Jon Talton is an American mystery author and journalist best known for the David Mapstone Mysteries series of novels. A Phoenix Arizona native, Talon attended the Kenilworth School, proceeded to Coronado High Scholl before graduating from Miami University and Arizona State University. His eleven titles include the thriller Deadline Man, the Cincinnati casebooks series, and the David Mapstone mysteries. He is also the author of the popular A Brief History of Phoenix a non-fiction work. Jon made his debut in fiction publishing with his novel Concrete Desert first published in 2001 to critical acclaim and widespread popularity. The Washington Post described it as one of the most rewarding and intelligent of contemporary mysteries. Publishers Weekly …show more content…
wrote that the series and its lead protagonist was a relief from the many bland private investigators that were all brawn and no brain, making it one of the most noir of narrative in modern mystery writing. Before he got into journalism, Talton was an ambulance paramedic operating in the Phoenix suburbs. He was also a professor of theater at the Southeastern Oklahoma State University. He is a fourth generation Arizona native currently residing in Seattle. Jon is a veteran blogger and journalist that has covered business and finance for more than 25 years. He has been particularly vocal about issues of public policy, economics, real estate, energy, and urban economies. He has been an editor and columnist for several reputable newspapers and magazines including the Rocky Mountain News, Charlotte Observer, Arizona Republic, Cincinnati Enquirer, and Dayton Daily News. He is also a regular contributor on CNBC. At Dayton, he was a leading member of the team that made the finals for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service of their work in making the United States first computer aided report on worker safety conditions. Working for the Charlotte Observer, he earned the honor of being named one of the US’s best business writers by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Some of the most prominent news stories that he covered included the Great Recession, America’s downtown renaissance, the big bank mergers of the 90s, the American auto industry, the troubles at General Motors, the 1980s collapse of energy prices, and the Texaco Pennzoil trial. As a university professor, he was honored with a community fellowship at the Arizona State University Morrison Institute and was awarded the Knight Western Fellow Award in Journalism by the University of Southern California. He is currently a novelist, publisher of the blog Rogue Columnist, and economics columnist for the Seattle Times. The David Mapstone Mysteries follow the lead protagonist that is a former history professor turned consultant for the sheriff’s office and later into a sheriff. When we are first introduced to David he has just been plunged headlong into a city full of murder, and corruption that lurk beyond the beautiful glow of dramatic sunsets and fantastic resorts. Even as Phoenix Arizona is his hometown, he returns to find the city has completely morphed, becoming a seasonal retreat for the wealthy sophisticates from the West Coast and a haven for wealthy retirees. He reluctantly accepts a job from Mike Peralta an old friend and now Marico County Deputy Chief. Given his interest and knowledge of the history of the city, His brief is to look into cold cases that have been dormant in the department’s office for ages, and try to close some. Over the course of the novel, he moves from being just a consultant on the department to sheriff when his friend Mike Peralta is killed in a case linked to corruption in the police force. In the meantime, Mapstone also has to deal with an old flame that had left him two decades ago for a wealthy lover and now wants him back. Things are even more complicated given that David is in an on and off relationship with a police computer expert that becomes something of a bodyguard and sidekick as the narratives progress. With all the echoes from the past and the clash of cultures brought about by the influx of wealthy new immigrants, David Mapstone needs to solve a range of murder mysteries alongside the gang violence, drugs, tainted wealth, and corruption in the force and maintain a modicum of sanity. Concrete Desert is the thrilling introduction to the David Mapstone Mystery series of novels by Jon Talton.
Mapstone the lead protagonist has just left life in academia and is back home divorced and looking for a new job. Mike Peralta his old friend offers him a consultant job cum deputy to the sheriff at the county department. Peralta believes his vast knowledge of Phoenix coupled with his legendary out of the box thinking could be the key to cracking several cold cases. David is soon in the thick of it and three days after taking the job, he cracks a fifteen-year-old case that boosts the reputation of the department. His next case is not as easy as it is a decades old case of a woman’s mysterious disappearance and death on the way home from the train station in 1959. The young woman named Rebecca Stokes was the first cousin to the leading contender for governor and the niece of the outgoing governor. Mapstone believes the case could have been the work of a serial killer. In the meantime, Julie riding his former flam arrives at his house, and true to form, she needs something from him. Her sister Phaedra has disappeared in eerily similar circumstances to those of the Rebecca cold case he is working on. Believing the two murders are linked he begins his investigations and soon finds himself playing a dangerous cat and mouse game with a vicious killer with unknown
intentions. Camelback Falls is the exciting sequel to the first novel in the David Mapstone mysteries Concrete Desert. When a sniper shoots the newly sworn in Sheriff Mike Peralta, David cannot help but try to find out just who is involved.
Although Leopold’s love of great expanses of wilderness is readily apparent, his book does not cry out in defense of particular tracts of land about to go under the axe or plow, but rather deals with the minutiae, the details, of often unnoticed plants and animals, all the little things that, in our ignorance, we have left out of our managed acreages but which must be present to add up to balanced ecosystems and a sense of quality and wholeness in the landscape.
The population of a community is vital to ensure that the needs of that community are met. A greater population allows for a larger vote in a democracy meaning a higher probability of attaining what that population wants. Indigenous communities were left hopeless when European settlers took over and slashed the numbers of their community making it impossible for them to ever overpower the Canadian government. The book “Clearing the Plains” by James Daschuk explains this critical period of time in which the population of Indigenous people dwindled based on the political, economic and ecological circumstances that were evident creating a society where Indigenous people lost their say, however Daschuk fails to mention the effects this population deflation has on society today and the racism that our society has perpetrated on Indigenous people.
