Books published by Sunstone Press

Some of these tales are about genuine heroes. Some are about dastardly villains. Others you’ll have to decide for yourself: hero or villain? You’ll recognize these people, even if you don’t remember their names. They are Spanish colonials, Mexicans, and Anglos all the way to the present. They are even aboriginal Americans predating the arrival of Europeans. These are personal tales—gossip, you might say—and, when you finish a story, if you’re like me, you’ll be able to say, “I didn’t know that!” Now, don’t you think knowing the quirks and grit of those who peopled the pages of your history textbooks—rather than all those dates and places—is more interesting? The author always thought so. After a dozen years writing travel stories about New Mexico, he undertook writing yarns of adventure, intrigue, failure, and even death. Open the book to Elfego Baca’s story and learn why one Mexican had no fear of American cowboys. Or how Navajo Chester Nez, who was denied the right to speak his native language, used Navajo words to help win World War II. Or even how the haughty wife of a colonial governor was falsely denounced to the Inquisition as a Crypto-Jew. Fact or imagination? Sometimes it’s hard to know which it is, but these, at least, are true life episodes. Includes Readers Guide.

In this novel, the narrator greets nay, welcomes readers into a world of the absurd, with boundaries of neither space nor time. Barely do we arrive at the Crusades’ bloodbath when a zeppelin circles about Renaissance Florence’s Arno, and before we can catch our breath, Cologne is reduced to rubble through Allied bombardment. Next we find ourselves in fin-de-siecle Vienna sharing an espresso with Freud. According to the narrator’s father, appropriately unnamed and unnameable, historical time is a flow of events endlessly repeating themselves, where what is true one moment is false the next, what once beautiful now hideous. Everything is both earthly serious and airy as life itself. Put another way, true survival consists in this: trust nothing and no one, yet love everything and everyone. This the narrator’s father achieves to perfection. He is the perpetual student unbound by place and time, who learned the art of love from Sappho, war from Napoleon (“call me Boni”) and climbed the steep scaffold with a refreshing drink for the hard working Michelangelo. In his many incarnations (learned from Merlin no doubt), father’s ongoing struggle is on behalf of the downtrodden and against the obscenely powerful. The history of the world itself is too short to fully contain such an individual, just as it was too short to enfold Cervantes’ great Don.

The American Civil War claimed and destroyed lives, stealing fathers and sons from those they loved. The horror caused many returning to cry out for death. They carried the festering scars of battle and were unable to overcome the torment of their souls. This is the story of Thomas Wilson, a soldier who returns home haunted by the destruction and devastation he both witnessed and caused. Although his regiment respects and reveres him as a sharpshooter, each man he has killed condemns him to a life of terrifying dreams and troubled days where forgiveness can never be obtained. Neither the love of his family nor the affection of a woman with sparkling dark eyes and soft black hair can chase his war demons away, for he is beyond mercy. Includes Readers Guide.

Nancy Hopkins Reily writes of viewing a painting at Georgia O'Keeffe's Abiquiu, New Mexico home on Christmas Eve, 1953. As a nineteen year old woman, Reily wondered what the painting was-an unfinished painting or a blue egg. But she realized that something important was going on in the house.One viewing of anything can spark steps for a journey lasting a day, weeks or years. Reily takes you on her long, long journey of discovery of the painting she called "The Blue Egg." The journey took her to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum where she met a landowner where Georgia had walked its awe inspiring landscape in Canyon, Texas; the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut; an interview with Georgia's retired cook, Jerrie Newsom, in Jerrie's mobile home; a visit to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert; introducing her two children to search at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; research that ended in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum gift shop with on the shelves her two books on Georgia; being asked to donate her research to the New Mexico Museum of Art, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library; and the final steps of packing sixteen boxes of research to be shipped to the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library.Through the years, Nancy's interest in words has led to researching sixty-four lines of family genealogy before Ancentry.com, keeping a daily journal since 1976, and simply organizing research into books on many subjects. If asked, "How long did it take to write The Blue Egg," she replies, "My age at the time."

