front cover of Christmas in Nevada
Christmas in Nevada
Patricia D. Cafferata
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The delightful and touching stories in Christmas in Nevada tell how Nevadans have celebrated the holiday, from 1858 to the present day. Some are told by well-known Nevadans, such as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Robert Laxalt, and former governors Bob List and Richard Bryan, but much more of the book shows ordinary Nevadans celebrating in diverse ways the wonders of the season. The range of the state’s ethnic and immigrant heritage is showcased by stories of Basque, Mexican American, Native American, and African American celebrations, along with traditions of Italian, German, Danish, and Serbian origin. Some of the more unusual accounts include the story of three miners trapped underground for forty-five days during the Christmas season, Tonopah’s “Nevergreen” tree, and Reno’s Santa Pub Crawl with thousands of costumed revelers. Through extensive research and personal interviews, Patricia D. Cafferata has created a heartwarming collection of stories, guaranteed to be treasured. Whether Santa arrives on a sleigh in a mining camp in Silver Peak, Esmeralda County, or a zip line down Fremont Street, Las Vegas, Christmas in Nevada brings warm memories, excitement, and good cheer.

• Includes a story from each of the state’s seventeen counties
• Illustrated with 57 historic photographs, many previously unpublished
[more]

front cover of Desert Mementos
Desert Mementos
Stories of Iraq and Nevada
Caleb S. Cage
University of Nevada Press, 2017
Desert Mementos is a collection of loosely connected short stories set during the early stages of the Iraq War (2004 and 2005). The stories rotate from battles with insurgents and the drudgery of the war machine in Iraq to Nevada, where characters are either preparing for war, escaping it during their leave, or returning home having seen what they’ve seen.
 
Cage captures similarities in the respective desert landscapes of both Iraq and Nevada, but it is not just a study in contrasting landscapes. The inter-connected stories explore similarities and differences in human needs from the perspectives of vastly different cultures. Specifically, the stories deftly capture the overlap in the respective desert landscapes of each region, the contrasting cultures and worldviews, and the common need for hope. Taken together, the stories represent the arc of a year-long deployment by young soldiers. Cage’s stories are bound together by the soldier’s searing experiences in the desert, bookended by leaving and returning home to Nevada, which in many ways can be just as disorienting as patrolling the Iraq desert.
[more]

front cover of Gandydancer'S Children
Gandydancer'S Children
A Railroad Memoir
Frank Wendell Call
University of Nevada Press, 2000

front cover of Absence And Light
Absence And Light
Meditations From The Klamath Marshes
John R. Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2002
"In order to accept the enormous responsibility that comes of being in the world, we must first conceive, in spite of all the obstacles, the state of actually being the world." It is for this reason that John R. Campbell came to the Klamath marshes, a wetland in southern Oregon formed by three ancient, shallow lakes.
Absence and Light is Campbell's account of his exploration of the marshes and a meditation on the world he found there, on his growing understanding of the physical, emotional, moral, and aesthetic meaning of that world, on his own growth as a man. Through Campbell's eyes, we observe the stirring and astonishing beauty of the marshes and their creatures, and the utter poignancy of their fragility before the heedless ambitions of humankind.
This is nature writing at its most profound and moving, writing that in examining and defining the world of nature helps us to understand the very complicated and contradictory realities of being human. Campbell's luminous descriptions and mystical insights will long linger in the reader's memory.
[more]

front cover of Under the Western Sky
Under the Western Sky
Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin
Neil Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2018
This original collection of essays by experts in the field weave together the first comprehensive examination of Nevada-born Willy Vlautin’s novels and songs, as well as featuring 11 works of art that accompany his albums and books.

Brutally honest, raw, gritty, down to earth, compassionate and affecting, Willy Vlautin’s writing evokes a power in not only theme, but in methodology. Vlautin’s novels, The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete and The Free (2006-2014) chart the dispossessed lives of young people struggling to survive in difficult economic times and in regions of the U.S. West and Pacific Northwest traditionally viewed as affluent and abundant. Yet as his work shows, are actually highly stratified and deprived.

Likewise, Vlauntin’s songs, penned as lead singer of the Americana band Richmond Fontaine chart a related territory of blue-collar landscapes of the American West and Northwest with a strong emphasis on narrative and affective soundscapes evocative of the similar worlds defined in his novels.

Featuring an interview with Vlautin himself, this edited collection aims to develop the first serious, critical consideration of the important novels and songs of Willy Vlautin by exploring relations between region, music, and writing through the lens of critical regionality and other interdisciplinary, cultural, and theoretical methodologies. In so doing, it will situate his work within its regional frame of the American New West, and particularly the city of Reno, Nevada and the Pacific Northwest, whilst showing how he addresses wider cultural and global issues such as economic change, immigration shifts, gender inequality, and the loss of traditional mythic identities.

