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Meet the critics

The Rocky

Published December 4, 2008 at 10:09 a.m.

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The Rocky books section owes a huge debt of gratitude to the freelancers who review books for us. They are a passionate group of avid readers dedicated to letting you in on the best — and occasionally the worst — that the publishing industry has to offer. Below, you’ll find brief bios of our regular reviewers, as well as a few of their most treasured books.

* CATHIE BECK is a fiction writer, writing professor and journalist. She has published in national literary anthologies and regional and national newspapers and magazines. She is a recipient of the Scripps-Howard Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Denver Woman’s Press Club fiction and non-fiction writing awards, among others. She recently completed a memoir titled Cheap Cabernet.

Favorite books: Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy; anything by Raymond Carver; Joe, by Larry Brown; anything in her little sister’s diary and The Joy of Cooking, 1972 edition.

* LYNN BRONIKOWSKI worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Ohio and Florida before joining the staff of the Rocky in 1983, where she worked as a reporter and editor for 13 years. She is currently a freelance writer and teaches in the journalism department at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Favorite books: The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy; The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd; The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver; The Color of Water, by James McBride; Working, by Studs Turkel.

* REX BURNS has published 17 books, as well as numerous articles, short stories, and reviews. A list of his major titles may be found at www.rexburns.com. He is retired from the University of Colorado.

Favorite books: Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert; The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner; A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway; To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf; Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen; Ulysses, by James Joyce.

* JENNIE A. CAMP holds a Ph.d. in American literature, an MFA in fiction writing, and a BA in journalism. She has published short stories, critical essays, and book reviews in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, among other places. She is a busy mom of five children and lives on the plains east of Platteville, where life with horses, sagebrush, and children sometimes echoes her doctoral work on the archetypes of western American literature. She is an enormous fan of Wallace Stegner’s oeuvre.

Favorite books: The Big Rock Candy Mountain, by Wallace Stegner; Light in August, by William Faulkner; Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison; Beloved, by Toni Morrison; and Indian Killer, by Sherman Alexie.

* DAN DANBOM is the former director of communication for a Denver education company and also writes a humor column for several magazines. He has worked in corporate communications as a writer, editor and manager.

Favorite books : In Dubious Battle, by John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck; The Chronicles of Doo-Dah, by George Lee Walker; The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence S. Ritter; The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris; The Pirate’s Naughty Wench: A Pictorial Tribute, by Seymour Bodds.

* DUANE DAVIS is co-owner of Wax Trax Records, a long-time Denver establishment. He lives with his wife of nearly 40 years and their two cats in the tranquil suburb of Littleton. His house is packed to the rafters with over 2,000 books and an even greater number of records. He loves to read and won’t hesitate to make a complete nuisance of himself while rattling on about the new Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon.

Favorite books: Bleak House, by Charles Dickens; Triumph of Love, by Geoffrey Hill; Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein; Sutree, by Cormac McCarthy; Notebook, by Robert Lowell; The Dream Songs, by John Berryman

* JANE DICKINSON has worked as an editor and/or writer for Glamour Magazine, the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Rocky. She holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, which enables her to quote Chaucer in Middle English while simultaneously running the vacuum or yelling at her two kids. She lives in Littleton, where she is co-owner of the yarn shop A Knitted Peace and where she writes mystery reviews for the Rocky. When she’s not reading mysteries, she likes to read poetry or revisit Jane Austen.

Favorite books: A few of the top mysteries Dickinson has reviewed for the Rocky include Thunder Horse by Peter Bowen, The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips, and the books of Andrea Camilleri and Denise Mina.

* MARY J. ELKINS teaches in the Honors Program at Colorado State University. She is a New Englander by birth and lived in Miami, Fla., for many years before moving to Fort Collins in 2000.

Favorite books: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens; Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson and a great collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage, by Chitra Divakaruni. Also poetry, particularly Irish poetry.

* JOHN C. ENSSLIN is a general assignment reporter at the Rocky. He is also president of the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists and program director for the Denver Press Club, where he organizes various author events. His tragic flaw is that he usually reads only non-fiction.

Favorite books: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville; Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman; Paterson, by William Carlos Williams; Howl, by Allen Ginsberg; On the Road, by Jack Kerouac and Midwinter Day, by Bernadette Mayer.

