Adopt-a-Book: Phoenix 2017

Displaying 1 - 9 of 9
Cover of Arizona /  Isamu Noguchi, Issey Miyake.

Arizona

Adoption Amount: $325
An attractive, slipcased catalog for a collaborative exhibition of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, painter Genichiro Inokuma, and designer Issey Miyake at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Japan, highlighting the mutual influence of the three friends and their hybrid Japanese and American cultures. After forming a close friendship in New York City in the 1950s, Noguchi took recent Japanese immigrant Inokuma to Poston, Arizona, the site of an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in World War II where Noguchi lived voluntarily in solidarity with his countrymen,... Read More
Arizona highways.

Arizona Highways

Adoption Amount: $500
“Civilization Follows the Improved Highway.” That was and still is the motto of the enduring and always alluring travel magazine Arizona Highways.  It was first published in 1925 as an engineering newsletter by the Arizona Highway Department. By the 1930s, it had segued into a magazine documenting the road construction of the expanding highway system throughout Arizona. In the 1940s, the magazine excelled as one of the first color illustrated travel magazines at the forefront of color printing technology. Arizona Highways attracted not only travel loving readers,... Read More
Arizona highways.

Arizona Highways

Adoption Amount: $500
“Civilization Follows the Improved Highway.” That was and still is the motto of the enduring and always alluring travel magazine Arizona Highways.  It was first published in 1925 as an engineering newsletter by the Arizona Highway Department. By the 1930s, it had segued into a magazine documenting the road construction of the expanding highway system throughout Arizona. In the 1940s, the magazine excelled as one of the first color illustrated travel magazines at the forefront of color printing technology. Arizona Highways attracted not only travel loving readers,... Read More
Book cover of The Desert Garden

The Desert Garden

Adoption Amount: $300
This slim book about native plants found in the Phoenix regional area, circa 1933, was written at a time when the population of the city was just under 50,000 people. It’s a self published book with the author providing both text and simple pen and ink illustrations of the plants throughout the book, including the book’s cover. The term "the desert garden" refers to the natural landscape surrounding the Phoenix area, including Phoenix mountain park, Camelback mountain, Papago Park, and Squaw Peak, as opposed to a garden of desert loving plants. The title is a bit of a misnomer, with the... Read More
Cover of Not all Okies are white :  the lives of Black cotton pickers in Arizona

Not All Okies Are White

Adoption Amount: $300
The author of this book is currently a professor of English at the University of Arizona. Sixteen years ago, Geta J. LeSeur collected oral histories from Black cotton pickers in Arizona. These are a special population of migrant workers who formed their own community (not by choice, of course) the town of Randolph, Arizona from 1930 through 1960. Each chapter is named after the person speaking in the oral history interview. There are family photographs throughout the book. This work is an essential part of Arizona state history. Read More
The Passing of the Frontier

The Passing of the Frontier

Adoption Amount: $250
"The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more intimate, or more beloved." So begins the first page of this pocket-sized book, introducing the reader to the range, the mines, the cowboys, and cattle trails of the American West.  The author, Emerson Hough, was a journalist who traveled all over the west in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and witnessed the area transform from wilderness into settled states. His articles on buffalo hunting at Yellowstone inspired the support of Congress to pass the National Park Protection Act in 1894.  This first... Read More
cover: Pattern and process in desert ecosystems

Pattern and Process in Desert Ecosystems

Adoption Amount: $300
This book is a collection of chapters, each written by experts in their ecological discipline. It covers the role of both insects and vertebrate animals (those with a backbone) in desert ecosystems, how nutrients move through the system (‘nutrient cycling’ is a hot topic for those who study ecosystems), and how plants adapt to the soils and rainfall in deserts. An important text for anyone who studies these phenomenon in deserts and elsewhere. Read More
Sonoran Desert Summer John Alcock

Sonoran Desert Summer

Adoption Amount: $300
John Alcock is a behavioral ecologist and professor at Arizona State University.  He writes in a very approachable style (similar to more popular and famous biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson) that splendidly reveals his passion and appreciation of desert life as a naturalist to the general public.  This 1990 title, “Sonoran Desert Summer,” is marvelously illustrated with pen and ink drawings by Marilyn Hoff Stewart. Read More
Cover of Western Apache Material Culture

Western Apache Material Culture

Adoption Amount: $300
Together, the Goodwin and Guenther Collections in the Arizona State Museum form the most significant collection of Apache cultural materials dating from the mid-1800s to 1985. In the early 1930s, Grenville Goodwin came to Arizona to attend prep school, but instead was drawn to the Apaches and spent his time studying their way of life. He gathered items from them, and earned the trust of knowledgeable elders who recreated things no longer made – all which he thoroughly documented, detailing their construction, meaning, and use. Edgar and Minnie Guenther were missionaries on the Fort Apache... Read More