The essays take different positions in relation to considerations of both novels and music, looking for links and relations across genres, always mindful of their specificity. Under the Western Sky shows how although apparently rooted in place, Vlautin’s work traces diverse lines of contemporary cultural enquiry, engaging in an effective and troubling examination of regional haunting.
[more]

front cover of Worlding the Western
Worlding the Western
Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community
Neil Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Worlding the Western views the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a reexamination of the consequences of the exceptionalism and closed borders of the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to challenge the dark side of globalization. He proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics.

Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case in which these features are present and yet, historically, have often been masked or denied in the rush toward unanimity and nation building. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to view the notion of a single world under pressure.
 
[more]

front cover of Worlding the Western
Worlding the Western
Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community
Neil Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Worlding the Western views the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a reexamination of the consequences of the exceptionalism and closed borders of the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to challenge the dark side of globalization. He proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics.

Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case in which these features are present and yet, historically, have often been masked or denied in the rush toward unanimity and nation building. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to view the notion of a single world under pressure.
 
[more]

front cover of Nevada Place Names
Nevada Place Names
A Geographical Dictionary
Helen S. Carlson
University of Nevada Press, 1974

Author and researcher Helen Carlson spent almost fourteen years searching for the origins of Nevada’s place names, using the maps of explorers, miners, government surveyors, and city planners and poring through historical accounts, archival documents, county records, and newspaper files. The result of her labors is Nevada Place Names, a fascinating mixture of history spiced with folklore, legend, and obscure facts. Out of print for some years, the book was reprinted in 1999.

[more]

front cover of Married To A Daughter Of The Land
Married To A Daughter Of The Land
Spanish-Mexican Women And Interethnic Marriage In California, 1820-80
Maria Raquel Casas
University of Nevada Press, 2009
The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California. Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women’s lives in these critical decades of California’s history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California’s rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas’s discussion ranges from California’s burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families. Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.
[more]

logo for University of Nevada Press
Minerals of Nevada
Stephen B. Castor
University of Nevada Press, 2012

Nevada has an extraordinary diversity of minerals, some of them unique to the state and some the focus of human exploitation for millennia. Minerals of Nevada is the first synoptic catalog of Nevada minerals, listing every mineral found in the state along with the places where they occur. The book includes the geologic history of the state, the history of mining in Nevada, descriptions of significant mineral deposits and mining districts, maps, and an album of striking color photographs of rare and important minerals.

[more]

front cover of The Color of Rock
The Color of Rock
A Novel
Sandra Cavallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2019

A young physician, Dr. Abby Wilmore, attempts to escape her past by starting over at the Grand Canyon Clinic. Silently battling her own health issues, Abby struggles with adjusting to the demands of this unique rural location. She encounters everything from squirrel bites to suicides to an office plagued by strong personalities. While tending to unprepared tourists, underserved locals, and her own mental trials, Abby finds herself entangled in an unexpected romance and trapped amidst a danger even more treacherous than the foreboding desert landscape.

Sandra Cavallo Miller’s debut novel transports readers to the beautiful depths of Arizona and weaves an adventurous and heartwarming tale of the courage and strength it takes to overcome personal demons and to find love.

[more]

front cover of Out of Patients
Out of Patients
A Novel
Sandra Cavallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2022
After practicing medicine for more than thirty years in the sweltering suburbs of Phoenix, Dr. Norah Waters is weighing her options, and early retirement is looking better and better. At age fifty-eight, she questions whether she still needs to deal with midnight calls, cranky patients, and the financial headaches that come with running a small clinic. Fighting burnout and workplace melodrama, Norah gives herself one final year to find the fulfillment and satisfaction she remembers from the early years of her once-cherished career.

As she embarks on her year’s journey, Norah grapples with a medical practice that is experiencing a concerning loss of income. She is supervising two medical students, one whose shyness hampers his development and another whose arrogance and contempt for family medicine creates major friction at the clinic. Norah’s life is further complicated by her elderly mother, a feisty 86-year-old living in Sun City, who once rejoiced at Woodstock and recently partied at Burning Man. Troubled by a shadow in their past, both women find themselves on a quest for self-worth in their shifting worlds. Norah also must cope with the end of an unhappy, long-term relationship with an aspiring, but deadbeat, novelist.

