BOOKSHELF

BOOKSHELF CARL OSCAR BORG AND THE MAGIC REGION, by Helen Laird. Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., P. O. Box 667, Layton, Utah 84041. 1986. 248 pages. $32.95, hardcover.

Good biographers and experienced archeologists have much in common. On the surface, they detect what may be below; then, by skilled excavation, they uncover the past for all to see. When Carl Oscar Borg died at the age of sixty-eight at Santa Barbara, California, almost forty years ago, only a segment of the art world was aware of his genius and indomitable spirit. Now, art historian Helen Laird, working from the surface sherds of his autobiography, field notes, poems, diaries, and her own extensive interviews, has unearthedhis many moods and defined his true stature. She toiled for seven years to bring this, her first book, to publication. We are the beneficiaries of her labors.

Born in Sweden in 1879, Carl Oscar Borg arrived in California at the age of twenty-four to escape the poverty of his childhood.

He had jumped ship at Norfolk, Virginia, and worked in the eastern United States as a journeyman illustrator. A self-taught artist, he found in the Magic Region (a name coined by art curator Everett C. Maxwell to describe the American Southwest) an intimate circle of creative people who welcomed him, and a vast and varied landscape that challenged his interpretation.

Borg was readily accepted into that southwestern circle of artists and became the friend of Thomas Moran, Ed Borein, Charles Russell, and the cultural crusader in corduroy, Charles Lummis. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, as his principal sponsor, eased the economic pressures that

ARIZONA SOILS, by David M. Hendricks. College of Agriculture, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721. 1985. 244 pages. $40.00, softcover.

This publication is an outstanding reference work in the classical sense. Carefully written, it provides a fascinating summation of matters we often take for granted. The book deals concisely with Arizona climate, geology, and natural history. The interrelationships between these elements are also discussed.

ROOSEVELT DAM, A HISTORY TO 1911, by Earl A. Zarbin. Salt River

many talented artists must endure in the early years of their careers.

Borg was an experimenter and subsequently mastered a considerable range of media-oil, watercolor, woodblock, gouache, drypoint, and copper etching. His subject matter, too, became as broad and varied. From the landscapes of the California coast, he journeyed to the high deserts of the Southwest and captured the appealing emptiness and pastel stillness of that part of the Magic Region. In time Central and South America, Italy, Spain, and North Africa also came to his view and brush.

Like his friend and fellow artist Olaf Weighorst, Borg, living in the orbit of the movie world, became involved with the industry. He was a set designer and art director, working with such notables as Douglas Fairbanks, Sam Goldwyn, and Cecil B. De Mille. Like Weighorst, he soon realized this was not a field of free expression and turned back to independent creativity.

One comes to believe with the author that if Carl Oscar Borg had lived and worked in Santa Fe or Taos, when those towns nurtured fertile art communities, his sweeping landscapes and sensitive studies of the Navajo and Hopi would long ago have reached the same summit as those of Joseph Sharp, Bierstadt, and Berninghaus.

Helen Laird's writing and research give us a portrait of a sometimes sad and sullen man who considered himself a failure. We can insist he was not. Included in the book are 175 black and white illustrations and fifty-five color plates that, together with the delicate excavations and interpretations of the author, establish Carl Oscar Borg as a major artist of the American Southwest.

Project. To order, write: Roosevelt Dam, P.O. Box 1950, Phoenix, AZ 85001. 1984. 245 pages. $26.25, hardcover, postpaid.

When the French savant Alphonse Louis Pinart visited Phoenix in 1876, he viewed a village of 300 souls living in one-story adobes with dirt floors. He described the ancient irrigation ditches, one of which was twelve miles long, now dry and brittle. Eight years later, Lincoln Fowler, a candidate for the Territorial Legislature, declared the need for water storage to make the community prosper. The concept of Roosevelt Dam came into being.

Author Zarbin, by diligent scholarship and ten years' research, tells the story of Roosevelt Dam from concept to the day when more than one mil lion acre-feet sparkled in the April sun and six and a half inches of water flowed over the spillways, spraying the rocks below.

The history of Phoenix is the history of capture and wise utilization of water. Zarbin has written it masterfully.