Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • 68

THE SUNDAY JOURNAL FICTION 1. "1st to Die." James Patterson. Little, Brown, $26.95. 2. A Painted House." John.

Grisham. Doubleday, $27.95. 3. "Scarlet Feather." Maeve Binchy. Dutton, $25.95.

4. "The Bonesetter's Daughter." Amy Tan. Putnam, $25.95. 5. "A Day Late and a Dollar Short." Terry McMillan.

Viking, $25.95. 6. "Edge of Danger." Jack Higgins. Putnam, $25.95. 7.

"The First Counsel." Brad Metaer. Warner, $25.95. 8. "The Vendetta Defense." Lisa Scottoline. HarperCollins, $25.

.9. "Mystic River." Dennis Lehane Morrow, $25. 10. "A Darkness More NONFICTION 1. "Who Moved My Cheese?" Spencer Johnson.

Putnam, 2 "The Wisdom of Menopause." Dr. Christiane Northrup. Bantam, $27.95. 3. "The Prayer of Jabez." Bruce W.

Wilkinson. Multnonv ah, $9.99. 4. "Body for Ufe." Bill Phillips and Michael D'Orso. Harper Collins, $25.

5. "Secrets of the Baby Whisperer." Tracy Hogg. Ballan-tine, $22. 6. "The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and The Completely Ridiculous In American Life." Bill O'Reilly.

Broadway, $23.95. 7. "Ufe Makeovers." Cheryl Richardson. Broadway, 8. "Ice Bound." Jerr -Nielsen.

Talk Mira- max, $24.95. 9. "Tuesdays with Morrie." Mitch Albom. Doubleday, $19.95. 10.

"Longaberger: An American Success Story." Dave Longaberger. Harper-Business, $25. Publishers Weekly- Than Night." Michael Wl II lbllja LIVklf Brown, $25.95. NOTABLE QUOTE: "The house smells of swamp tea and old underwear and boiled roots and dark rooms." "THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MV DREAMS' BY NASDIJJ I DAVID STEINBERG We stem vistas Of the Book accompanies exhibition of Denver art collection Series explores Medieval Spain K4 1 By David Steinberg Journal Staff Writer Denver art collector Philip Anschutz has lent his paintings of the American West to many museums, but never to the prestigious one in his hometown the Denver Art Museum. "I don't know why (he hasn't).

Maybe it's been a desire for the family to have a private life in Denver," said Joan Carpenter Troccoli, the museum's deputy director. That changed late last year: Anschutz invited the museum to present the exhibit and allowed Troccoli nf 4 Hl- i It A. 1 It 3 if ii lllk rTlT i I THE SOUTHWEST: This Is Gerard art collector Philip Anschutz. SO if i to curate it. picked and chose what we wanted to show.

There were about 106 works that wefe shown," Troccoli said; is a survey collection and I wanted to make sure that people could see how extensive it really is because it covers virtually the entire history of the art of the West, which I start thinking about in the 1820s to the present day. And that collection has all of those decades represented." The Anschutz collection itself contains more works than what are in the exhibit or what are in the book accompanying the show. But Troccoli said "Painters and the American West The Anschutz Collection" by Joan Carpenter Troccoli with Marlene Chambers and Jane Comstock. Essay by Sarah Anschutz Hunt Denver Art MuseumYale University Press, $45, 218 pp. THE ANSCHUTZ COLLECTION Curtis Delano's "Evening Cloud," a 20th-century work owned 1 SI 1 it Jtiiv tin' 5r hi aJ the land work for them, vividly teaches her readers something new: Sometimes the land just spits you out like something rotten or like a runt in the litter left to die.

Chas, Davis failed rancher, is a tributary of a river that runs deep in American culture and, like spring water, is always new in the telling, fresh See FRUSTRATED on PAGE F7 Journal Lecture series The University of New Mexico Institute for Medieval Studies is sponsoring the lecture series "Medieval Spain Land of Three Cultures" Monday, March 19, through Thursday, March 22. The lectures, which are free and open to the public, will be held in Woodward Hall 101 on the UNM campus. Here is the schedule of speakers, topics and dates: Joseph F. O'Callaghan speaks on "Frontier Society in the Land of Three Religions: Medieval Spain before the Discovery of America," 7 p.m. Monday, March 19.

O'Callaghan, a professor emeritus at Ford-ham University, is one of the leading scholars on medieval Spain in the United States. Joseph F. O'Callaghan talks on "Alfonso the Learned, and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: A Personal Testament." 3:30 p.rrv Tuesday, March 20. Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo speaks on "Nationalism and Internationalism in the Art of Reconquest p.m. Tuesday, March 20.

This is a slide-lecture. Valdez del Alamo is an associate professor of art history at Montclair State University. She specializes in the art of medieval Spain. Thomas F. Gllck on "The Transmission of Arabic Science in Latin and Hebrew." 4 p.m.

Wednesday, March 21. Glick is a professor of history and director of the Institute of Medieval History at Boston University. Judith Cohen on "Women and Musical Transmission in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Cultures." 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 21. This is a lecture-demonstration.

Cohen, a musicologist, teaches on the graduate faculty of York University in Toronto. Judith Cohen on "Music of the Spanish Borderlands," 3:30 p.m. Thursday, March 22. This is a lecture-demonstration. (Cohen will also give a concert of Sephardic and village songs of medieval Spain at 5 p.m.