Supported by her steadfast dog, a misfit veterinarian, and a thoughtful radiologist, Norah wrestles through a surprising assortment of obstacles, sometimes amusing and sometimes dreadful, on her way to making a decision about her future.
[more]

front cover of What the River Said
What the River Said
A Novel
Sandra Cavallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2021
In her third book in the Dr. Abby Wilmore Series, Sandra Cavallo Miller weaves a new riveting tale of medical adventure and mystery, set amidst the splendor of the Grand Canyon 
 
In this riveting third book of the Dr. Abby Wilmore series, Dr. Abby returns to her medical clinic in Grand Canyon National Park. Happy to be reunited with her staff and her partner, Dr. John Pepper, Abby is back treating park visitors and personnel as well as local residents. However, a wave of heart attacks among apparently healthy hikers creates a new puzzle, and soon there are rumors of people using performance-enhancing drugs. Abby’s situation deteriorates when a new female friend suddenly disappears, and Abby berates herself for missing the woman’s depression.

As Abby struggles with the disappearance of her friend, Dr. Pepper is preoccupied by a mysterious threat from his past and becomes badly
injured in an apparent fall. While he recuperates, Abby takes over much of the clinic work while they provide a home for Pepper’s troubled teenage niece and an adopted stray dog.

Abby soon discovers that there is something more sinister behind the recent troubling events. In this exhilarating follow-up to The Color of Rock and Where Light Comes and Goes, Abby must learn to confront her past in order to stand up for the ones she loves.
 
[more]

front cover of Where Light Comes and Goes
Where Light Comes and Goes
A Novel
Sandra Cavallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2020

Book 2 in the Dr. Abby Wilmore Series

Where Light Comes and Goes brings back Dr. Abby Wilmore, the young family physician who was the protagonist of Miller’s first novel, The Color of Rock. Abby has accepted the directorship of a summer clinic in Yellowstone National Park where she hopes to expand her medical skills. She arrives to find herself working above the increasingly restless Yellowstone supervolcano, treating visitors, staff, and locals, all while evading the advances of a lecherous concession manager and maintaining a long-distance relationship with her partner who stays at the Grand Canyon Clinic. As tremors in the park escalate and the lakes seethe with bubbling gases, Abby learns that some-one is mysteriously killing the bison.

What follows is an engrossing mystery unfolding in a spectacular setting with rich, quirky, and endearing characters and unexpected plot turns. While an overworked Abby makes new friends among her clinic staff and patients, tension builds as the volcano seems to be moving closer to a major eruption and the bison killings become more frequent. Soon, Abby finds herself in mortal danger as the story races to a thrilling and unexpected conclusion.

Sandra Cavallo Miller demonstrated in The Color of Rock that she is a gifted storyteller. Where Light Comes and Goes deftly combines a gripping mystery set in the accurately depicted routine of a busy medical practice amid the wonders of Yellowstone’s magnificent scenery and wildlife. This is entertaining reading at its best.

[more]

front cover of Where No One Should Live
Where No One Should Live
A Novel
Sandra Cavallo Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Dr. Maya Summer works at Arizona Public Health, overseeing and researching a myriad of public health issues. A passionate advocate for a motorcycle helmet law, she also monitors disease-bearing mosquitoes, rabid bobcats, and the opioid epidemic—along with many other concerns. To maintain her clinical skills, she spends time at the nearby family medicine residency, seeing patients and teaching new physicians. Maya also navigates a complicated personal life: a somewhat troubled romantic relationship with a cardiologist; a retired physician-friend searching for new meaning; an undocumented neighbor raising a young son; and a cherished ailing old horse. A new danger looms when she sparks the anger of local biker gangs who want to stop her helmet campaign. As the intimidating warnings reach an unsettling highpoint, a past trauma that had been fueling her work now starts to haunt her—threatening to derail her carefully choreographed life.

Dr. Alex Reddish, a faculty member at the residency, enjoys Maya’s company every week. He longs to know her better but also knows she is involved with a prominent cardiologist. A former shy chess champion, Alex has worked to remake himself into a more socially engaged person, though he cannot completely shed his reclusive past. His professional life is complicated by two resident physician advisees: a depressed and poorly performing man, and a seductive woman. And now someone seems determined to harm him. 

Maya and Alex turn accomplices when they try to unravel a spate of unusual illnesses afflicting residency staff, and discover disturbing trends. As Maya and Alex become closer, they must also tackle their personal pasts and individual demons, and find the courage to move forward. 
[more]

front cover of Atlas of Nevada Conifers
Atlas of Nevada Conifers
A Phytogeographic Reference
David Alan Charlet
University of Nevada Press, 1996

Atlas of Nevada Conifers is a major scientific contribution to our understanding of the ecology of Nevada. It documents in great detail the distribution of all native conifer species in the state—critical information because of the primary ecological importance of conifers for all organisms and because of the lack of documentation of these distributions in the scientific literature before now. Charlet maps and documents the exact location of herbarium records for 1,600 individual trees. The data found in 23 tables and 22 range maps will serve as a primary reference for botanists, land managers, and conservation biologists for years to come.

