Explore Booksellers picks range from outdoors to economy to noir

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Booksellers in Aspen recommends books that explore the Grand Canyon, economic history and a fictional serial killer.

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From the publisher: A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon, a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”

The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined—and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both.

From Amy Floyd, finance and operations manager: I love how Kevin Fedarko brings both hilarity and gravitas to his tale of the quest to walk the entire length of the Grand Canyon with his best friend, Aspen’s own Pete McBride. A delightful storyteller, Fedarko weaves his memoir of their mishaps and triumphs with a history of the park, the land and geology, and the Indigenous tribes that have been its caretakers for eons. It will make you immediately want to run out to hike in the canyon, or never go hike in the canyon — likely both.  I also recommend picking up McBride’s “The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim” to read alongside to experience all of the photos he took on the journey.

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From the publisher: Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.

Economist Brad DeLong’s book tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

From Alec Sprague, events & programming: “Slouching Towards Utopia” led me to really reflect on where we’re at as a society and a species. It’s a master work, walking through over a century of economic history and detailing how we, the people living today, inherited the fruits of the greatest period of progress in human history. But given all of that progress, you’d think we’d live in something closer to utopia — why don’t we? This is, in my view, the most important question of our time. 

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From the publisher: Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele. To his mind nothing has come close to matching “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.” He prowls the foggy city night — ­bus stops and stretches of darkened beaches and movie houses just emptying out — seeking solitary young women. His funds are running out and his frustrations are growing. Where is the good life he was promised? Why does he always get a raw deal? Then he hooks up with his old Air Corps buddy Brub, now working for the LAPD, who just happens to be on the trail of the strangler who’s been terrorizing the women of the city for months…

Written with controlled elegance, Dorothy B. Hughes’s tense novel is at once an early indictment of a truly toxic masculinity and a twisty page-turner with a surprisingly feminist resolution. A classic of golden age noir, “In a Lonely Place” also inspired Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film of the same name, starring Humphrey Bogart.

From Clare Pearson, book buyer: I picked up this book for the promise of a moody and atmospheric sense of place, and was not disappointed by the subtle character study of evil that followed. “In a Lonely Place” presages the best of its genre while drawing influences from masters such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. I felt as if I were transported into a mid-century film noir, and I experienced the prose in an immersive grayscale. A quick read for fans of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and other mystery classics. 

Type of Story: Review

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