40 Essential Arizona Books - A stroll though the state's literary landscape

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Editor's note: Ahead of this year's Festival of Books, I asked a few local
writers to share some thoughts about their favorite Arizona books.
This list is not meant to be the definitive list of essential Arizona reading;
it's merely a stroll through the vast literary landscape of books about Arizona.
My thanks to Margaret Regan, Brian Smith, Tom Zoellner, Tom Prezelski,
Jeff Gardner and Tirion Morris for their contributions. Dig in and add your
favorites online at TucsonWeekly.com. —Jim Nintzel

Tombstone from a Woman's Point of View: The Correspondence of
Clara Spalding Brown, July 7, 1880, to November 14, 1883, edited
by Lynn R. Bailey. Journalist Clara Spalding Brown, like J. Ross Browne,
took a dim view of Territorial Tucson. Its flat-roofed adobes and narrow
streets made this "odd city" look "more like an ancient Bible town than
anything else," she wrote. But her real subject was Tombstone at the height
of silver mania. Brown lived in the burgeoning mining city from 1880 to 1882,
and reported on life there in dispatches for the San Diego Daily Union,
later compiled as a book. A rare and welcome document of Wild West Arizona
written by a woman, her work chronicles the roughness of the raucous mining town.
She took note of the town's prevailing hatred of Chinese workers and gave
special attention to the lives of women in this male-dominated camp. The
"respectable" women of her social class trying to "civilize" the place lived
side by side with women who labored in the boarding houses and restaurants
that served miners. The women of the "demi-monde"—prostitutes—were "very
numerous and showy." Not surprisingly, women of different classes rarely
intermingled. "As long as so many members of the demi-monde" patronized
the town dances, Brown wrote, "many honest women will hesitate to attend."
—Margaret Regan

The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands
by Margaret Regan. At once a denunciation of U.S. immigration policy and
reportage from the valleys of death, also known as deserts between Tucson
and Mexico. I could not get Josseline Quinteros, this 14-year-old girl who
expired in the desert, out of my head. All the migrant deaths humanized here.
We aren't at war with them yet we let them die. This is a revealing, course-correcting
work of journalism stacked with potent detail and wizard storytelling, much
based on her prize-winning work in these very pages. This life-long Regan
fan says anyone with a heart ought to read this. —Brian Smith

Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. My dad finally got me to read Edward Abbey.
Not sure why I'd resisted for years. The writing is punchy and beautiful, crammed
of muscular yet poetic descriptions of nature and people, balefully anti-growth and
pro-booze ... my kinda thing. In ways it captured the zeitgeist of the Southwest
I was born into, before the desert became over-manhandled. When I read it, I realized
that old Nam vet George Washington Hayduke was likely the source of the inspiration
to get me into my own pro-desert sabotages on bulldozers and tractors out in the
desert east of Harrison Road when I was 10 years old. Did little good. That desert
got gang-raped, now sad with condos and insanely air-conditioned big-front-glass
stores. —Brian Smith