[more]

front cover of Embattled Memories
Embattled Memories
Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials
Suhi Choi
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The Korean War has been called the “forgotten war,” not as studied as World War II or Vietnam. Choi examines the collective memory of the Korean War through five discrete memory sites in the United States and South Korea, including the PBS documentary Battle for Korea, the Korean War Memorial in Salt Lake City, and the statue of General Douglas MacArthur in Incheon, South Korea. She contends that these sites are not static; rather, they are active places where countermemories of the war clash with the official state-sanctioned remembrance. Through lively and compelling analysis of these memory sites, which include two differing accounts of the No Gun Ri massacre\--contemporaneous journalism and oral histories by survivors\--Choi shows diverse narratives of the Korean War competing for dominance in acts of remembering. Embattled Memories is an important interdisciplinary work in two fields, memory studies and public history, from an understudied perspective, that of witnesses to the Korean War.
[more]

front cover of Access for All
Access for All
Expanding Opportunity and Programs to Support Successful Student Outcomes at University of Nevada, Reno
Melisa N. Choroszy
University of Nevada Press, 2019
For many students in Nevada and throughout the nation, they are the first in their family to go to college—these students are identified as “first-generation.” The population of first-generation students continues to increase year-over-year and their unique needs have shaped the way education practitioners must approach serving future students effectively.

This collection of essays, written by University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) faculty and students, is an examination of the programs and strategies created to support first-generation and other underrepresented student populations. In addition, it serves as a dedication to the families and students whose hopes and dreams include the attainment of a college degree. Readers will gain insight into the framework needed to provide accessible programs and services to a large and diverse student population before, during, and after college graduation as well as first-hand success stories from the students themselves.

Each generation hopes for a better life for their children. Higher education, in particular, has been a dream for many in this country that has been made possible through public and private financial support. Every new generation of college-bound students faces new and evolving challenges, but the fierce dedication and commitment demonstrated in these pages define the key to developing a thriving and diverse institution that helps all students succeed.
 
[more]

front cover of Success for All
Success for All
Programs to Support Students Throughout Their College Experience
Melisa N. Choroszy
University of Nevada Press, 2019
While the most important measure of success for many degree-seeking students is the timely attainment of a Bachelor’s degree, there remains a host of other indicators of student success that vary by student population and students’ personal goals. Many of these smaller successes lead to the ultimate goal of graduation and are significant triumphs throughout the journey through higher education.

Success for All is a strategic guide for administrators and educators that offers methods for advising students through the myriad of challenges they face. Every bit of success contributes to the accomplishment of a larger goal, and this book highlights success at every level. It provides a specific roadmap to the research, services, and programs at the University of Nevada, Reno and Truckee Meadows Community College that support student success in undergraduate and graduate programs regardless of a student’s social, emotional, or prior academic experiences. Contributors discuss how to make students feel welcome in their social and educational environments and how to directly assist them with the timely completion of their degree. Administrators and educators demonstrate how these programs help make a positive contribution to the students and the institutions they serve while implementing practical solutions to increase graduation rates.
 
[more]

front cover of Teaching About Place
Teaching About Place
Learning From The Land
Laird Christensen
University of Nevada Press, 2008
The sixteen essays in this anthology describe the practice of teaching about place, with the goal of inspiring educators as well as other readers to discover the value of close investigation of their own places. The contributors discuss places from the desert river canyons of the American West, to the bayous of Texas, to wildlife refuges on the Atlantic Coast, to New England’s forests and river, and back to the wildland-urban interface in suburban Southern California. <br> These essays reveal broader lessons about the possibilities and limitations that come with teaching about place and inhabiting our own places outside the classroom. Contributors include: Ann Zwinger, Bradley John Monsma, SueEllen Campbell, Terrell Dixon, and John Elder.<br> <br>
[more]

front cover of The Basques
The Basques
The Franco Years And Beyond
Robert P. Clark
University of Nevada Press, 1979

front cover of Negotiating With Eta
Negotiating With Eta
Obstacles To Peace In The Basque Country, 1975-1988
Robert P. Clark
University of Nevada Press, 1990

