BTA Book Club

The Boyce Thompson Book Club Arboretum Book Club focuses on books about Arizona as well as books written by Arizona authors. Over the past 5 years, members have read 65 books including novels, memoirs, mysteries and Arizona history. The Book Club meets on the first Friday of the month at 9 AM in the Smith Building Lecture Room and is open to all book lovers. The atmosphere is casual, and light refreshments are served, followed by a lively discussion of the month’s book. Members of the Book Club also enjoy occasional field trips related to books of the month. In July the group attended the Payson Book Festival, and in September will be going to Ranch Museum. Enlightening visits from authors such as Jan Cleere and Carolyn Niethammer have been another highlight of the Book Club. The authors offer further insight to their books and describe their writing process.

The Book Club is free for Arboretum members and free with admission to the Arboretum. For more information or to RSVP, email Vicki at btabookclub@msn.com

October 5: "Letters from Wupatki" by Courtney Reeder Jones

When David and Courtney Reeder Jones moved into two rooms reached by ladder in a northern Arizona Indian ruin, they had been married only two weeks. Except for the ruin’s cement floors, which were originally hardened mud, and skylights instead of smoke holes, the rooms were exactly as they had been 800-years before.

The year was 1938, and the newlyweds had come to Wupatki National Monument as full-time National Park Service caretakers for the ruin. Remote in time and place, their story as described in Courtney’s letters will take readers into a dramatic landscape of red rocks, purple volcanoes, and endless blue sky. Here, some 60-years ago, two young people came to terms with their new life together and with their nearly total reliance upon each other and their Navajo neighbors.

November 2: "Gardens in the Dunes" by Leslie Marmon Silko

A sweeping, multifaceted tale of a young Native American pulled between the cherished traditions of a heritage on the brink of extinction and an encroaching white culture, Gardens in the Dunes is the powerful story of one woman’s quest to reconcile two worlds that are diametrically opposed.

At the center of this struggle is Indigo, who is ripped from her tribe, the Sand Lizard people, by white soldiers who destroy her home and family. Placed in a government school to learn the ways of a white child, Indigo is rescued by the kind-hearted Hattie and her worldly husband, Edward, who undertake to transform this complex, spirited girl into a “proper” young lady. Bit by bit, and through a wondrous journey that spans the European continent, traipses through the jungles of Brazil, and returns to the rich desert of Southwest America, Indigo bridges the gap between the two forces in her life and teaches her adoptive parents as much as, if not more than, she learns from them.

December 7: "Desert Wife" by Hilda Faunce

Hilda Faunce lived at an Indian trading post on an Arizona reservation during the years of the first World War. In Desert Wife she traces her journey with her husband from Oregon to Arizona in a wagon pulled by two horses across the desolate North and Southwest and then their life running the trading post in northern Arizona.

Although she had some of the prejudices of the time, Hilda grew to have respect for and friendship with the Navajo while living there. She records the intimate life of the Navajo as well as the story of her life as a trader living in a remote settlement. She dispensed medical care and observed medicine men. During the Spanish flu she had to helplessly watch as entire families died, and her own husband fell ill.

From quiet moments of contentment to dramatic moments of mortal danger, Hilda Faunce has a voice that speaks to the reader of the colorful desert and ancients lives of the first Americans. This is a firsthand account of the lives of native Americans as seen by a woman of the 20th century.