Mysteries, adversity and biographies by Southern Arizona authors

“Cactizonians’ Treasure” by Bart Ambrose. Aim-Hi Publishing, LLC. 273 pages. $26.95, $16.95 paperback, $6.31 Kindle.

Local legend meets fiction in this lively novel about the pursuit of hidden treasure that gallops from the Rincon Mountains to Sonora, Mexico.

Thieves who intercepted a train near Pantano in 1887 and relieved it of a Wells Fargo shipment worth thousands of dollars in gold and silver, stashed the haul in the remote Five-Mile Cave. Their loot, the subject of avid speculation, sat undisturbed in the cave for decades. Fast forward to 1934: Five-Mile Cave, now Colossal Cave, is the site of a Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp. The rumors about the hidden plunder live on since, as the narrative makes clear, “…stories of any kind were the lifeblood of the camp.” Young Jimmy, one of the CCC “Cactizonians” readying the site for public use, realizes the payday of his life when he stumbles across the fortune, but he immediately becomes the target of thieves, opportunists, Wells Fargo detectives, and the federal government, all of whom have designs on Jimmy’s find. The race is on as Jimmy tries to outrun and outsmart his multiple pursuers and protect his treasure.

Author Bart Ambrose, a native Arizonan and conservationist, lives in the Catalina Foothills.

— Helene Woodhams

“The Dawning of Diversity: How Chicanos Helped Change Stanford University” by Frank O. Sotomayor; Research by Barbara Sotomayor. West by Southwest Press. 323 pages. $31.85.

In “The Dawning of Diversity,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines how the activism of Chicano students and faculty poked the sleeping bear that was Stanford University, bringing about a groundbreaking transformation in educational opportunities and inclusion for Mexican-Americans.

As a student at Stanford, author Frank Sotomayor was both a witness to and participant in these events. Beginning with the founding of the university in Palo Alto in 1891 by Sen. Leland Stanford, the author provides some eye-opening history (including Stanford’s cringe-worthy embrace of the eugenics movement) before turning to the period of the tumultuous mid-1960s. By 1967, thanks to exclusionary admissions practices, Mexican-Americans accounted for just a fraction of 1% of the student body, despite constituting 10% of California’s population. Society was in motion, however, and Stanford, if somewhat sluggishly, moved with it by accepting more minority applicants. Sotomayor identifies three critical years — 1969, 1970 and 1971 — when the incoming freshman classes included slowly increasing numbers of Mexican-American students who would be trailblazers, busting stereotypes and laying the groundwork for institutional change.

The author skillfully weaves rigorous reporting and informed commentary with absorbing personal accounts from the change-makers themselves who, by passing the baton through the decades, remained determined to win acceptance and respect for their cultural identity in a milieu intent on their assimilation. The awakening of Stanford to the value of diversity is an important part of Chicano history, and, as Sotomayor correctly notes, it’s far too good an untold story not to be chronicled for posterity. He does it ably.

Sotomayor, a former Los Angeles Times editor and a member of Stanford University’s Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame, lives in Tucson.

— Helene Woodhams

“Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853-1934: Reluctant Warrior” by Armand S. La Potin. University of Oklahoma Press. 288 pages. $29.95; $21.95 paperback; $28.45 Kindle.

Second Lieutenant Hugh Lenox Scott arrived in the Dakota Territory on the heels of Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn, embarking on a military career in which he distinguished himself with his skills as a communicator and diplomat.

The “Reluctant Warrior” is an unconventional title for a soldier’s story, but as author Armand S. La Potin makes clear in this provocative volume, Scott had some unconventional opinions. A self-styled “soldier of peace,” he preferred compromise over warfare which, he believed, should be the last resort. Had Custer simply sat down with his adversaries to talk it out, Scott opined, things could have gone differently.

The son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, Scott easily adopted the mantle of negotiator, learning sign language so he could communicate with tribal leaders and gain their trust. His fascination with Indian cultural practices was critical to his ability to work with tribal leaders for peaceful solutions while simultaneously providing opportunities to learn their warfare techniques.

As La Potin demonstrates, Scott was a complex individual full of contradictions, and this volume is far more than a standard military biography. Viewing his subject through the lens of the predominant racist attitudes of the day, La Potin offers an illuminating portrait of a man who, on the one hand, made the welfare and protection of tribal groups an imperative, while on the other, believed that Indigenous peoples were primitive and childlike by nature, unlikely to survive without being fully assimilated into white society.

