, Major Joseph Cummings, is found dead in an arroyo near what is now the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona. The murder, as well as the roughly million of today's dollars in cash and belongings in his saddlebags, is historically factual. Carson's explanation that he was shot by a lone Indian, which, even today, can be found in the U.S. Army Archives, is implausible. Who did kill Carson's "brave and lamented" Major? The answer is revealed in this tale of a group of con artists operating in 1861-1863 in the New Mexico and Arizona Territories. As a matter of historical fact, millions of today's dollars were embezzled from the Army, the Church, and the New Mexico Territory during this time. In this fictionalized version, the group includes the aide de camp of the Territories' Commanding General of the Union Army, a poker dealer with a checkered past in love with one of her co-conspirators, and the Provost Marshal of Santa Fe. It is an epic tale of murder and mystery, of staggering thefts, of love and deceit. Both a Western and a Civil War novel, this murder mystery occurs in and among Cochise's Chiricahua Apache Wars, the Navajo depredations and wars, Indian Agent Kit Carson's return to action from retirement, and the Civil War. The story follows the con artists, some historical, some fictional, during their poker games, scams, love affairs, and bank robberies, right into that arroyo deep in the heart of Navajo country. STEVEN W. KOHLHAGEN is a former economics professor (University of California at Berkeley) and Wall Street investment banker. He is the author of innumerable economics publications, and he and his wife, Gale, jointly published a murder mystery, "Tiger Found." He divides his time between the New Mexico-Colorado border high in the San Juan Mountains and Charleston, South Carolina.
Karen Hathaway and Patrick McGovern meet on a tall ship on a cruise to Prince Edward Island. Their lust-filled love boat encounter leads to marriage which is complicated by corporate scandal and some unresolved psychological issues. An unexpected trial outcome creates a crisis which they work out in different ways. As they struggle to rebuild their lives, the reader is led on a profound spiritual journey of deepening significance. Choosing love in complicated and deeply conflicted situations is often not easy, but as Karen learns, it was the only decision that would make her whole.
A summer on the California coast calls to Mattox Williams, a writer wanting quiet days to do the finishing work on his novel. He leases his Santa Fe house for three months and finds an ocean-facing room at Glitter Bay. While meeting the other people of the beach community, a love affair develops as well as the surrounding strife. He makes a deep emotional mark on the neighbors, particularly on Hayden Danning and his sister, Sylvan. A surprise offer from a film producer opens his horizons and requires trips south to Hollywood and Laguna Beach. At the end of summer, Mattox tries to find a way to keep alive the love he has found.
This seamless work of lyrical intensity mimics both in tone and substance one of Bach's grand compositions. It centers around two friends who are reunited after years of separation through an accidental meeting in New York's Greenwich Village-a meeting which becomes the catalyst for the nearly nonstop tale of the life and death of the mother of one, a holocaust survivor recently dead of cancer in New York. In the telling of the tale, recent as well as distant events are uncompromisingly exposed and historical as well as interpersonal connections at times painfully, yet always lovingly revealed. This journey of words is not without considerable risk to both the teller and the listener who is eventually joined by his girlfriend with little or no historical perspective. "e;The Goldberg Variations"e; as played by Glenn Gould is a recurrent theme throughout the novel, as it is one of the few pieces of music comforting the mother as she nears her end. This novel is a moving portrait of the past as well as the present, and in its grand as well as small scale becomes a successful exploration of the myriad ups and downs of human relationships.
Don Carlos Buenaventura, a powerful brujo in his sixth life, practices a benign form of sorcery based on his motto "Do no harm." His great powers derive from intensive training in heightened awareness akin to Eastern yogic disciplines rather than from incantations, spells, or aid from demon allies. He is accidentally born in 1684 into an aristocratic Catholic family in Mexico City, a social and religious milieu in which his identity as a brujo, if known, would put him in mortal danger. In repressing any sign that he is other than an ordinary young man, he forgets both his brujo powers and who he really is. Exiled at nineteen to the remote frontier town of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he is exposed during the journey northward to wild desert landscapes that awaken his forgotten powers. In Santa Fe he resumes his conventional persona to protect what he now recognizes is his true identity and is caught in the tension of trying to live two lives. An arduous return trip to Mexico City and back further intensifies his brujo powers, leading to many adventures, including dangerous encounters with an evil sorcerer, an Apache war party, and a woman devotee of an ancient Aztec goddess, and also stimulates his recall, in dreams, of his brujo training in past lives. A chance meeting in Mexico City with a woman trained in Tantric spirituality is life-changing, opening him to other dimensions of consciousness. Returning to Santa Fe, he faces the task of learning to unite his Brujo's Way with his new spiritual path. A native Californian, Gerald W. McFarland received his doctorate in U.S. history from Columbia University (1965) and taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for forty-four years. During that time he published four books in his field. He received many honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; the Colonial Dames of America cited his book, "A Scattered People: An American Family Moves West," as one of the three best books in American history published in 1985. He and his wife live in rural Western Massachusetts.
