Brooke at the Bar is a candid, lively, and sometimes humorous autobiography by Brooke Wunnicke, the first woman to be a trial and appellate attorney in Wyoming and who went on to become a legal legend in Colorado. In conversational writing, Brooke provides insights from a lawyer, mentor, and educator. She advocates that, while not perfect, the United States has the world’s best legal system and that all citizens need to understand and protect their rights, freedoms, and responsibilities.
 
Brooke shares vignettes of her early life—California in the Great Depression, college at Stanford, law school in Colorado during World War II, and the 1946 opening of her Cheyenne law office, a precedent for women in law. She vividly describes memorable and amusing experiences with clients, witnesses, lawyers, juries, and judges and explains some significant cases. She recounts important and dynamic events from her twelve years as Denver’s chief appellate deputy district attorney, an era during which she was an inestimable mentor to many young lawyers who became prominent in the private and public sectors.
 
Brooke passionately believed “the law has been and will continue to be civilization’s hope.” In her book’s final part, she demystifies many legal terms and procedures and describes the parts of a civil jury trial—including information for jurors and witnesses—and provides an enthusiastic and clear refresher on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
 
Brooke at the Bar is a unique and historically important contribution that will be of interest to general readers, scholars, and students interested in US law, political science, government, women’s history, twentieth-century western history, civil rights, and legal communities, including those in Wyoming and Colorado, where Brooke was “at the Bar.”
 

The Sanchez Family is a family history detailing the Sanchez family’s experiences as immigrants to Wyoming and the ways that their US-born children’s interest in wrestling had cascading impacts across generations. By focusing on a sport and a state that have not received much attention, Jorge Iber conveys the importance of athletics as a part of the educational experience of the Latino community.

The first members of this particular Sanchez clan arrived in Wyoming during the early decades of the twentieth century. The first-generation American grandchildren of these families—Gilbert, David, Arthur, and Ray—used wrestling to radically alter their social and economic status by attending college with athletic scholarships, graduating, and moving on to professional, middle-class careers. Subsequent generations of the family followed their fathers and uncles to the mats at various institutions, also going on to earn degrees and enter professional occupations. Indeed, Iber contends that wrestling became the family’s “business,” the mechanism by which the Sanchezes extricated themselves from Cheyenne’s working class.

Revealing a previously unstudied aspect of Mexican American life in the state, The Sanchez Family sheds light on another vehicle for the educational, social, and economic advancement of Latinos in other parts of the United States. The first book to examine the role of wrestling in the lives of Mexican Americans, it serves as a foundational text for Latino studies of sports and constructing racial counterscripts.