>Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 12:37:51 -0500 >Reply-To: H-Net Western History List <H-WEST@H-NET.MSU.EDU> >Sender: H-Net Western History List <H-WEST@H-NET.MSU.EDU> >From: Elliott West <ewest@uark.edu> >Subject: FYI: Another Top 100 >To: H-WEST@H-NET.MSU.EDU > >Dear H-Westers, > > Co-moderator Sam Lamb sent the following, reminding us that it had been >posted back in May, 1999. It's the San Francisco Chronicle's list of the >best books on the West writtin in the 20th century. It was sent to us >then by our friend Bob Cherny. > > Elliott West, Co-Moderator > >******** > >The SF Chronicle published a longer version of this article accompanying >its list of Top 100 books on the West or by westerners. I've edited for >length, but the URL for the full article is enclosed; unlike many papers, >anyone can go into the website and call up articles--no passwords needed. > >Bob Cherny >History, San Francisco State > >- - - - - > >West-Side Stories >Readers rank the 20th century's best nonfiction this side of the Rockies >David Kipen >Thursday, May 27, 1999 >1999 San Francisco Chronicle > >URL: >http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/05/2 7/DD53174.DTL > >The trouble with compiling any best- of list is that the compiler never >gets to take part in what makes lists so much fun, i.e., complaining about >the omissions afterward. Nonetheless, it's with great pride that The >Chronicle hereby surrenders its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of >the 20th century written in English about -- or by an author from -- the >Western United States. > >The Chronicle Western 100 owes its existence to precisely the kind of >griping it may now inspire. One year ago, the editorial board of a major >New York publisher disseminated its list of the 100 best novels written in >English and published in the 20th century. Critics promptly called the >list too old, too white, too male and too representative of the >publisher's back-list. > >A month ago the same house promulgated a follow-up list of the 100 best >nonfiction books written in English and published in the 20th century. >They took care this time to change their editorial board until it looked >more like America. Sure enough, the nonfiction list wound up looking more >like America, too -- if only America ran westward from New York to the >Rockies and then stopped, like a frisky dog at the end of its leash. > >The Chronicle Western 100 lets 20th century English-language nonfiction >off the leash. It was devised on the nervy assumption that an >unscientific, self-selected sampling of interested Western readers could >pick just as viable a list as the editorial board of a venerable Manhattan >publisher. That faith has since been amply repaid, with Chronicle readers >coming out of the woodwork to write, e-mail and buttonhole their smart, >opinionated nominations. > >The top vote-getter on the Chronicle Western 100 is Mary Austin's _Land of >Little Rain_, her classic 1903 account of the terrain between Death Valley >and the High Sierra -- a book Edward Abbey called _a small, tender, >old-fashioned and engaging book, a part of the basic literature of >American nature writing._ Hard on its heels were Wallace Stegner's _Beyond >the Hundredth Meridian_, Abbey's _Desert Solitaire_ and Ivan Doig's _This >House of Sky._ > >Let no one blame himself for not having read all, or many,or perhaps even >any of these books. Blame instead an East Coast literary establishment >that tends to get the West wrong only when it isn't ignoring it. > >Look at the top 10 magnificent writers and reflect that none of them, not >one, made New York's nonfiction list. Not Austin, who blazed the trail for >a century of writing about the wild. Not Stegner, whose Stanford writing >program has nurtured generations of distinguished writers in the West. Not >Abbey, whose comic novel _The Monkey Wrench Gang__ helped radicalize >environmental thinking in America. Not Doig, the Montana-born, >Seattle-based master whose impatiently awaited new novel, _Mountain Time_, >hits bookstores this summer. And not Evan S. Connell either, the San >Francisco mailman-turned-novelist whose landmark examination of Custer and >the Little Big Horn was not only written in the West but published here as >well by the late, much-lamented Northpoint Press. > >A decision was made early on to adopt a one-book-per-author proviso. One >hundred sounds like a lot, but it's not, and too many worthy writers came >up short as it is, even without having to compete for a spot against five >different John Muir titles. Ties were broken, rules bent and the >continent Solomonically divided at the Rockies. > >------------------------------------------------------------------ >THE TOP 10 >1. _Land of Little Rain_, Mary Austin >2. _Beyond the Hundredth Meridian_, Wallace Stegner >3. _Desert Solitaire_, Edward Abbey >4. _This House of Sky_, Ivan Doig >5. _Son of the Morning Star_, Evan S. Connell >6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto >7. _Assembling California_, John McPhee >8. _My First Summer in the Sierra_, John Muir >9. _The White Album_, Joan Didion >10. _City of Quartz_, Mike Davis > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > >THE CHRONICLE'S WESTERN 100 >1. _Land of Little Rain_, Mary Austin >2. _Beyond the Hundredth Meridian_, Wallace Stegner >3. _Desert Solitaire_, Edward Abbey >4. _This House of Sky_, Ivan Doig >5. _Son of the Morning Star_, Evan S. Connell >6. The Western Trilogy, Bernard DeVoto >7. _Assembling California_, John McPhee >8. _My First Summer in the Sierra_, John Muir >9. _The White Album_, Joan Didion >10. _City of Quartz_, Mike Davis >11. _Ordeal by Hunger_, George Rippey