Word: shoumatoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Legends of the American Desert (Knopf) Alex Shoumatoff, a New Yorker contributor, spent 25 years researching and writing this book about the U.S. Southwest. The result is a sometimes bewildering but continually fascinating profusion of stories and themes. Shoumatoff writes knowingly and affectionately about indigenous Indians and those who came later. The scenery is spectacular, and there is nothing dry or dusty in this desert...
...have begun as an investigation into the ways in which the region's history has been written since ancient times by the scarcity of water. That would have been logical and achievable--a good, sensible subject with a reasonable stopping point. But by his own account, author Alex Shoumatoff, a veteran writer about distant parts for the New Yorker, spent too much time on the project for a neat, orderly account, traveled too far, read too many books, heard too many semitruths and beguiling lies from too many plausible liars and improbable truth tellers. He also lived through about...
...long- distance runners--tall, lean, high-cheekboned men who play a nonstop kickball game over what may be two days and at distances of up to 100 miles. But when they cross the finish line, they more or less ignore the winner, acting as if nothing unusual had happened. Shoumatoff writes that the Tarahumara never accepted the Spanish culture and religion, but that lately their culture has been brutalized by narco-traficantes, drug dealers who terrorized them into growing marijuana and opium poppies. He comments wryly that pot and heroin are "the new treasure of the Sierra Madre...
...author spends time at Big Mountain, Hopi territory still settled by refusenik Navajos, "way out in the Arizona desert, off the modern grid." A traveler who has returned from the back of beyond may be tempted to claim more acceptance by the locals than was really the case, but Shoumatoff plays it straight. He made some headway and won some trust, but he reports that the wall Navajos have erected against white wannabes and sight-seeing Anglo journalists is very real...
...Shoumatoff gives less space to Anglo culture, but he does introduce the reader to Stanley Marsh, the whimsical gent who buried 10 baby blue Cadillacs on end near Amarillo, Texas, and to New Age purveyors of what he accurately calls hooey in Sedona, Ariz. For the refried Spanish architecture mandatory in the tonier quarter of Santa Fe, N.M., he borrows a glorious slur from an exasperated architect that the regional hothead Edward Abbey could have said more noisily but not better: Taco Deco...