* BILL GALLO was a staff reporter at the Rocky for 18 years. Currently a freelance writer, his work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, Sports Illustrated, Rocky Mountain Magazine and Film Heritage, among others.

Favorite books: The novels of Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the poems of Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats; Don DeLillo’s masterpiece, Underworld, and many others.

* MARK GRAHAM is a retired Jefferson County high school English teacher who helped to create “Unreal Literature,” an elective class focusing on science fiction, horror and fantasy, which he taught for 25 years to thousands of area students. He has a bachelor of journalism from the University of Missouri and a master’s in English education from the University of Colorado. His articles and interviews have appeared in Castle Rock, Cemetery Dance and other magazines. He has been a book reviewer for the Rocky for 30 years, specializing in science fiction, horror and fantasy.

Favorite books: A few of the favorites among the roughly 2,000 books he has reviewed for the Rocky are (in no particular order): Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom; The Stand, by Stephen King; Watchers, by Dean Koontz; Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Chistopher Moore; Running with the Demon, by Terry Brooks; The Totem, by David Morrell; Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem; One on One, by Tabitha King; Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons; Ghost Story, by Peter Straub. Graham also holds particular fondness for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste (the best book he had to read in high school).

* JOAN HINKEMEYER is a Denver librarian, former English teacher and freelance writer and editor. She is a California native and has also lived in the Midwest.

Favorite books: The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner; Giants in the Earth, by Ole Edvart Rolvaag; Walden, by Henry David Thoreau; Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell; and Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.

* CHRISTINE JACQUES was born in Greenwich Village, which, she says, accounts for some of her literary tastes. She has two degrees from Rutgers University, and, in addition to the Rocky, has reviewed books for Colorado Libraries and CompulsiveReader.com. Christine and her husband live in Golden.

Favorite books: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; Eye of the Blackbird: A Story of Gold in the American West, by Holly Skinner; Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (“comfort food for me now,” she says); and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.

* VERNA NOEL JONES has worked as a writer and/or editor for the Chicago Tribune, the Rocky, Colorado Homes & Lifestyles, Denver Magazine, StrokeSmart Magazine and HealthOne magazine. She also is co-author of the parenting book Don’t Drown in the Carpool. She currently works as a free-lance journalist for various newspapers and magazines.

Favorite books: The Reivers, by William Faulkner; Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte; The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini; Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand; Griffin & Sabine, by Nick Bantock.

* KAREN ALGEO KRIZMAN is a former Entertainment Editor at the Rocky. A resident of Littleton, she is also the former reference librarian at the Highlands Ranch Library.

Favorite books: Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger; James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl; Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, by James Gleick; Beach Music, by Pat Conroy; A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.

* KELLY LEMIEUX holds a degree in creative writing and English literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has an interest in politics, foreign policy and history and is currently at work on a novel.

Favorite books: Chain of Command, by Seymour Hersh; Sorrows of Empire, by Chalmers Johnson; Against Nature, by J. K. Huysmans; and History of the Byzantine State, by George Ostrogorsky.

* TRACI J. MACNAMARA is a freelance writer and book reviewer. She has an undergraduate degree in science from the University of Notre Dame and graduate degrees in English literature, creative writing, and curriculum and instruction. Her writing has appeared in magazines, journals, and books, including Vegetarian Times, Backpacker, the Patagonia catalog, Isotope: A Literary Journal of Nature and Science Writing, and A Leaky Tent is a Piece of Paradise (Sierra Club Press, 2007). Her current interests include nature writing and British Romantic poetry.

Favorite books: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau; The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey; Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard; The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, and Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell.

* PETER MERGENDAHL is the Rocky thriller critic. He earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, thus, he says, making him qualified to dig ditches. Since then, he has spent most of his career in the book industry. Over a 20-year stretch, he has reviewed every manner of book for the Rocky, including books on fly-fishing, business, history and countless thrillers. After 20 years living in Colorado, he recently moved to Maine, where the mountains are smaller, but the ocean is definitely bigger.

Favorite authors include Jim Harrison, James Lee Burke, and Annie Dillard, as well as the poet Richard Wilber.

* JENNIFER MILLER, the Rocky’s children’s/young adult critic, previously worked as an environmental reporter in Tahoe, Calif., and as a features reporter in Napa, Calif. She is now a full-time mother of three boys.