Since the late 1960s, the Basque insurgent organization ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) has been engaged in a violent struggle against the Spanish state in an effort to gain the independence of the Basque Country. ETA violence has led to the death of hundreds of people, making the organization the most violent insurgent group in Europe. Between 1975 and 1988, nearly thirty attempts to negotiate an end to violence, with a few limited exceptions, all ended in failure. This important book examines why the efforts to negotiate have failed and makes suggestions on how to improve the chances for successful discussion in the future. Although Clark does not disprove the conventional wisdom that negotiation with terrorists is a bad idea, he does begin from the opposing point of view that there may be some positive values to be realized from such negotiation.Negotiating with ETA describes the various factions that are interested in the outcome of such negotiations and the Spanish antiterrorist policy throughout the period under examination. The book also recounts the early attempts to negotiate, the first attempt at "social reintegration," various attempts by the Basque Government to get negotiations started, negotiation efforts under the Spanish socialist government of Felipe González, and the lengthy negotiations that took place in Algeria. A wide range of scholars and specialists will find this book valuable, including those interested in contemporary Spanish politics, ethnic nationalism, Basque affairs, the problem of terrorism, and conflict resolution.

[more]

front cover of The City Of Trembling Leaves
The City Of Trembling Leaves
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
University of Nevada Press, 2012

The City of Trembling Leaves by Walter Van Tilburg Clark was first published in 1945 by Random House and reprinted by the University of Nevada Press in paperback in 1991 with a new foreword by Robert Laxalt.

Clark’s novel broke new ground in his telling of the story of the rites of passage of a boy, Tim Hazard, into adulthood in the setting of the Western town of Reno, Nevada. The descriptions of Reno’s landscape and the realistic characters depict the role of nature during the tumultuous stages of adolescence and the potential risk of obstruction and loss in the attainment of maturity.

[more]

front cover of The Track Of The Cat
The Track Of The Cat
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
University of Nevada Press, 1993
Clark's classic novel is a compelling tale of four men who fear a marauding mountain lion but swear to conquer it. It is also a story of violent human emotions--love and hate, hope and despair--and of the perpetual conflict between good and evil.
[more]

front cover of The Watchful Gods And Other Stories
The Watchful Gods And Other Stories
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
University of Nevada Press, 2004
This edition of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s collection of short stories—which includes “Hook,” Clark’s most renowned story—makes these pieces available again to a new generation of readers.

Critic John R. Milton once said that Walter Van Tilburg Clark "did perhaps more than anyone else to define (in his fiction) the mode of perception, the acquisition of knowledge, and the style which we tend to call Western." In 1950, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the acclaimed novel The Ox-Bow Incident, published a collection of short stories that had already won distinction in various national magazines. The collection was well received by reviewers, and subsequent critics have noted that these stories reflect both Clark’s literary power and the major concerns of his novels: the interior and intuitive complexities of good and evil, and the fragile, intricate web that connects humankind to the rest of the natural world.

A foreword by Ann Ronald, one of the West’s most astute literary critics, sets the stories into the context of Clark’s oeuvre and illuminates the way they reveal crucial characteristics of this writer’s imagination.

[more]

front cover of After The Boom In Tombstone And Jerome, Arizona
After The Boom In Tombstone And Jerome, Arizona
Decline In Western Resource Towns
Eric L. Clements
University of Nevada Press, 2014
Focusing on two Arizona towns that had their origins in mining bonanzas—Tombstone and Jerome—historian Eric L. Clements offers a rare study dissecting the process of bust itself—the reasons and manners in which these towns declined as the mining booms ended. Tombstone was the site of one of the great silver bonanzas of the nineteenth century, a boom that started in the late 1870s and was over by 1890. Jerome’s copper deposits were mined for much longer, beginning in the 1880s and enduring until the 1930s. But when the mining booms ended, each town faced its decline in similar ways. The process of decline was more complex than superficial histories have indicated, and Clements discusses the role of labor unions in trying to stave off collapse, the changing demography of decline, the nature and expression of social tensions, the impact on institutions such as churches and schools, and the human responses to continued economic depression. But bust involved more than a steady decline into ghost-town status, Clements discovers: the towns' remaining residents employed numerous strategies to survive and reduce household expenses. In the end, both towns reinvented themselves as late-twentieth-century tourist attractions.
[more]

front cover of Business of Newspapers
Business of Newspapers
Cloud
University of Nevada Press, 1992

front cover of The Blossom Festival
The Blossom Festival
(A Novel)
Lawrence Coates
University of Nevada Press, 1999
The Blossom Festival chronicles rural life in the Santa Clara Valley during the decades leading up to World War II. Against the lush backdrop of millions of fruit trees unfold the personal dramas of a fascinating cast of characters. This leisurely read explores the complex relationships between parents and children in the context of a rich California region bent on replacing agriculture with computer chips to become Silicon Valley. 
[more]

front cover of The Garden of the World
The Garden of the World
Lawrence Coates
University of Nevada Press, 2012

California’s Santa Clara Valley was once home to a vigorous wine industry. The Garden of the World is the tale of a pioneer winemaking family headed by Paul Tourneau, a fiercely ambitious vintner determined to make the finest wines in California. His plans are disrupted by a phylloxera epidemic at the beginning of the twentieth century, the trials of national Prohibition, and the bitter alienation of his older son. Played out against the vividly depicted seasonal rhythms of vineyard life, this is a moving saga of betrayal, loss, and the harsh consequences of unbreakable ambition.

