“Getting to Know Denver: Five Fabulous Walking Tours,” by Francis J. Pierson (Charlotte Square Press, 211 pages, $19.95)
Christmas-book columns generally start with the flashy, expensive picture books. Not this time, because “Getting to Know Denver” is our top pick for a gift.
Denver may be filling up with rounded-edge “beer-can buildings,” as a local architect puts it, but there are still fine old structures left. Writer-photographer Francis J. Pierson leads readers to many of them in this walking tour.
The tours include LoDo, Auraria, Broadway, Capitol Hill and the old retail/financial districts of 16th and 17th streets. Featured are mostly old buildings, some of them long gone, but there are a few new ones too, not all of them to Pierson’s liking. He calls the Titanium Lofts “more of a cliché than an original statement.”
Pierson’s tart commentary is one of the pleasures of reading “Getting to Know Denver.”
“All the Wild Horses: Preserving the Spirit and Beauty of the World’s Wild Horses,” by Dayton O. Hyde (Voyageur Press, 208 pages, $40)
Horses roam wild in many parts of the world – just think zebra. Many of them are captured in photographs by Rita Summers and Charles G. Summers Jr. in “All the Wild Horses.” But the wild horses we love best are in the American West, and Dayton O. Hyde has been involved with them since he was a teenager in the 1930s.
While this is primarily a picture book, the narrative by Hyde, an old-time cowboy, holds the book together. The author is best when he’s telling stories of his boyhood, when he once promised an Indian not to rat him out for bootlegging if the man would capture a wild sorrel for Hyde. The Indian left two – and took one of
Hyde’s family horses in return.
“Among Wild Horses: A Portrait of the Pryor Mountain Mustangs,” by Lynne Pomeranz (Storey, 144 pages, $16.95)
Lynne Pomeranz concentrates on the mustangs living along a stretch of the Montana-Wyoming border. She combines fine photographs of horses with observations about them. Young mares, she notes, rarely live alone. They go from their mothers’ protection to harem mares and form strong bonds with other mares.
“Big Sky: Wild West Panorama,” by Tim Fitzharris (Firefly Books, 160 pages, $45)
“Big Sky” might as well be called Big Land, because the full-color photographs in this oversize book capture the vast landscapes of the West. Even the close-ups of flowers, such as a two-page spread of Indian paintbrush, depict the sweep of the land. There are no sweet little pictures here. These are not photos for the faint-hearted. The panoramic photographs show the grandeur of the West, the loneliness of mauve and orange desert buttes and the icy cold of snow-covered mountains.
Sandra Dalls is a Denver novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional nonfiction.
