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Barbara Kingsolver READERS' PICK: May peacock feathers cover the streets of downtown Tucson and shower their lucky selves down upon the talents of Barbara Kingsolver. Her simple but elegant prose delivers strong themes gently--whether they're the complicated issues surrounding Native American identity, or relationships between Mexican Americans and whites, Kingsolver has an uncanny knack for solving political issues without the reader being bludgeoned over the head with a message. With heavy-hitting local woman writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko on the shelf, Kingsolver's love and optimism no doubt play a large part in her popularity. It is precisely hope rather than despair that have lead The Weekly's readers to select Kingsolver's work to take home. READERS' POLL RUNNER-UP: Charles Bowden doesn't write books that you curl up and read while sipping herbal tea and escaping the world around you. Bowden turns over stones about life in the Southwest that not many people are comfortable looking under. Whether they scare you, enthrall you or infuriate you, Bowden's books illicit a more active response than just nodding your head and saying, "I see." Do not expect a straight line from A to B as you enter Bowden's world of passions and obsessions as the most beautiful and brutal environment on earth finds itself bedfellows with the missionaries of commerce. Bowden is eternally searching. It is a restless search that takes him from the sun-pounded desert where death claims more souls than the Border Patrol, to the gilded corporate offices of Phoenix businessmen, to the lavish lives of the Southwest's biggest dreamers and the drug cartels. All of this is not separated neatly into columns for the reader; rather, it is woven into a series of fevered dreams. STAFF PICK: We decided that Larry McMurtry is around these parts often enough to be counted as a Tucsonan. Larry's on a serious roll these days. In the past year or so, he's released Pretty Boy Floyd (co-written with Tucsonan Diana Ossana), done the screenplay for Floyd, filmed the TV mini-series of Streets of Laredo, released the current best-seller Dead Man's Walk (a prequel to Lonesome Dove), and released another, The Late Child. He writes 'em faster than we can read 'em.
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