[more]

front cover of The Goodbye House
The Goodbye House
Lawrence Coates
University of Nevada Press, 2015
In the aftermath of the early 2000s dot-com bust, the people of San Jose, California face a changing landscape of lost dreams and careers gone awry. It’s in this setting that Katherine Watson, a forty-seven-year-old event planner and mother of two, moves back into her childhood home with her teenage son, Carter. They live with her aging father, who is undergoing palliative care for prostate cancer. Katherine’s husband, Scott, has gone missing after his risky investments failed and they were forced to sell their dream home.

In this multigenerational family story, Katherine, Carter, and Scott all try to navigate an evolving world in the Golden State that doesn’t seem quite so golden any longer. Scott returns and hopes to restore and recreate their past happiness, Katherine contemplates divorce and explores new love along the way, and Carter works to find a place for himself in a new school among classmates who are hostile to him.

The characters fervently chase their dreams across Silicon Valley and beyond, from the gleaming office parks of Cupertino to a self-help seminar on the Las Vegas Strip and an underfunded high school theater production of The Tempest. The one element tying them all together is the house of the title, a 1950s tract home that once represented happiness and now holds the family close in its protective embrace, until, in the end, even this constant changes.
[more]

front cover of The Master Of Monterey
The Master Of Monterey
A Novel
Lawrence Coates
University of Nevada Press, 2003
This comic novel, by the author of The Blossom Festival, is set in Mexican California in 1842 and is based on a true story of mistaken conquest. When Commodore Jones and the crew of the National Intention land in Monterey believing themselves to be bringing freedom and democracy to the benighted Californios, they discover that history has preceded them, that cruelty, betrayal, greed, and lust are already well established there, and that far from existing outside of history, California is a battleground for several contending versions of the past. They also find that their own limitations and illusions are far more powerful than the message of hope that they intend to deliver. 
[more]

front cover of All In
All In
The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States
Jonathan D Cohen
University of Nevada Press, 2018
Gambling, the risky enterprise of chance, is one of America’s favorite pastimes. Office March Madness brackets, a day at the race track, a friendly wager, the random ridiculous Super Bowl prop bet, bingo night, or the latest media frenzy over the Powerball jackpot—all emphasize the ubiquity of this major economic force and cultural phenomenon. Approximately 70 percent of Americans regularly engage in some form of betting, amounting to over $140 billion in combined casino and lottery revenue every year. A hundred years ago, however, legal gambling was a rarity in the United States.
 
A fresh take on the history of modern American gambling, All In provides a closer look at the shifting economic, cultural, religious, and political conditions that facilitated gambling’s expansion and prominence in American consumerism and popular culture. In its pages, a diverse range of essays covering commercial and Native American casinos, sports betting, lotteries, bingo, and more piece together a picture of how gambling became so widespread over the course of the twentieth century.

Drawing from a range of academic disciplines, this collection explores five aspects of American gambling history: crime, advertising, politics, religion, and identity.

In doing so, All In illuminates the on-the-ground debates over gambling’s expansion, the failed attempts to thwart legalized betting, and the consequences of its present ubiquity in the United States.
[more]

front cover of A Garden Of Bristlecones
A Garden Of Bristlecones
Tales Of Change In The Great Basin
Michael P. Cohen
University of Nevada Press, 1998

An engaging, well-illustrated natural and cultural history of the oldest living organism—the bristlecone pine. Since Edmund Schulman discovered in 1958 that individual bristlecones live nearly 5,000 years, the trees have been investigated primarily for the elaborate record their rings contain. The trees have been "read' closely, with major consequences for natural and human history. Historians have read local and global environmental change. Archaeologists have rewritten the history of civilization. Writers have transformed them into figures pertinent to the human dilemmas of time and eternity. A Garden of Bristlecones investigates professional and popular conceptions as a set of narratives drawn from the outside and inside of the trees. It reveals the premises of the investigators, the nature of their inquiry, and the extent of their knowledge, while also revealing the Great Basin bristlecone itself. Illustrations by Valerie Cohen.

[more]

front cover of Granite and Grace
Granite and Grace
Seeking the Heart of Yosemite
Michael P. Cohen
University of Nevada Press, 2019
In Granite and Grace Michael Cohen reflects on a lifetime of climbing, walking, and pondering the granite in Yosemite National Park at Tuolumne Meadows. This high-country region of Yosemite is dominated by a young, beautifully glaciated geological formation known as the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite. It does not include familiar Yosemite icons like Half Dome, yet geologists describe this granitic realm at over 8,000 feet as “an iconic American landscape.”

