My Favorite Book, Part 27.

 

When President William McKinley was assassinated, a high-toned politician said, “Now look! That damn cowboy is President of the United States.” The “damn cowboy” in question was Theodore Roosevelt. And he remains, to this day—despite a few Texans and a make-believe movie actor—the only real cowboy to rise to that office.

Roosevelt’s cowboy career is chronicled in The Cowboy President: The American West and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Michael F. Blake.

Blake outlines the circumstances that sent Roosevelt, a patrician New Yorker, to the frontier West where he established cattle ranches in North Dakota. More than an owner, Roosevelt worked alongside his hired hands and became adept at handling horses, working cattle, riding the range, and surviving in a hard land.

Based on detailed research, Blake relates Roosevelt’s cowboy career to his wider life, telling how the lessons he learned in the West colored his endeavors in government service, the military, politics, and family life. The result is a well-rounded picture of the cowboy president that’s interesting, intriguing, and informative.

You’ll close the book with new understanding of and appreciation for “That damn cowboy.”

Lost by a nose.

    I miss the smell of books. It used to be I could walk into any one of a number of bookstores in my area and breathe in the smell of ink or paper or glue or dust or whatever it is that gives bookstores that distinctive smell. They were all different, I suppose, but there was something in the way they touched the nose that they shared.
    Most of those bookstores—along with their counterparts all across the country—are gone now. A few are victims of the recent and ongoing pandemic. Some lost out by being undersold once too often by online predators. And some were done in by the so-called big-box category killers that took over the market in years past, aided by business practices since declared illegal.
    The most venomous of those is still around and, in many places, is the only seller of new books still standing. Visiting those stores just isn’t the same, somehow. And they don’t smell right—they smell like coffee, rather than books.
    There are still some bookstores that smell like bookstores are supposed to smell, but there are fewer of them all the time, and they are increasingly farther between.
    I look forward to my next visit, spending time sniffing out some good books.

 

A look into the future.

Five Star, publisher of several of my books, just sent the cover design for my forthcoming novel, Pinebox Collins.

It’s about a one-legged itinerant undertaker in the Old West.

From the battlefields of the Civil War, Jonathon “Pinebox” Collins wanders the West seeking his place in the world. Cow towns, mining towns, boomtowns, small towns, growing cities—he tries them all.

Along the way, he witnesses what, where, and how the West changes America and the world. And he sees who makes it happen, crossing paths with pivotal people of the times. Among them, “Wild Bill” Hickok, whose trail repeatedly intersects with Pinebox’s.

Pinebox Collins offers a unique view of the Old West, through the eyes of a man who looks death in the eye every day.

The book is due for release in March 2020. Put it on your “to-do” list.

Crass commercialism for Christmas.

Although it has nothing to do with the reason for the season, this is the time of year we shower one another with gifts. Books make fine gifts. They last a long time and the reader gets to open them again and again.

If you want my opinion (a big IF, I admit), books with my name on the cover make fine gifts. Poems. Novels. Short Stories. History. Humor. Adventure. Drama. Conflict. All set in the American West, the best part of the world. You’ll find enjoyable, engaging reading for anyone and everyone from junior high to geriatrics.

Visit www.writerRodMiller.com and www.RawhideRobinson.com for information and links to people who will take your money (but not much of it) and send you books.

Thanks, and have a Merry Christmas—and all other gift-giving occasions.

My Favorite Book, Part 13.

The history of my homeland, the American West, has been of interest to me for as long as I can remember. From Indians to Spanish and Mexican colonizers to explorers to mountain men to pioneer settlers to mining boom towns, I like learning about it all.

But, mostly, I am intrigued by cowboys and the cattle trails and ranges and ranches where they worked. So it will be of no surprise to anyone with similar interests to know that you’ll find a well-thumbed copy of Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries by David Dary on the bookshelf beside my desk.

The book is thoroughly researched, extensive in its reach, and well written. I’ve read it through on more than one occasion. And I refer to it often when verifying facts for something I’m writing, or merely to satisfy my curiosity about some person or place or event. In fact, I just picked it up, and there are no fewer than thirteen bookmarks sticking out of it.

While I cannot claim to know David Dary well, it was a pleasure, on two occasions, to share a table with him at Western Writers of America banquets. (His company was much more enjoyable than the food.)

If you haven’t read Cowboy Culture, you should. You’ll soon see why it won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, the Spur Award from Western Writers of America, and the Westerners International Award.

And you’ll come away knowing about real cowboys, as opposed to the fast-riding, gun-toting “cowboys” of movie, TV, and Western novel fame who seldom, if ever, cross paths with a cow. 

Post Script: I just learned from one of our readers that David Dary passed away just one week ago. That's the loss of a fine historian, writer, and man. 

My Favorite Book, Part 9.

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols is a strange book. It can make you laugh so hard you’ll fall off your chair. And it can make you cry.

The characters in the story are quirky, odd, strange, eccentric, and altogether realistic and believable. Nichols captures the dialect and vernacular of the people who have populated the northern New Mexico mountains for centuries in ways that tickle the ear. Equally well-drawn are the gringo interlopers who, in the name of “progress,” attempt to upset the delicate balance between people and the land.

While there are serious issues at work here, treated with the gravity they deserve, the missteps and mistakes of combatants on all sides add humor and hilarity to the telling. Pride and poverty, affluence and hubris, nature and the supernatural, legalities and scofflaws all play a role, and together they weave a wonderful tale of a town trying to survive in spite of itself.