La Potin, who lives in Marana, is professor emeritus of history at the State University of New York College at Oneonta.

— Helene Woodhams

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

“American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories” edited by Mark L.M. Blair, Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox and Kestrel A. Smith University of Arizona Press. 188 pages. $24.95.

This reader never expected this study of an academic program to be a page-turner. She was wrong.

In the work, editors Blair, Tippeconnic Fox and Smith introduce the University of Arizona American Indian Studies program and let nine of its PhDs relate their personal and professional stories. The UA’s AIS program was a pioneer (the first in the U.S. to offer PhDs). Readers can trace its evolution, but—more significantly — they are granted access to the experiences, challenges and world views of Indigenous students. Each of the graduates occupy an academic position — college professor, dean, or president — but none attained it easily. They had prejudice to overcome; poverty, low expectations, cultural disconnect. What they have in common is persistence and appreciation for the UA AIS faculty. Their personal stories and voices are, indeed, the “gift” in the collection’s title.

— Christine Wald-Hopkins

“Dead but Not Gone” by R.L. Clayton. Independently published. 447 pages. $17.99.

The set-up of this, R.L. Clayton’s sixth novel in his “Dead” series, establishes a tone: The black-haired, ambitious female vice president of the United States, “Kali Hamilton,” aided by the equally ambitious, face-lifted, female Speaker of the House, “Nancy Pelton,” seeks to unseat the older, white, first-term President, “Jack Bolton” (married to younger “Joni Bolton”), as Hamilton aggressively pursues mandatory national confiscation of assault weapons. See where we’re going with this?

At issue in “Dead but Not Gone” is an amplification of the current political and cultural ideological gulf in the American landscape. Clayton has previously written about external threats to the U.S., like cyber or bio attacks. In this book, he turns domestic. A Southern Arizona ranch-turned-militia and foreign-military training center becomes the setting to play out the conflicting perspectives and objectives of both the right and the left. Clayton resurrects The Prophet, who already successfully united some world religions, and Kiki Russell and Nick Sabino, who are sharpshooter and interrogator/surgeon par excellence. Kiki and Nick’s talents become necessary as former US president Ron Carson — juggling the Second and Tenth Amendments — is called upon to help resolve the ideological divide.

— Christine Wald-Hopkins

“A Hollow, Muscular Organ” by Meg Files. Accents Publishing. 113 pages. $16.

Poet, fiction writer and writing instructor Meg Files draws from her full creative quiver in this thought-provoking, saddening meditation on contemporary marriage: She uses the conventions of poetry, follows the forms of fiction and occasionally steps out of the narrator’s voice to share a writer’s decisions.

The heart being the central symbol of the novella, we follow broken-hearted Susannah, as she deals with her husband Griff’s affair with a (predictably) younger office worker. Denying that this affair is more serious than other “things” Griff has had, Susannah pulls out all the stops to draw him back …. even to the cringe-worthy point of wrapping her naked self in cellophane. Through flashbacks to happy, connected times and metaphors (“The sufferer exists as the focused red center of a bleared world.”), the reader suffers with the couple, the ache of disconnection and loss; even the bitter-sweetness of epiphany.

— Christine Wald-Hopkins

“Three Doors, One Room” by Tony Luebbermann. Finishing Line Press. 45 pages. $14.99.

The poet’s eye and voice in these poems are as perceptive and incisive as his “…raven’s dark wing: purpled,/Glossy, burnished ….” This chapbook, Tucsonan Tony Luebbermann’s second, is a celebration of the natural world — both desert and northern lake — and the thoughtful observer’s place in it. Introduced by a Marianne Faithful quotation — “The really explicit phrase is doors of perception” — the collection is organized in its title: three doors and a room.

“First Door” consists of crisp nature images and observations — we see a “bee, /on fire/ with pollen”; we hear “With water, a stone may sigh for the language of stones/ is naked ...” “Second Door,” introduced by the Umberto Eco quotation “The beauty of the universal consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity,” contains poems of human interaction and action: “Ever wonder about random events?”; “I find these scenes on thrift shop’s shelves:/ Shirts faded, folded like shouts…” In “Both Doors Open,” Luebbermann both celebrates and laments humanity’s place in the natural world. In “On Roses at Night Under Stars”: he acknowledges the insignificance of humankind “Above, the stars, our witness tress of space/ marking corners of our myths, our ancient/ properties — … indifferent to human styles…” but “opaque, mysterious/ untouchable, chilling the uplifted face.” Sobering. But lovely.

— Christine Wald-Hopkins