Drawing together the humanistic and scientific significance of the wild landscapes he traverses, Michael uncovers relationships between people and places and meaning and substance, rendering this text part memoir—but also considerably more. On-the-rock encounters by hand and foot open up a dialogue between the heart of a philosopher and the mind of a geologist. Michael adds a literary softness to this hard landscape, blending excursions with exposition and literature with science. It is through his graceful representations that the geological becomes metaphorical, while the science turns mythological.

This high country, where in 1889 John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson planned what would become Yosemite National Park, is significant for cultural as well as natural reasons. Discoursing on everything from Camus’s “Myths of Sisyphus” to the poems of Gary Snyder, Michael adds depth to an already splendorous landscape. Premier early geologists, such as François Matthes, shaped the language of Yosemite’s landscape. Even though Yosemite has changed over half a century, the rock has not. As Michael explores the beauty and grace of his familiar towering vistas, he demonstrates why, of the many aspects of the world to which one might get attached, the most secure is granite.
[more]

front cover of Tree Lines
Tree Lines
Valerie P Cohen
University of Nevada Press, 2017
Tree Lines unites striking ink drawings of high-altitude pine trees with poetic vignettes about how people interact with mountain environments. The drawings and text work together to form a direct artistic encounter with timberline conifers. The husband and wife team of Valerie and Michael Cohen employ a unique process whereby she draws in isolation, gives him her drawings, and he then writes whatever he’s inspired to create. Neither offers the other any kind of feedback or instruction. The result is an accessible and deeply engaging work that is also extremely well researched; the Cohens bring a lifetime of scholarship in literature, history, and the environment to this work.

The drawings are black-and-white, pen-and-ink representations of high alpine ecosystems. The prose is stripped bare, abbreviated in an epigrammatic style that is poetic and spontaneous. Trees represented here are the Western Juniper or Sierra Juniper, the Limber, and the Bristlecone Pine—three species of long-lived, slow-growing conifers that grow across the Great Basin. While they represent only a small portion of the vegetative culture high in the western mountains, the Cohens use representation as abstraction as is utilized by writers and artists to convey a unique kind of microcosm of our natural environment. This book compares to such classics as Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which open up lines of observation, analysis, and art for a new generation of readers. 
 
[more]

front cover of Moth Catcher
Moth Catcher
An Evolutionist'S Journey Through Canyon And Pass
Michael M. Collins
University of Nevada Press, 2007

The memoir of a scientist and the wild silk moths he studiesBiologist Michael Collins has been studying wild silk moths since he was a boy. This family — which includes the largest and most colorful of the North American moths — led Collins into a long career as a scientist, and has provided him with significant insights into the process by which new species evolve. Moth Catcher is Collins’s engaging account of his development as a scientist and of his groundbreaking research. The canyon and pass environments of the American West offer a setting in which, since the last Ice Age, organisms have adapted to new surroundings and where many have formed new species. Collins has discovered in the Sierra Nevada that geneticists call a “hybrid zone” where two species interbreed. This hybrid zone is unusual because both sexes are fertile, unlike lab-bred hybrids between the same silk moth species. Collins explains how such hybrid populations serve as laboratories in nature where the process of speciation can be observed and studied. This book offers a fascinating view into the work of a field scientist and the ways that evolution continues to operate around us. Collins’s colorful accounts of his fieldwork will delight any reader who loves the outdoors and is captivated by the diversity and interrelations of the life forms found there. And his passion for his research and the fragile, exquisite creatures that he studies will inspire a new appreciation of the wonders of the natural world and the myriad life forms that occupy it.

[more]

front cover of Cowboy is a Verb
Cowboy is a Verb
Notes from a Modern-day Rancher
Richard Collins
University of Nevada Press, 2019
From the big picture to the smallest detail, Richard Collins fashions a rousing memoir about the modern-day lives of cowboys and ranchers. However, Cowboy is a Verb is much more than wild horse rides and cattle chases. While Collins recounts stories of quirky ranch horses, cranky cow critters, cow dogs, and the people who use and care for them, he also paints a rural West struggling to survive the onslaught of relentless suburbanization.

A born storyteller with a flair for words, Collins breathes life into the geology, history, and interdependency of land, water, and native and introduced plants and animals. He conjures indelible portraits of the hardworking, dedicated people he comes to know. With both humor and humility, he recounts the day-to-day challenges of ranch life such as how to build a productive herd, distribute your cattle evenly across a rough and rocky landscape, and establish a grazing system that allows pastures enough time to recover. He also intimately recounts a battle over the endangered Gila topminnow and how he and his neighbors worked with university range scientists, forest service conservationists, and funding agencies to improve their ranches as well as the ecological health of the Redrock Canyon watershed.