Favorite books: Miller’s favorite books as a child were Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon and Ben Shecter’s Conrad’s Castle. Now as a mother she especially appreciates The Little Engine That Could (both the original and Loren Long’s newly illustrated edition), by Watty Piper; The Little Bear Treasury, by Maurice Sendak; A Hole is to Dig, by Ruth Krauss and Happy Birthday to You!, by Dr. Seuss.

* CLAYTON MOORE is a freelance writer whose book reviews and author interviews have appeared, in addition to the Rocky, in Paste Magazine, Atomic Magazine, Dirty Linen, About.com, The Rain Taxi Review of Books and Kirkus Reviews. He also writes a monthly column about crime and mystery fiction for Bookslut magazine. Authors he has interviewed include Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, Christopher Moore, Alexander McCall Smith, Brad Meltzer, and Bill Bryson, but he really just wants to write the kind of paperback novels that sell in drugstores and airports.

Favorite books: Skipped Parts, by Tim Sandlin; Boy Wonder, by James Robert Baker; The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie; Lamb, by Christopher Moore; The Beasts of Valhalla, by George C. Chesbro; the Emperor series by Conn Iggulden.

* SARAH PEASLEY MILLER is a Littleton-based freelance writer whose work has also appeared in the Washington Post.

Favorite books: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand; The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell; Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, by Laurence Bergreen, and, most recently, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

* STEVE RUSKIN, a Colorado Springs native, is the author of one book — John Herschel’s Cape Voyage: Private Science, Public Imagination and the Ambitions of Empire (Ashgate Publishing, 2004) — and numerous articles for both academic and popular audiences. He has a PhD in science and technology studies from the University of Notre Dame, and was also a research student at Cambridge University in England. If the stars were perfectly aligned, he would spend his days mountain biking and skiing, and his nights reading and writing.

Favorite books: The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien; The River Why. by David James Duncan; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig; The Travels, by Marco Polo; and Sidereus Nuncius, or The Starry Messenger, by Galileo Galilei.

* JENNY SHANK’S fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Image, CutBank, Calyx, Eureka Literary Magazine, Weber Studies, and other journals. One of her stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and another was listed among the “Notable Essays of the Year” in the Best American Essays. Her novel-in-progress was a recent semi-finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and she’s received fiction writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. For six years she was the Denver/Boulder Editor of The Onion A.V. Club, and her journalism has also appeared in Bust, Westword, the Daily Camera, the Colorado Daily, and NewWest.Net. Her blog can be found at: http://www.newwest.net/index.php/main/author/jlowercase. She grew up in Denver and currently lives in Boulder.

Favorite books: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain; Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston; Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy; Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather; The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor.

* LAURENCE WASHINGTON teaches journalism at Metropolitain State College of Denver and is co-publisher of Blackflix.com, a web site dedicated to urban film and music news.

Favorite books: All The President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years, by Robert F. Kennedy; From Russia With Love, by Ian Fleming; Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan; Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison.

* GARY WILLIAMS has a degree in English literature from Metropolitan State College and has reviewed books for the Rocky since 1998. He has also worked as a business/technical writer for many years.

Favorite books: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving; Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry; Trinity, by Leon Uris; The Last Lion, by William Manchester; The Inner Game of Tennis, by W. Timothy Gallwey.

* SCOTT YATES is the grand-nephew of Elizabeth Yates, Newbery-Award winning author of Amos Fortune, Free Man, and an entrepreneur and freelance writer who lives in Washington Park. He worked as a journalist for 10 years before founding the most literary traffic e-mail alert service in the history of the world. He recently ran a database service collecting some of the worst writing in the world: pending legislation. He can be found on www.sco.tt.

Favorite books: American Heritage Dictionary (the best of around 500 or so dictionaries cluttering his office); I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe; A Solo in Tom-Toms, by Gene Fowler; Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard P. Feynman (which should be read before Genius, the Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick); Turn of the Century, by Kurt Andersen (who was his boss at Spy magazine, but who, he insists, would make the list anyway. As with Wolfe, Andersen’s writing gets criticized for being packed too full of detail, which reminds Yates of what Emperor Joseph told Mozart in Amadeus. “Too many notes. Yes. That’s it. Too many notes.”)

Comments

  • December 4, 2008

    11:46 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    tac680 writes:

    Steve Ruskin and others might be interested to know that The River Why is now a movie in post production and will be released in 2009.

    See www.theriverwhy.com