Sergeant Jack Kilroy returns to the United States after a year in combat and two years in a prison camp in Vietnam where he had led an escape and returned over a hundred internees back to U. S. lines, becoming a hero to his men. He takes his discharge in New Mexico and finds an isolated stream near Santa Cala Pueblo where he can fish and think, all by himself, but soon visitors begin to arrive: a Maine coon cat, the cat''s pretty owner, and an old Indian selling firewood. Others follow and soon he is playing high stakes poker in the back room of the local bar once a week. All he wants is a little time off, but his time is soon filled with the problems of his army buddies in the V. A. Hospital, the Indians of the nearby pueblo and the poker players, which include the theft of sacred artifacts, the murders of young Indian men and the enmity of witches.
Why did Greeks in the late 1800s cross a sea, an ocean and a continent, to start new lives in the United States? Why did they eventually migrate to a small dusty town in the desert Southwest? How did Albuquerque become a center of Greek-America in the 1930s? And how did the decision to build the church in 1944 in the Huning Highland originate from a tragic event? This book answers these questions and more. It also details the compassionate response of the community to the appearance of Greek "lungers" seeking the cure to the ravages of tuberculosis, and traces the decision to establish in 1937 in Albuquerque the Nation''s only Greek-American tuberculosis sanatorium. This book begins with the first Greeks coming, at the turn of the nineteenth century, to Albuquerque with the railroad. It details how they began immigrating to the town in large numbers after the First World War, and shows how, by the 1920s, these indomitable men owned and operated numerous businesses in the heart of new Albuquerque. It also shows how their brides made their own unique contribution by transforming the Greek population into a community. They assimilated into the United States and contributed to Albuquerque''s ethnic and cultural diversity. This country gave them opportunity, and in turn, they gave their best. KATHERINE M. POMONIS, a Santa Fe, New Mexico native of Greek descent, received a B.A. in History and Anthropology from the University of Rhode Island. She subsequently worked at the University of New Mexico''s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, both as a staff member and as guest curator to numerous exhibits including "Greek Byzantium Revisited" and "The Greeks of America." She served as President of the New Mexico Association of Museums and was on the Board of the Maxwell Museum Association. She is also a member of the New Mexico State Historical Society, Historic Albuquerque, and the Albuquerque Archaeological Society.
Amanda has two lives: one as normal as her brother Eugene's, the other: a chronic sleepwalker who sleepwalks into the black hills where she's "e;adopted"e; by a caravan of gypsies. There, she's empowered to protect people from the "e;town stalker."e; No one notices that Amanda's uncle, a singing police chief moonlighting at his greenhouse, incubates a deadly strain of locusts. When a hailstorm destroys the greenhouse, the locusts are released, and Amanda learns from the gypsies how to stop the pestilence. While still a teenager, Amanda and her painter-husband move to SoHo, New York's art mecca. Munk is her Svengali and master of drugs. After giving birth, she must take care of her erratic husband and her newborn, precipitating a psychotic break. But her fortune changes as she spies on gypsy workers in the factory next door. Why do they wear hairnets and baby blue dresses when the candy factory has long since closed? Why are they rustling through stacks of letters and bringing coffin-sized trunks into the dark recesses of the factory? Amanda's world is dangerous-her psychic gift of seeing omens in everyday occurrences shows her how to capture the love she searches for-one with consequences she could never imagine. GINNY MACKENZIE is a poet, fiction writer and translator. Her stories and novel excerpts have appeared in "e;New Letters,"e; "e;Crab Orchard Review,"e; "e;Wisconsin Review,"e; "e;Taarts III"e; (anthology) and the "e;American Literary Review."e; Her poetry manuscript, "e;Skipstone,"e; won the national Backwaters Poetry Award and was published by Backwaters Press. Her creative non-fiction manuscript won the University of Southern Illinois' John Guyon Award. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as "e;The Nation,"e; "e;Agni Review,"e; "e;Ploughshares,"e; "e;Shenandoah"e;, the "e;Mississippi Review"e;, the "e;Iowa Review"e;, and "e;Prairie Schooner."e; She is the editor and translator of two bi-lingual books by contemporary Chinese poets of the Cultural Revolution. Simon Van Booy, novelist and winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award says: "e;Sleeping with Gypsies"e; is a beautifully written book that holds the reader spellbound like a fly in amber."e;
On a 140-acre campus on the high plains south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) stands as a world leader in contemporary Native arts and culture education-an educational institution committed to "difference." This fifty year history explores some basic questions. How is IAIA different from other colleges? What is it about the history, structure, location, and curriculum that makes it a special institution? How did a school that began as an experiment in American Indian arts education progress from a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) high school to a junior college to an accredited non-profit baccalaureate institution in less than fifty years? And what does the next fifty years have in store? Published in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of IAIA, this compilation of historical documents, photographs, essays, and conversations illuminates the history and role of art education at the Institute of American Indian Arts. RYAN S. FLAHIVE is the archivist for the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has dedicated his career to education, museums, and public history and specializes in digital preservation and manuscript curation. Flahive earned his bachelor''s degree in history and anthropology from Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri and holds a master''s degree in history and a graduate certificate in museum studies from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
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