Sunday, March 25, at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Fourth and Bridge SW. Tickets are $12 and are available in advance at the Cultural Center and the Jewish Community Center, 5520 Wyoming NE;) See LECTURE bA PAGE F7 aS it iSI Book award winners The Mountains Plains Booksellers Association will present its 2001 regional book awards at a 6:30 p.m. banquet Saturday, March 24, at La Fonda in Santa Fe. Tickets are $40 and proceeds benefit regional literacy groups. Ordering deadline is Tuesday, March 20.

For credit-card reservations call toll-free (800) 752-0249 or go to the Web site www.mountainsplains.org or e-mail with ticket request. These are the winners: "Winter Range" by Claire Davis. Fiction. "The Blood Runs Uke a River Through My Dreams" by Nasdijj. Nonfiction.

"Painters and the American West The Anschutz Collection." The Arts. "Clarence Goes Out West and Meets a Purple Horse" by Jean Eckman Adams. Children. "Shaped by Wind and Water" by Ann Haymond Zwinger. Spirit of the West Literary Award.

that's another first the first time that a book, rather than a catalog, has been published. "The collection has had earlier publications and most of them have contained a brief introductory essay followed by full-page reproductions of the work with a little caption describing the work," she said. The format for the book is different, Troccoli said. Two essays are presented, one an extensive personal essay by Anschutz's daughter, but also the reproductions, which have captions, are grouped by subject matter. Subjects include portraiture, still life, genre painting and landscape.

Troccoli calls it "the best collection dealing with the? American West held by a private individual." Nationally and regionally famous artists who lived in New Mexico or who have visited and painted here are well-represented in the collection. See BOOK on PAGE F7 Sometimes there are moments that converge in oddball ways. Like the two moments Monday morning. Both were about the Middle Ages, generally 450 to 1500. During a break from writing this column, I was reading an e-mail about the upcoming lecture series on "Medieval Spain Land of Three Cultures." Well, the e-mail was about a folio or folder, that first surfaced in the 15th century, the Late Middle Ages, in the lowlands south of Antwerp.

It was a time before books, according to the e-mail message. The message said the folio was known as "Oculatum 636," and supposedly contained a method of surviving the cruelties of life, a life without plumbing, electricity, planes, cars, CDs and Palm Pilots. Fast forward to the present-day United States. The e-mail says an Englishman living in Arkansas has interpreted the "Oculatum 636" and it's some sort of salve for those living with today's stressful life. I'm not going to pursue this folio any further.

I can live with stress but the primary order of business was writing the column. So let's divert to what's happening right here in River City the free lecture series at the University of New Mexico. The series, now in its 16th year, falls under the UNM Institute for Medieval Studies, which Professor Helen Damico heads. Tony Cardenas, who chairs the Spanish and Portuguese Department, and v-laire Waters, an assistant professor of English, organized the program for the series with Damico. As the series theme indicates, the lectures will shine a light on a shifting multicultural (ChristianSpanish, JewishHebrew and MuslimArab) society.

"Culturally, medieval SpainIberia was extraordinarily rich," Waters said. "It's important for us now because of the rewards and difficulties of a multicultural society that made Europe more culturally advanced through its poetry, art and architecture and science." And Cardenas added, the multicultural society witnessed almost 800 years of struggle, of crusading. Arabs invaded Spain in the eighth century, dominated it for a good portion of the next six centuries and were gradually pushed out in 1492. That date sound familiar? It was the year of the Reconquest, pushing the Arabs back into North Africa. It was the year of the union of the crowns of See FREE on PAGE F7 OASIS IN by Denver frustrated "Winter Range" fey Claire Davis Picador, $23, 272 pp.

Rkvikw by Susan Salter Reynolds The unexpected and unfamiliar are high peaks in the range of literary achievements, particularly in the last decade. Characters surprise by changing, strange CONTRASTING Van Soelen's realistic figures mourning. THE ANSCHUTZ COLLECTION STYLES: Santa Fe artist Theodore "Burial," painted about 1928, has mountains In the background and elongated In the foreground that emphasize their heart of 'Range' cattle ranching and barbershop conversation, is overly familiar and slightly wooden. All the action, all the transformation, all the. insight take place in the hearts and souls (not minds) of her characters.

In this she resembles Annie But Davis, in revealing to us a furious frustrated character, the product of several generations of cattle farming who cannot make Furious, 'R A CLAIRE DAVIS ED IsfWcHoin of rancher at landscapes appear, unfamiliar vernacular is translated. "Domestic novel," in these information-hungry times, is one of the worst things a critic can hurl at a writer; diner-talk is out; adjectives like "plain" and "predictable" signify failure. Everyone wants to be surprised. The setting of "Winter Range," Claire Davis' first novel, does not surprise. Her West, the West of critics, academics, and readers debated the necessity of authorial intrusion.

Unself -conscious now, we can write about ourselves writing, about why we do what we do, where we came from, and what the path we followed brought us. Even more, -people will listen, will want to know. Such is the motive, in part, behind the Credo Nature writer expounds on goals, motivation 1 series of books by Milkweed Press. Prominent nature writers Rick Bass, Pattiann Rogers, Scott Russell Sanders and William Kittredge in 1999, and in 2000 Robert Michael Pyle and Ann Haymond Zwinger expound on goals and motivations behind theirwork. What comes of this is an insightful glimpse into the "Shaped by Wind and Water: Reflections of a Naturalist" by Ann Haymond Zwinger Milkweed Editions, $12, 160 pp.

Review by Janna Bialek Thank goodness we've passed the days when craft of nature writing today. Zwinger would agree, although she admits that "the contemplative character of natural history writing may not. move mountains quickly enough." She knows with complete conviction that good writing is enough to See NATURE on PAGE F7.