The bestselling author of Dispatches from Pluto and The Deepest South of All turns his sharp wit and observational powers on the epicenter of America’s most divisive issues: Arizona. When Richard Grant and his wife moved with their four-year-old daughter back to Tucson, Arizona, where the couple first met, he expected to easily rekindle his love of the region. Instead, he found a housing market gone haywire, rampant election conspiracies, and right-wing political violence alarmingly close to his home and family. Undocumented immigration was surging, and the state was also on the front lines of climate change, breaking heat and drought records, and running out of long-term water supplies. Under these circumstances, Grant wondered how he might raise a happy, well-adjusted child who believes in the future. Yet these concerns weren’t keeping people away: Arizona was simultaneously experiencing some of the nation’s highest population growth. In A Race to the Bottom of Crazy, Grant mixes memoir, research, and reporting in a quest to understand what makes Arizona such a confounding and irresistible place. He visits the world’s largest machine-gun shoot; takes a sunset boat cruise with a US Congressman and a group of far-right patriots; rides through the desert with a Border Patrol agent; and goes camping with his family in breathtaking mountain ranges that rise out of the desert like islands in the sky. Interspersed with these adventures are recollections of his previous stint in the state, including his friendship with cult writer Charles Bowden and years living off the grid with smugglers, dope farmers, and outlaws on the Mexican border. Ultimately, Grant arrives at the conclusion that Arizona has always been a scattershot improvisation, with bizarre and extreme behavior in its DNA. This book is an entertaining, illuminating, and essential guide to understanding modern America at its most overheated.

In this study of sex, gender, sexual violence, and power along the border, Bernadine Marie Hernandez brings to light under-heard stories of women who lived in a critical era of American history. Elaborating on the concept of sexual capital, she uses little-known newspapers and periodicals, letters, testimonios, court cases, short stories, and photographs to reveal how sex, violence, and capital conspired to govern not only women's bodies but their role in the changing American Southwest. Hernandez focuses on a time when the borderlands saw a rapid influx of white settlers who encountered elite landholding Californios, Hispanos, and Tejanos. Sex was inseparable from power in the borderlands, and women were integral to the stabilization of that power. In drawing these stories from the archive, Hernandez illuminates contemporary ideas of sexuality through the lens of the borderland's history of expansionist, violent, and gendered conquest. By extension, Hernandez argues that Mexicana, Nuevomexicana, Californiana, and Tejana women were key actors in the formation of the western United States, even as they are too often erased from the region's story.

Changing Woman invokes one of the Southwest's most infamous massacres, the slaughter of Aravaipa Apaches near Camp Grant in 1871, through the eyes of Valeria Obregón, a settler in Tucson, and Nest Feather, a young Apache woman.

In December 1883, five outlaws attempted to rob the A.A. Castaneda Mercantile establishment in the fledgling mining town of Bisbee in the Arizona Territory. The robbery was a disaster: four citizens shot dead, one a pregnant woman. The failed heist was national news, with the subsequent manhunt, trial and execution of the alleged perpetrators followed by newspapers from New York to San Francisco. The Bisbee Massacre was as momentous as the infamous blood feud between the Earp brothers and the cowboys two years earlier, and led to the only recorded lynching in the town of Tombstone--John Heath, a sporting man, who was thought to be the mastermind. New research indicates he may have been innocent. This comprehensive history takes a fresh look at the event that marked the end of the Wild West period in the Arizona Territory.

From western roadhouses to fine dining, Tucson boasts an extraordinary lineup of diverse restaurants. Though some of its greatest no longer exist, their stories conjure the sights, smells and sounds of the city's history. Longtime locals still buzz about Gordo's famous chimichangas, an accidental dish originating in Tucson. The legendary Tack Room was a beacon of fine dining. Places like Café Terra Cotta and Fuego pioneered a new southwestern cuisine, serving regional dishes like prickly pear pork and stuffed poblanos. University of Arizona alumni miss old spots like the Varsity, while long-gone haunts like Gus & Andy's attracted a unique crowd of businessmen, movie stars and the occasional mobster. Join local food writer Rita Connelly as she serves up savory stories of good food and good company from the gone but never forgotten favorites of the Old Pueblo.