Stewart >12. _Ishi in Two Worlds_, Theodora Kroeber >13. _Americans and the California Dream_ (five volumes), Kevin > Starr >14. _Cadillac Desert_, Marc Reisner >15. _A Sand County Almanac_, Aldo Leopold >16. _California: The Great Exception_, Carey McWilliams >17. _Arctic Dreams_, Barry Lopez >18. _Farewell to Manzanar_, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, James D. > Houston >19. _Young Men and Fire_, Norman MacLean >20. _Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee_, Dee Brown >21. _Bad Land_, Jonathan Raban >22. _The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience_, > J.S. Holliday >23. _The Art of Eating_, M.F.K. Fisher >24. _And the Band Played On_, Randy Shilts >25. _The Big Four_, Oscar Lewis >26. _The Solace of Open Spaces_, Gretel Ehrlich >27. _In the Spirit of Crazy Horse_, Peter Matthiessen >28. _Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research_, > John Steinbeck, Edward F. Ricketts >29. _The Practice of the Wild_, Gary Snyder >30. _Dancing at the Edge of the World_, Ursula K. LeGuin >31. _Zen Mind, Beginners Mind_, Shunryu Suzuki >32. _Great Plains_, Ian Frazier >33. _The Great Plains_, Walter Prescott Webb >34. _Land of Giants: The Drive to the Pacific Northwest, > 1750-1950_, David Sievert Lavender >35. _Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas_, Mari Sandoz >36. _City of Nets_, Otto Friedrich >37. _Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place_, Terry > Tempest Williams >38. _The Content of Our Character_, Shelby Steele >39. _High Tide in Tucson_, Barbara Kingsolver >40. _Winter_, Rick Bass >41. _Undaunted Courage_, Stephen Ambrose >42. _The Woman Warrior_, Maxine Hong Kingston >43. _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_, Tom Wolfe >44. _I Lost It at the Movies_, Pauline Kael >45. _The Devil's Dictionary_, Ambrose Bierce >46. _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_, Hunter S. Thompson >47. _The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are_, Alan > Watts >48. _The Hunger of Memory_, Richard Rodriguez >49. _Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast_, > Daniel Duane >50. _This Boy's Life_, Tobias Wolff >51. _Books in My Baggage_, Lawrence Clark Powell >52. _The California Dream_, anthology edited by Dennis Hale, > Jonathan Eisen >53. _Men to Match My Mountains_, Irving Stone >54. _Love and Will_, Rollo May >55. _The Language of the Goddess_, Marija Gimbutas >56. _The Air-Conditioned Nightmare_, Henry Miller >57. _T. Rex and the Crater of Doom_, Walter Alvarez >58. _The Way to Rainy Mountain_, N. Scott Momaday >59. _The Man Who Walked Through Time_, Colin Fletcher >60. _John Barleycorn_, Jack London >61. _Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian > Americans_, Ronald Takaki >62. _Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, > Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power_, Michael Parenti >63. _The Executioner's Song_, Norman Mailer >64. _The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American > West_, Patricia Nelson Limerick >65. _Living Up the Street: Narrative Recollections_, Gary Soto >66. _The Captive Mind_, Czeslaw Milosz >67. _California Fault: Searching for the Spirit of a State Along > the San Andreas_, Thurston Clarke >68. _Lonesome Traveler_, Jack Kerouac >69. _The Ohlone Way_, Malcolm Margolin >70. _An Autobiography_, Ansel Adams >71. _The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s_, > Norris Hundley >72. _Hole in the Sky: A Memoir_, William Kittredge >73. _Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry_, Robert Hass >74. _Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle_, Murray Morgan >75. _My Wilderness_, William O. Douglas >76. _The Klamath Knot_, David Rains Wallace >77. _Sweet Promised Land_, Robert Laxalt >78. _History of the Sierra Nevada_, Francis P. Farquhar >79. _The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary_, John Rechy >80. _Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962_ >81. _Final Cut_, Steven Bach >82. _The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the > Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890_, Leonard Pitt >83. _ `It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own': A New History of > the American West_, Richard White >84. _Communalism_, Kenneth Rexroth >85. _I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked_, Upton > Sinclair >86. _And a Voice to Sing With_, Joan Baez >87. _Miles From Nowhere: In Search of the American Frontier_, > Dayton Duncan >88. _Winter in Taos_, Mabel Dodge Luhan >89. _The Voice of the Desert_, Joseph Wood Krutch >90. _Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in > Postindustrial Society_, Theodore Roszak >91. _Traveling Light_, Bill Barich >92. _The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History_, Leo Braudy >93. _Stepping Westward_, Sallie Tisdale >94. _Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our > Civil Religion_, Lewis H. Lapham >95. _Coming of Age in California: Personal Essays_, Gerald > Haslam >96. _Sinclair Lewis_, Mark Schorer >97. _Dashiell Hammett: A Life_, Diane Johnson >98. _The Town That Fought to Save Itself_, Orville Schell >99. _Hide and Seek_, Jessamyn West >100. _Anybody's Gold_, Joseph Henry Jackson >------------------------------------------------------------------ > >CHECKING IT TWICE > >Did we blow it? Send your opinion of The Chronicle Western 100 to >Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San >Francisco, Calif. 94103, or weigh in via the Web at sfgate.com. >Just type _good books_ in the keyword box. > >1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page B1 > > Carol De Priest <http://www.goodnet.com/~dpriest/>