Here are capsule reviews of several recent nonfiction releases:
ZERO 3 BRAVO: Solo Across America in a Small Plane; by Mariana Gosnell; Alfred A. Knopf; $25; 371 pages.Reader beware: Steer clear of this volume if you're afraid of catching the flying bug. Mariana Gosnell, formerly a reporter for Newsweek, spent one recent summer flying from New York to California and back by way of small, often family-run airports, and she makes the trip seem too interesting, and too affordable, to pass up.
Gosnell stops at the predictable tourist sites en route - the Wright Brothers museum in North Carolina, Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, etc. - but "Zero 3 Bravo" is redeemed by the airplane tales, and people, Gosnell delivers along the way. The pilot with chewing gum in his fuel tank: He bought a pack of the same brand of gum, chewed a stick, dropped it in a jar of aviation fuel and found - whew - that it dissolved within a week. The stump-hunter in Alabama: Firewood dealers can get such a premium for "fat" wood, to which dead virgin pine turns if left in the ground, that it actually pays to hunt stumps from the air.
"Zero 3 Bravo" grows dull in places, as Gosnell apparently records every one of her 70-odd landings, but the book is infectious nonetheless, in part because the rural airport is an increasingly endangered species. That's the bad news. The good news is that small-airport culture is extraordinarily friendly - Gosnell was offered a meal and a place to stay most everywhere she went. The author's 1950 Luscombe Silvaire Model 8F cost her a mere $3,100.
WALKING DOWN THE WILD: A Journey Through the Yellowstone Rockies; by Gary Ferguson; Simon & Schuster; $20; 204 pages.
It's been called, for a decade and more, the "sagebrush rebellion" - the ongoing protest among ranchers, farmers and businessmen over government's generally hands-off stewardship of its vast land holdings. Gary Ferguson, a Montana resident and writer of hiking guides, refers only occasionally to the sagebrush rebellion in this book, but it's clearly a major impetus behind his decision to embark on a 500-mile trek roughly circling two national parks, Yellowstone and Grand Teton.
What he finds is joy and danger: joy in natural springs, frigid mountain mornings and chance trail encounters with two- and four-footed beasts; and danger in the guise of grizzly bears, thin ice and rapacious human development. It's the last thing, of course, that proves most frightening, for commercial interests threaten everything else. Entering Targhee National Forest from Yellowstone seems to Ferguson like stepping from the Louvre into a junkyard, the park perfectly defined by the clear-cut lumbering up to its border.
Ferguson is not a poetic writer, but he adeptly blends local history with personal experience, biology with politics, to produce a complex portrait of the Yellowstone ecosystem.