Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

Grand Canyon Women tells the humorous and heartbreaking stories of twenty-six remarkable women--Native Americans, river runners, scientists, wranglers, architects, rangers, hikers, and housewives--each of whom, in the midst of nature's indiscriminate universe, discovers her identity.

A “richly anecdotal” account of the secluded LA neighborhood’s legendary music scene, a tale of groupies, cocaine, and California dreaming (Salon). Finalist, SCBA Book Award for Nonfiction A Los Angeles Times Bestseller In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Decades later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, earbuds, and concert stages around the world. In Laurel Canyon, veteran journalist Michael Walker draws on interviews with those who were there to tell the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the era’s leading musical lights—including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few—who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed. “An exhaustively researched and richly anecdotal book that will fascinate both rock aficionados and cultural historians.” —Salon “Captures all the magic and lyricism of an almost mythological geographical spot in the history of pop music . . . the story of a more melodious time in rock and roll where the great talents of the ‘60s and ‘70s cloistered together in a sort of enchanted valley populated by an all-star cast of characters.” —Steven Gaines, author of Philistines at the Hedgerow

"She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music. Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country. A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than “a painter derailed by circumstances,” she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell’s life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from “Big Yellow Taxi” to “Both Sides, Now” to “A Case of You”—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable. In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell’s youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends.

A gorgeous compendium of Joni Mitchell's handwritten lyrics and drawings, originally handcrafted as a gift for a select group of friends in 1971 and now available to the public for the first time In 1971, as her album Blue topped charts around the world, Joni Mitchell crafted one hundred copies of Morning Glory on the Vine as a holiday gift for her closest friends. For this stunningly beautiful book, Joni hand-wrote an exquisite selection of her own lyrics and poems and illustrated them with more than thirty of her original pictures. Handcrafted, signed, and numbered in Los Angeles, the existing copies of this labor of love have rarely been seen in the past half-century. Now, during Joni's seventy-fifth birthday year, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings will be widely available for the first time. In this faithfully reproduced edition, Joni's best-loved lyrics and poems spill across the pages in her own elegant script. The lively, full-color drawings depict a superb array of landscapes, still lifes, portraits of friends, self-portraits, innovative abstractions, and more. All the artwork from the original book is included, along with several additional pictures that Joni drew of her friends from the same period. Finally, the refreshed volume features an original introduction written by Joni. Morning Glory on the Vine is a gorgeous and intimate keepsake and an invitation to explore anew the dazzling, visionary world of Joni Mitchell.

An intimate exploration of Joni Mitchell's life and art. When singer, musician, and broadcast journalist Malka Marom was asked to interview Joni Mitchell in 1973, she eagerly accepted the opportunity to converse with the performer she'd first met late one night in 1966 at an open mic in Yorkville. More conversations followed over the next four decades of friendship, and it was only after Joni and Malka completed their last recorded interview, in 2012, that Malka discovered the heart of their discussions: the creative process. In Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, Joni and Malka follow this thread through seven decades of life and art, discussing the influence of Joni's childhood, love and loss, playing dives and huge festivals, acclaim and criticism, poverty and affluence, glamorous triumphs and tragic mistakes ...This riveting narrative, told in interviews, lyrics, paintings, and photographs, is shared in the hope of inspiring others.

This is the story of one of the most important female recording artist of the last 50 years. Joni Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan before busking in the streets and nightclubs of Toronto, Ontario. In 1965, she moved to the U.S. and began touring. Settling in Southern California, Mitchell, with popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock," helped define an era and a generation. Mitchell's fifth album, For the Roses, was released in 1972. She then switched labels and began exploring more jazz-influenced melodic ideas, by way of lush pop textures, on 1974's Court and Spark, which featured the radio hits "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris" and became her best-selling album. With roots in visual art, Mitchell has designed most of her own album covers. She describes herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance."

For more than a century, Ghost Ranch has attracted people of enormous energy and creativity to the high desert of northern New Mexico. Occupying twenty-two thousand acres of the Piedra Lumbre basin, this fabled place was the love of artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, and her depictions of the landscape catapulted Ghost Ranch to international recognition. Building on the history of the Abiquiu region that she told in Valley of Shining Stone, Ghost Ranch historian Lesley Poling-Kempes now unfolds the story of this celebrated retreat. She traces its transformation from el Rancho de los Brujos, a hideout for legendary outlaws, to a renowned cultural mecca and one of the Southwest’s premier conference centers. First a dude ranch, Ghost Ranch became a magical sanctuary where the veil between heaven and earth seemed almost transparent. Focusing on those who visited from the 1920s and ’30s until the 1990s, Poling-Kempes tells how O’Keeffe and others—from Boston Brahmin Carol Bishop Stanley to paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert, Los Alamos physicists to movie stars—created a unique community that evolved into the institution that is Ghost Ranch today. For this book, Poling-Kempes has drawn on information not available when Valley of Shining Stone was written. The biography of Juan de Dios Gallegos has been enhanced and definitively corrected. The Robert Wood Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson) years at Ghost Ranch are recounted with reminiscences from family members. And the memories of David McAlpin Jr. shed light on how the Princeton circle that included the Packs, the Johnson brothers, the Rockefellers, and the McAlpins ended up as summer neighbors on the high desert of New Mexico. After Arthur Pack’s gift of the ranch to the Presbyterian Church in 1955, Ghost Ranch became a spiritual home for thousands of people still awestruck by the landscape that O’Keeffe so lovingly committed to canvas; yet the care taken to protect Ghost Ranch’s land and character has preserved its sense of intimacy. By relating its remarkable story, Poling-Kempes invites all visitors to better appreciate its place as an honored wilderness—and to help safeguard its future.

More than forty years ago, Joni Mitchell Ts music helped define a generation of young people. Now, one of her classic songs is introduced to a new generation through the remarkable art of Brian Deines. " The Circle Game," a charming nod to childhood dreams and memories, tells the story of a young boy experiencing the simple wonders of life: dragonflies in jars, the night sky, frozen streams, and carousels. As the years go by, cartwheels are replaced by car wheels and the boy Ts dreams change, but the sense of wonder remains. The first Joni Mitchell song to be illustrated for children, "The Circle Game "captures the timeless magic of youth.