John Treadwell Nichols

Joe Mondragon, thirty-six with not much to show for it, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully, if impulsively (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began -- though few knew it at the time -- the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork...

During the forty years in which a rural southwestern backwater is transformed into a boomtown and industrial mecca, the townspeople try to adjust to their loss of land and heritage.

"Nichols has gathered writing that span more than thirty years and range from idyllic reflections on nature to unmerciful satires on impending Armageddon. We see the author as a young man on the trip to Central America that gave him a social conscience that wouldn't quit; as a hunter, hiker, and naturalist on rivers and in mountains increasingly threatened by development; and as a novelist watching in embarrassed disbelief as his book The Milagro...

"Michael Smith survives the Vietnam war only to find himself angry and adrift in a United States at war with itself. Though he cannot forget the pornographic atrocities he witnessed abroad, it is the pervasive brutality of civilian life that threatens to destroy him until he lands in a tormented yet life-saving relationship. First published in 1987 and now available to a new generation of readers, this disturbing novel foreshadows twenty-first-century...