Ranchers who want to stay in the game don’t dominate the landscape; instead, they have to continually study the land and the animals it supports. Collins is a keen observer of both. He demonstrates that patience, resilience, and a common-sense approach to conservation and range management are what counts, combined with an enduring affection for nature, its animals, and the land. Cowboy is a Verb is not a romanticized story of cowboy life on the range, rather it is a complex story of the complicated work involved with being a rancher in the twenty-first-century West.
[more]

front cover of The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain
The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain
Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation
Daniele Conversi
University of Nevada Press, 2000
Daniele Conversi's book is a comprehensive introduction to Basque and Catalan nationalism. The two movements have much in common but have differed in the strategies adopted to further their cause. Basque nationalism, in the shape of the military wing of ETA, took the path of violence, spawning an efficient terrorist campaign. Catalan nationalism, by contrast, is generally more accommodating and peaceful. This new study examines and compares the history, motives, and methods of the Catalonian and Basque nationalist movements. Conversi's interpretation of these programs offers a new understanding not only of the recent history of Spain but of the dynamics of nationalist movements throughout the modern world.
[more]

front cover of Out of the Woods
Out of the Woods
Seeing Nature in the Everyday
Julia Corbett
University of Nevada Press, 2018
2018 Reading the West Book Awards Nonfiction Winner

Have you ever wondered about society’s desire to cultivate the perfect lawn, why we view some animals as “good” and some as “bad,” or even thought about the bits of nature inside everyday items–toothbrushes, cell phones, and coffee mugs?  In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions by seamlessly integrating personal narratives with morsels of highly digestible science and research.  Each story delves into an overlooked aspect of our relationship with nature—insects, garbage, backyards, noise, open doors, animals, and language—and how we cover our tracks.

With a keen sense of irony and humor and an awareness of the miraculous in the mundane, Julia recognizes the contradictions of contemporary life. She confronts the owner of a high-end market who insists on keeping his doors open in all temperatures. Takes us on a trip to a new mall with a replica of a trout stream that once flowed nearby.  The phrase “out of the woods” guides us through layers of meaning to a contemplation of grief, remembrance, and resilience.

Out of the Woods leads to surprising insights into the products, practices, and phrases we take for granted in our everyday encounters with nature and encourages us all to consider how we might re-value or reimagine our relationships with nature in our everyday lives.
[more]

front cover of Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School
Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School
Sarah E. Cowie
University of Nevada Press, 2019
Winner of the 2019 Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology, the collaborative archaeology project at the former Stewart Indian School documents the archaeology and history of a heritage project at a boarding school for American Indian children in the Western United States. In Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School, the team’s collective efforts shed light on the children’s education, foodways, entertainment, health, and resilience in the face of the U.S. government’s attempt to forcibly assimilate Native populations at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as school life in later years after reforms.

This edited volume addresses the theory, methods, and outcomes of collaborative archaeology conducted at the Stewart Indian School site and is a genuine collective effort between archaeologists, former students of the school, and other tribal members. With more than twenty contributing authors from the University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada Indian Commission, Washoe Tribal Historic Preservation Office, and members of Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone tribes, this rich case study is strongly influenced by previous work in collaborative and Indigenous archaeologies. It elaborates on those efforts by applying concepts of governmentality (legal instruments and practices that constrain and enable decisions, in this case, regarding the management of historical populations and modern heritage resources) as well as social capital (valued relations with others, in this case, between Native and non-Native stakeholders).

As told through the trials, errors, shared experiences, sobering memories, and stunning accomplishments of a group of students, archaeologists, and tribal members, this rare gem humanizes archaeological method and theory and bolsters collaborative archaeological research.
[more]

front cover of No Equal In The World
No Equal In The World
An Interpretation Of The Academic Presidency
Joseph N. Crowley
University of Nevada Press, 1994
No Equal in the World is a comprehensive study of the literature on the American academic presidency from the middle of the nineteenth century—when the first universities, as distinct from colleges, began to emerge—to the present. The book surveys widely divergent literature on the biographies of major presidents at crucial moments in the history of their institutions. The book affords an overview of the development of both the role of the university president and the public’s perception of that role, and indicates where perception and reality diverge. At a time when university presidents must find their way through a minefield of increasingly heated debates over issues such as free speech, curriculum, faculty diversity, and the specter of “political correctness,” Crowley’s book provides a sense of history to those striving to understand the demands of the position. It is an invaluable resource for scholars.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter