70 books like Tucson Salvage

“They came hungry,” begins the first chapter of this delightful look at the gastronomy of America’s desert quarter.

The whole dining table is here: huevos rancheros, tamales, chili, oranges, russet potatoes, rotgut whiskey, the chimichanga (which McNamee calls “a crispy torpedo of goodness”) and the Apache home-brewed beer called tiswin.

It’s one thing to enjoy Southwestern cooking. It’s another to understand its roots.

Cities all over the country were busy wrecking their own architectural heritage in the mid-20th century during the heyday of “slum clearance,” but Tucson experienced an especially painful loss: multiple blocks of irreplaceable colonial townhouses in Barro Viejo turned to dust for the sake of an ugly convention center.

Lydia Otero explains how and why this was allowed to happen with the exactitude of a scholar and the muted outrage of one who came from the community mourning the loss.

I loved this road memoir by one of our most gentle and graceful writers, the poet Richard Shelton, who mentored hundreds of incarcerated writers in Arizona prisons.

He writes of a return to the “delightful maze” of the town of Bisbee, where he first worked as a teacher in 1956, a place where the old copper miner's shacks cling to the hillsides of the Mule Mountains as precariously as the villas on a Mediterranean island, and where the people have shrugged off life's hard punches as insouciantly as a prizefighter.

Resplendent with nature writing, you can practically smell the creosote on the sentences. I think this is one of the most tonally accurate volumes ever written about this region.

We take our sunsets seriously in Arizona, enough that we put a variation of one on our state flag. But Bruce Berger's book made me rethink how I look at the smeared colors in the evening sky.

Look not west, he says, but to the mountains in the east: the “decreasing wavelengths and cooling colors–vermillion to salmon to plum” on the slopes that provide a lightbox to the garish display at your back.

This is only the start. In finely wrought prose befitting the author’s other career as a pianist, he renders the harsh beauty of the Southwest in a set of twenty essays that draw a portrait of landscape and memory.

This book was crucial in my path to veganism.

It is a memoir where Barbara Kingsolver writes humorously about a year of living off the land. She is not a vegetarian but must raise, kill, and butcher animals if she wants to eat meat. The result is, every time she eats meat, she weighs the emotional cost.

This reckoning has been my bible. I ask myself, would I be willing to kill the chick I raised to eat? Inevitably, the answer is “no.” 

The book is not a treaty encouraging people to live off the land, it’s the opposite. It makes you appreciate every bit of food you put in your mouth and the fact you did not have to grow, harvest, clean and cook it. 

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Flores family for hiring me on as a busier/bartender shortly after I moved to Tucson from Ohio in 1993. Carne Seca, albondigas and topopo were all new words to me that have since become embedded in my daily experience.

Carlotta Flores published a cookbook of recipes from the restaurant in 1998 and I reference it often in my own cookbook, Taste of Tucson. It’s a must-have book for anyone interested in learning more about Sonoran style Mexican food.

Gloria Anzaldúa was born and raised in South Texas, growing up along the U.S.-Mexican border. For many years she lived in San Francisco, and then in Santa Cruz, California.

The first 113 pages of the book are stories and essays drawn from her life experiences as a woman of Mexican and Indian heritage, daily experiencing life at the physical border between the United States and Mexico.

She was raised in a strongly Catholic tradition, while also drawn to and inventing her own spirituality rooted in indigenous practices of harmony, balance, and reverence for the earth. She was a lesbian in a straight world that condemned her woman-loving sensibility.

Each of these is a “borderland” to be navigated and negotiated, and each of these borders is rich with insight, life, laughter, tears, violence, and love. The last 100 pages of the book is titled “Un Agitado Viento/ Ehécatl, The Wind.” It… show more.

This wonderfully written memoir by one of the most successful singers in American rock and popular music offers a thoughtful look at the artist’s rise to fame in multiple musical genres—from folk clubs to sold-out stadium concerts, to Broadway, torch songs, and the Mexican Canciones music of the author’s Sonora heritage. The book is a keen glimpse at the pressures of the road (and expectations for women in the spotlight), but a triumphant story of talent and artistic innovation.

While this is a short story, not a novel, it is, in my opinion, the quintessential psychological Western. Depicting the struggle of an ordinary man saddled with extraordinary tasks, to maintain his honor and his values in the face of temptation, it delves into the minds of the two participants, and takes the reader on a wild ride as they wait for the train. Tension you could cut with a knife replaces action, keeping the reader on the edge of his/her seat until the end.

The Biosphere 2 project was the wackiest multimillion-dollar enterprise to emerge from the New Age movement. This book is a nonfiction account of how a New Mexico commune, with a charismatic leader, developed a plan to test the viability of off-planet living by creating a sealed-off biosphere, which would be a self-sustaining and organizing ecosystem in which humans could survive. The goal was to create not a sterile environment but one that supported life that would make off-planet living appealing. The four men and four women sequestered for two years in the 3.14-acre domed-off area outside Tucson grew into two factions that hated one another. All came close to starvation, CO2 poisoning, and madness. For readers that simply must have narrative in fiction form, T. Corraghesson Boyle’s The Terranauts is based on this same early 1990s episode.