Sahara Special, by Esme Raji Codell, is a shining piece of adolescent nonfiction that authentically and sensitively captures the Heart-Wrenching Life Story and Amazing Adventures of a two-time inner-city fifth grader. Inspiring and empathy inducing, Sahara Special exemplifies Russel’s guidelines for culturally and socially diverse literature as outlined in our textbook in many ways.
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness is an autobiographical narrative written by naturalist Edward Abbey. Abbey composed the account based on his personal experiences as an employee for the United States Park Service at Arches National Monument in Utah. Abbey’s anecdotal account is nonlinearly comprised of occupational experiences and renditions of the region’s folklore. These illustrations analogous because they exhibit related themes and trends associated with the author’s experiences and beliefs.
In the short story, “On the Rainy River”, Tim O’Brien reflects on how an individual’s values and identity shifts in the face of adversity. This idea is portrayed in the character of Tim O’Brien and how he is able to compromise his values when he is faced with internal turmoil in the presence of adversity. “Oddly, though, it was almost entirely an intellectual activity. I brought some energy to it, of course, but it was the energy that accompanies almost any abstract endeavor”. This quote portrays how weakly Tim clung onto his values even though he held an opinion against this war. Tim never really takes initiative to fully fight this war, he only puts in the bare minimum. He talks about how the editorials he wrote were “tedious’ and “uninspired”
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
In an excerpt from “In Cold Blood”, Truman Capote writes as an outside male voice irrelevant to the story, but has either visited or lived in the town of Holcomb. In this excerpt Capote utilized rhetoric to no only describe the town but also to characterize it in order to set a complete scene for the rest of the novel. Capote does this by adapting and forming diction, imagery, personification, similes, anaphora, metaphors, asyndeton, and alliteration to fully develop Holcomb not only as a town, but as a town that enjoys its isolation.
The Europeans changed the land of the home of the Indians, which they renamed New England. In Changes in the Land, Cronon explains all the different aspects in how the Europeans changed the land. Changing by the culture and organization of the Indians lives, the land itself, including the region’s plants and animals. Cronon states, “The shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes well known to historians in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations less well known to historians in the region’s plant and animal communities,” (Cronon, xv). New England went through human development, environmental and ecological change from the Europeans.
Although I have never been someone who has taken an interest in reading about nutrition and how it affects our bodies, I really enjoyed the book, Eat Dirt by Josh Axe. The author discusses how he took an interest into leaky gut after his mother was diagnosed with cancer a second time and he created a plan to help her eat healthier in order to improve her health. The plan worked wonders for his mother, although he claims the plan won’t cure her or anyone else in her case it was highly effective. Throughout the book, Axe continues to provide the reader with examples of what his patients have suffered from and how, through changing their eating habits, have improved their lives significantly. After each example of patients, the author informs the reader of what leads to leaky gut and ways to combat it. Each chapter expands on the five ways to combat leaky gut by providing examples on the topics such as, what to eat and what probiotics to take for certain conditions. Throughout his
Born in Home, Pennsylvania in 1927, Abbey worked as a forest ranger and fire look-out for the National Forest Service after graduating from the University of New Mexico. An author of numerous essays and novels, he died in 1989 leaving behind a legacy of popular environmental literature. His credibility as a forest ranger, fire look- out, and graduate of the University of New Mexico lend credibility to his knowledge of America’s wilderness and deserts. Readers develop the sense that Abbey has invested both time and emotion in the vast deserts of America.
In The Promised Land, Nicholas Lehmann follows the stories of black migrants, politicians, and bureaucrats through the Great Migration, and attempts to explain the decline of northern cities, the constant liberty struggle of blacks across America, and government response to the issues surrounding the Great Migration. This work signalled a drastic change from the structured approach of Thomas Sugrue’s, The Origins Of The Urban Crisis, which observes the effects of institutions and human agency on postwar Detroit and its marginalized peoples. Both Sugrue and Lemann had (albeit slightly different) holistic views of the political climate of postwar cities, which helped provide context for prejudices towards blacks and the poor, and subsequently
Richard Brautigan’s short fiction stories incorporate protagonists that are recognizably fictionalized versions of the author himself. He writes in order to extract his own struggles of the past and the difficulties of discovering himself in the present. Through the characters in The Weather in San Francisco and Corporal, the portrayal of his optimistic view of life as a consequence of the rigors of daily life, and the use of symbols, Brautigan presents his personal story through the words on the paper.
American Pastoral written by Philip Roth is a novel that revolves around the character Seymour “Swede” Levov, a prosperous Jewish American business man and a former high school star athlete from New Jersey. During the 1960s the Swede’s pastoral life is thrown into havoc when his daughter Merry, a teenage war protester is the main suspect in the bombing of a post office in which the town’s doctor, an innocent bystander, is killed. Through a variety of literary devices, Roth makes the point that in the end, no matter how much effort goes into keeping things orderly and upright, chaos eventually overtakes everything.
William Faulkner’s “Dry September”, and “That Evening Sun” have to very obvious things in common; they leave many unanswered questions. There is no real ending to either story, and the reader is left to imagine what happens in the end of each story.
Mineral Springs police department, which consists of nine men, decides to lend the two detectives any resources they need concerning the murder. They basically follow a couple of bum leads, play a few rounds of golf, and soak up the peace and quiet of their surroundings.