Treasure trove of local works waiting to be discovered at Library’s reading room

Author Philip Caputo strolled into the Patagonia Public Library one day last month to drop off a signed copy of his latest book, “Wandering Souls.” According to Booklist, his most recent work is “a searing yet deeply compassionate story collection that explores the fragile borders between survival, guilt, and redemption.” We accept!

The “magical kingdom of Patagonia” has always drawn creative people to live in its mountains and its villages. Caputo is one of a handful of local authors we like to call our own. And the Patagonia Public Library has set aside a trove of their works in the Reading Room. The multiple-award-winning writers who fill up that trove with the greatest bounty are Caputo, Gary Paul Nabhan and Jim Harrison. 

Philip Caputo may be best known for the memoir “A Rumor of War” (1977), recounting his experiences as platoon commander in the Marines in Vietnam. Before the book’s debut, Caputo had spent years as a journalist, including as a war correspondent who saw the fall of Saigon and was wounded in the Lebanese civil war. 

Since then, he has written almost 20 books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction, and 11 novels. The author’s books are set all over the world from Sudan to South Florida. “Crossers,” published in 2009, is a novel set against a backdrop of drug and illegal-immigrant smuggling on the Mexican border. 

Many days, he says, even most days, he can be found working on his next project in the library’s Reading Room. We are proud to carry over 15 of Caputo’s works. Check one out and maybe you can discuss the work with the author when you return it to the library.

Gary Paul Nabhan lives among us as an ethnobotanist and ecologist with a great interest in native foods and their peoples. Referring to Nabhan’s first published book, “The Desert Smells Like Rain” (1982), author Barry Lopez wrote, “Gary Nabhan’s compassionate observation of Papago land ethics is important work, capable of broad application. He is a naturalist in the full sense of the word, because he has not forgotten the people.” That describes Nabhan’s entire oeuvre (so far) of 35 books, with titles including “Coming Home to Eat,” “Tequila!,” “Agave Spirits,” which won the James Beard Award, and his most recent book, “Against the American Grain, Borderlands History of Resistance.”

In it, Nabhan tells the stories of those who have shaped our history through bold resistance. “Whether they were Indigenous, LatinX, Catholic priests and nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it has been the resisters, performance artists, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins of society who constantly reshape the faces and fabric of America,” he wrote. Our little library offers up over two dozen of Nabhan’s works. Come in and sample a few!

“Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life,” is a new biography of Harrison, and it joins 30 of Harrison’s works housed in our library. Harrison is known most popularly for his novels (remember the novel-turned-film “Legends of the Fall”), poetry and essays, and, among proud locals, for holding court at the Wagon Wheel during his final years spent in Patagonia. In Todd Goddard’s biography, Harrison emerges “as a complicated man possessing large appetites for drinking, smoking, food, and sex” (publishersweekly.com). 

His greatest passions were poetry and nature. Harrison wrote that his “intimacy with the natural world had been a substitute for religion, or a religion of another sort.” “The River,” one of Harrison’s later poems, is illustrative:

Then again maybe we’ll be cast

at the speed of light through the universe

to God’s throne. His hair is bounteous.

All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there.

The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back

so as not to frighten the little ones.

Even now they remember this divine habitat.

Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river?

We’ll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.

— Jim Harrison, “The River” (excerpt), Dead Man’s Float (2016)

Todd Goddard will speak about Harrison and read from his new biography at the Tin Shed Theater on Feb. 21 at 2 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Patagonia Public Library.