In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned ideas that might allay the financial calamity that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s. Among the myriad programs Roosevelt initiated was the WPA, the Works Progress Administration (later re-named the Work Projects Administration) that was created to provide meaningful work to the unemployed millions throughout America. Thanks to New Mexico Governor Clyde Tingley, a masterful politician who wended his way into Roosevelt's good graces, New Mexico became the recipient of a significant proportion of federal WPA funding that supported thousands of otherwise unemployed men and women. One of the great programs to emerge was in support of the arts, and many painters, writers and musicians were employed to pursue their respective art forms.Helen Chandler Ryan was appointed director of the Federal Music Project (FMP) in New Mexico that lasted from 1936 to 1943. In 1939, it was re-named the New Mexico Music Project, and by 1942, the name was changed yet again to War Services Program-Music Phase. The focus of this project was "music education, performance, and preserving of local musical heritage, especially Hispanic [Hispano] folk music." Under Ryan's direction and that of her co-administrators, musicians and folklorists collected songs and other material that otherwise might have been lost.The transcribed folk songs were mimeographed and distributed to teachers who taught both singers and instrumentalists who then presented the music in public performances. This music project not only funded fieldworkers, it also brought music to the people of the villages of New Mexico in a time when little else was available to lift the hearts of la gente.In this book, materials collected between 1936 and 1941 are assembled in five separate units. Units 1, 2, and 3 are comprised of a series of Hispano folk songs with transcribed melodies and English translations of lyrics. Unit 4 is a collection of thirty Hispano dance songs, some of which remain popular even now. Unit 5 is entitled "Guitar Arrangements of Spanish American Folk Songs."We are fortunate to have this taste of Hispano music of New Mexico from the early twentieth century now available to all. It is integral and vital to the repertoire of musical lore that greatly enhances New Mexico's heritage.

On April 3rd, 1942, the Japanese infantry staged a major offensive against Allied troops in Bataan in the Philippine Islands. The invasion was led by General Masaharu Homma, who had already forced General Douglas MacArthur's troops from Lingayen. The Japanese began to fire every half hour, increasing in intensity each time, while the defenders crouched down in their foxholes. At the same time the Japanese 22nd Air Brigade started dropping more than sixty tons of bombs. Dive bombers flew low to strafe troops and trenches. USAFFE Artillery and telephone lines were neutralized. Bamboo thickets, banyan trees, sugar cane fields were set ablaze. Then, as the dust cleared on April 9th-the anniversary of the death of legendary Emperor Jimmu, the first ruler to sit on the Japanese imperial throne- General Edward King of the United States Army Forces of the Far East surrendered to General Homma and the infamous Bataan Death March began. In this novel war, an evil wind, rages over a beautiful planet Earth. Like a scythe, it claims all the young men in their teens and twenties. This is the story of five on their journey to the end of the trail in the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.

Two monumental granite statues by famed German artist Kathe Kollwitz-the Grieving Parents-have been stolen from a World War I soldiers' cemetery in Belgium. What could the motive have been for such an unlikely theft? On a visit to the director of the Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, retired art history professor and Kollwitz scholar Megan Crespi is asked to aid in tracking down the robber or robbers. As she pursues clues and visits possible suspects more Kollwitz statues are stolen in Cologne and Berlin. Crespi's itinerary takes her to the Berlin Kollwitz Museum, Weimar, the Baltic Sea island of Rugen, Greifswald, and finally to the Kollwitz House in Moritzburg. On the way she interacts with physicians Abraham Ruckgabe and Iliana Frankel, the just-married couple Monika von Putbus and Akram al-Aljamie, and unscrupulous CEO of Rugen's asbestos-contaminated Dorotek factory, Reinhold Fromm, collector of dominatrix drawings. We meet possible suspects, Iranian prince Yusri Pahlavi, greedy Lukas Zamann of the Galerie Zamann, and the mysterious "e;Marie Schmidt,"e; of Moritzburg, Kollwitz's final home. All seem to be connected to the spate of Kollwitz thefts. Can Crespi solve these thefts and will the precious artworks be found? An unexpected denouement involving seven persons and two cats gives us the answer.

In this historical novel, Billy Old and Jeff Kidder were Arizona Rangers at the turn of the twentieth century and best friends. In 1908, while acting in the line of duty, Kidder was murdered by five crooked Mexican policemen. No charges were filed against his killers. They were quietly skirted away to various locations throughout the county of Sonora, Mexico, a vast, desolate area covering nearly twenty thousand square miles. In 1909, shady politics in the Territory of Arizona brought about the disbanding of the Rangers, leaving many to drift into obscurity and some into degradation. In that same year Billy Old vanished into Sonora to find and kill the men responsible for his friend's death. He returned close to two years later with that deed accomplished. During Billy's search of hundreds of sleazy Sonora whorehouses and cantinas he experiences many exciting, humorous, and tragic encounters. There's a bloody and deadly confrontation with four scalp hunters; a mystical meeting with an old, dying Hopi Indian; an attack by the legendary "Red Ghost" of the southwest; a sorrowful meeting with a past fellow Ranger; cannibal Indians from East Texas; renegade Apaches; flushing toilets; the wonders of ether; Dancing Devils-fifty-foot high swirling dust funnels that can blind an animal; and a whore named Abbie Crutchfield who proves vital to Billy's quest. And then there's his horse Orion and a mule named Captain, all a part of a critically changing time in the American Southwest. Includes Historical Background and Readers Guide.