On the final day of the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association FallCon, guests at the Authentic Voices keynote breakfast were treated to six authors speaking about their nonfiction titles, followed by a conversation with one another, moderated by Jenna Meier-Bilbo (Off the Beaten Path, Steamboat Springs, Colo.). Two strong themes emerged that framed the morning: the health of democracy and the well-being of the planet.
Debbie Levy, in A Dangerous Idea (Bloomsbury Children's Books, Jan. 14), her examination of the Scopes trial nearly 100 years ago, and Rick Atkinson, through the second book in his trilogy on the American Revolution, The Fate of the Day (Crown, Apr. 29), both emphasize the resonance of these historical events today. Levy pointed out that "by 1900, evolution was widely accepted." However, it was one thing if adults knew about Charles Darwin's theory, and quite another to expose teenagers to the idea. In 1925, a Tennessee statute passed that banned lessons in evolution in public schools. High school science teacher John Scopes agreed to be arrested in order to challenge the law. As Levy--a former lawyer--points out, Scopes became secondary to the larger drama playing out between William Jennings Bryan, a creationist, and Clarence Darrow, who defended evolution. The book raises the question still at the center of education: What should children be taught, and who has the power to decide?
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| Authentic Voices panelists: (l.-r.) Riley Black, Debbie Levy, Rick Atkinson, Amy Gamerman, Stanley Milford, Jr., and Zak Podmore. (photo: Tori Henson) | |
After Atkinson's first book in the Revolution Trilogy, The British Are Coming, this second book, The Fate of the Day, focuses on the middle years of the conflict, and the characters at the center of it: George Washington and Britain's King George III. Atkinson was among the first to view the papers of George III when Queen Elizabeth made them available to the public. "He was not the buffoon that stumbles across the stage in Hamilton," Atkinson said. "He was his own secretary, and he made his own copies, too." The author is working with Ken Burns on a PBS series about the American Revolution, scheduled to air in 2025, both as a researcher and an on-camera expert. Atkinson said the framing question for the PBS series is: "What were they willing to die for?"
In his debut book, The Paranormal Ranger (Morrow), Stanley Milford Jr. writes about ghosts and Bigfoot, Navajo skinwalkers, and hauntings. But his book is also deeply connected to the beliefs at the root of the Navajo Nation, a people living in a 27,000-mile area for which Milford was responsible as a Navajo Ranger. Milford described a pivotal event in which two young officers answered a call from an elderly woman who said Bigfoot had taken her sheep. The officers laughed, and that offended her. For the Navajo, livestock are their livelihood. Their superior told them, "These people were traumatized. You're there to help people and protect them." That's when he enlisted young Milford to become a Navajo Ranger.
In one situation, Milford encountered "66 coins that fell out of nothingness, flew across the room, and hit my partner and me. These experiences were life-changing," he said. Milford explained "as an officer, you document everything that happens." For his book, he drew from 23 cases that stretched over two decades. Of Navajo descent himself, Milford also spoke of the more than 3,000 treaties signed with the Navajo: "None of them have been kept."
If humans are meant to be the stewards of the earth, as Robin Wall Kimmerer would have it, the two men at the center of Amy Gamerman's debut book, The Crazies (Simon & Schuster, Jan. 7), would seem to fly in the face of the idea. Gamerman set out to research a Texan's $44 million, 44,000-acre spread in the Crazy Mountains of Big Timber, Mont., for "Mansion," her column for the Wall Street Journal. This Texan wanted to develop a dilapidated Victorian structure as a hotel, but a neighbor was planning to lease out some of his land as a windmill farm--in plain sight of the would-be hotel. The Texan tried to buy out the neighbor, and the neighbor flatly refused.
Gamerman became fascinated with this neighbor, who was strong enough to say no to the billionaire Texan. She characterized Big Timber as a town of people who have lived there and worked the land for generations, and the billionaires who fly in on private jets to a second (or third or fourth) home. That neighbor turned out to be Rick Jarrett, whose ancestors had run a cattle farm on that land since 1882, the year the Crow people were forced off the land by a congressional statute. Jarrett "didn't believe in climate change, but he believed in his right to make money off his land," Gamerman said. "I didn't set out to write a western, but that's what I did. A true western for a warming planet."
And speaking of warming planets, science writer Riley Black became intrigued when readers of her previous book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, said they most loved reading about the plants. Why? Black wondered. She believes, "It's because the plants would do something, and the animals would respond." Once again in When the Earth Was Green (St. Martin's Press, Feb. 25, 2025), Black links the interconnectedness of plants--in 15 vignettes--and dinosaurs. She also discusses the way monkeys moved from Africa to South America and continued to evolve, and how amber--tree resin--preserves fossils and plants, among many other topics. Black spoke of her writing as narrative nonfiction: "Paleontology requires science and imagination. 'What were these things like when they were alive?' The millipede, the mastodon. It's finding the story, not just doing a 'potted story' [she paused for the pun] of prehistoric plants." In her penultimate chapter about the Ice Age, Riley mentions mastodon farts. "They're chewing plants all day. Their emissions were enough to warm the planet," she said. "Now we're replicating the same."
Zak Podmore found a kind of silver lining of the warming of the planet, as he recounts in Life After Dead Pool (Torrey House Press). Growing up, Podmore heard about the breathtaking Glen Canyon from those who had walked among its beautiful heights and bends. But by 1963, it had been flooded under Lake Powell to harness a river system that supplies water to 40 million people, seven states, and 30 Native nations. In 2020, as a journalist for the Salt Lake Tribune, Podmore wrote that the Colorado River had hit record lows. The former reservoir bed had been exposed; cottonwoods were growing where the river had flowed, and beavers were returning. The book's title refers to what will happen when Lake Powell's level reaches below the tubes through which it empties into the river system; the water would be trapped with no way to reach those who need it: a dead pool. The silver lining for Podmore: "Glen Canyon is not lost forever!" Meier-Bilbo asked Podmore, "What was the roughest stretch of your 1,700-mile river trip to research the book?" He answered, "It starts in a creek, then the river grows, then shrinks after Lake Mead, and at the border of Mexico it becomes canals. The canals were the roughest stretch, camping in thickets of dry brush. These used to be wetlands with jaguars. There is no water for the Delta."
All six authors' themes brought to mind the question Amy Gamerman posed, as she thought about the two ranchers fighting it out in Big Timber, "What does it mean to be a good neighbor?" In our schools, as a citizenry who fought and still fight for democracy, who dishonor treaties, and as stewards of the planet, "what does it mean to be a good neighbor?" --Jennifer M. Brown