Lies They Tell Writers, Part 35: Nobody reads anymore.

A lot of the advice you get as a writer is discouraging: Writing a book is hard work. Publishers won’t read your manuscript. Self-published books don’t sell. Bookstores won’t stock your books. Nobody reads anymore.

There’s an element of truth in all those disheartening claims.

Except the last one.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that nobody reads anymore. It’s usually attributed to all the other distractions competing for former readers’ time: TV, movies, music, video games, social media, and so on and so on.

But, the fact is, according to the Pew Research Center, 73% of adults in the United States read a book in the past 12 months. And that hasn’t changed much over the past five years. Most of them—65%—read a printed book, 28% read an ebook, and 14% listened to an audiobook. Not only are people reading, they’re reading (and listening to) multiple formats (which is why that adds up to 107%).

How much Americans read is also holding steady. Readers read an average of 12 books a year, with the “typical” reader getting through four books. Obviously, readers like me are pushing up the average—in the past year I’ve read somewhere around 60 or 70 books.

There’s no doubt people are still reading.

I only wish they were reading my books.

My Favorite Book, Part 2

 

Long, long ago in a year that had a nine and a seven in it, I was working at a small television station in Idaho. I was a master control switcher, directed newscasts and interview shows, put together local commercials, dubbed videotapes, and performed various other production tasks. One day a coworker, who worked downstairs and wrote local commercials, left for a job in radio.

“You have a degree in journalism,” the boss said. “You must know how to write. Do you want to write commercials?”

I said yes. But I knew nothing about advertising—how and why it worked, who did it, where, how, or any of that stuff. Learning that stuff seemed like a good idea, so I visited the library and started home-schooling myself.

One of the books I read was From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, by an irreverent and accomplished New York City advertising agency copywriter (and later agency owner) named Jerry Della Femina.

He made the advertising agency business sound fun—and frustrating, challenging, annoying, and exasperating.

But mostly fun.

The book led me to pursue work as an advertising agency copywriter. I’ve been at it nearly forty years since; now part-time. While not as glamorous as Madison Avenue, working at agencies in Idaho, Nevada, and Utah has been much as Della Femina described it in that influential book I count among my favorites.

Besides all the fun, the job hasn’t involved much heavy lifting and seldom requires breaking a sweat. And, somehow, it led me to wonder—after writing advertising for some twenty years—if maybe I could write a poem.

Now look.

Can you judge a book by its cover?

The old saying says no—you can’t judge a book by its cover.

Book publishers say yes—readers ought to be able to glean a good deal about what’s inside a book by the nature of its cover. And, for the most part, they live by that belief. The covers of romance novels share a certain similarity. As do mysteries. And science fiction. And thrillers. And fantasy. And other categories of books.

Including, of course, Westerns.

Which brings up the subject of my forthcoming Western novel (look for it in December), Rawhide Robinson Rides the Tabby Trail. While it is certainly a Western novel, you’d have to cast a pretty wide loop to catch it with the usual herd.

For one thing, it’s humorous—something I think is sadly lacking in Westerns. And most other fiction, for that matter. For another thing, while there are a few confrontations where people get shot at, but I don’t think anybody gets shot.

And again, like its Spur Award-winning predecessor, Rawhide Robinson Rides the Range, it’s filled with lies—or, to use more polite language, tall tales.

Or, as Rawhide Robinson would have you believe, the absolute truth.

Those differences are probably why the cover doesn’t look much like a typical Western novel. Still, the cover does tell you something about what’s inside—a book that’s not much like a typical Western novel.

Finally, if the quality of the artwork on the cover is any indication, what’s inside is likely to be pretty darn good.

If I do say so myself.

Advance Coverage.

The artwork above is the cover design for The Lost Frontier: Momentous Moments in the Old West You May Have Missed. I think it’s quite handsome.

Behind the cover are nearly thirty nonfiction accounts from Western history about events and incidents on the frontier that haven’t received the notice they deserve from serious historians. They’re interesting, important, informative, and entertaining and I hope fans of the Old West learn something new.

The folks at TwoDot/Globe-Pequot, publisher of the book, are really on the ball, for while The Lost Frontier won’t hit the shelves until May, it has been listed with online booksellers for quite some time—so, if you’re a long-term planner, you can log on and pre-order a copy.

We Come Bearing Gifts.

The holiday season is upon us, with celebrations of many kinds, from Christmas to Boxing Day to Kwanzaa to Hanukkah to Saturnalia and so on.

While there is much to celebrate and reflect on this season, there is also a crassly commercial aspect to it all—the hectic race to give and receive gifts. My contribution to all the commercialism is the suggestion that there is no finer gift than a good book.

Books have shelf life. The recipient can enjoy it now, and later, and later yet again. Books don’t spoil, dry up and blow away, wilt or wither, crash, lose power, fade, or otherwise lose their luster. A good book can bring hours of enjoyment—not only to the owner, but to others it is shared with, as well.

There are books for every age and every taste, on every subject and for every interest. A good book is engaging and involving, and, by its very nature, interactive. Reading stretches the imagination and grows gray cells. It can be a solitary or a social activity. Using a book requires nothing but light—no batteries, no assembly, no wires, no tools. A book is portable—you can take it with you and use it almost anywhere and everywhere.

As you go down your gift list, consider a book for every name you find.

And, to sum up with a self-serving, greedy, avaricious suggestion, check out the books at www.writerRodMiller.com. Somebody, somewhere, might like one of them.

If not, there are plenty of alternatives. So, by all means, give good books.