Chris Richards / Arizona Daily Star

More Photos (1):

Other articles by J.c. Martin:

A lot of area history . . . and a little bit of the law Love of golf spurs short stories Southern arizona authors : Successful tale of losses and the bomb Southern Arizona authors : Fun reads will entertain young and old 'Chopin Manuscript' wins top Audie southern arizona authors : 'Cool in Tucson' points Gunn toward Tucson Southern arizona authors : Singing Wind store to honor two writers 'Just Add Water' a fun look at gardening Tough lives of ranchers captured Southern Arizona authors

Production and Manufacturing
QUALITY MANAGER Sales and Marketing
Town and Country Foods
Sales Manager Driver/Transportation
DRIVERS Driver/Transportation
REPOSSESSION DRIVERS Trades/Construction
SCHMUESER & ASSOCIATES
PRECSION MILLWRIGHTS Technical
Dynamics Information Technology
Systems Engineer Administrative & Professional
Pima Prevention Partnership
Administrative Assistant

Book reviews began in the Arizona Daily Star in the 1920s. They were identified as The Literary Lantern, and for the next 60 years they made fairly erratic appearances.

In October 1976, book reviews revived with a bang on the strength of a volume by a Southern Arizona author named Glenn Boyer, whose controversial "I Married Wyatt Earp" has been book news ever since.

Between 150 and 200 authors each year send their books to be included in this column — now identified formally as Southern Arizona Authors — which appears the first Sunday of the month on the Books page in the Opinion section. The subject matter is astonishing. It ranges from mining in Burma to growing up Mennonite, philosophy, memoirs, tips on business, teaching, fitness, history, mystery and, of course, poetry.

The following titles begin our new year.

● "Greek Mischief" (Llumina Press, $13.95) is the impressive debut novel from Frank Pialorsi, the recently retired director of the University of Arizona's Center for English as a Second Language.

It's 1967, and Randall Parks, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, has been newly assigned to Greece. His area of expertise to that date had been mainly touring VIPs, but now he finds himself in the middle of a military coup ousting the Greek monarchy. In the ensuing months, Parks is tangled in political shenanigans of the highest order, including intrigue, assassination attempts and involvement with two beautiful women. Pialorsi, a Fulbright scholar in Greece in the late 1960s, mixes fact and fiction in a work that is both engaging and informative.

● "The WOW Boys" (University of Nebraska Press, $16.95) by James W. Johnson concerns the inauguration of the T formation in modern college football. It happened in the 1940s at Stanford University, and this well-researched, well-written book from UA professor emeritus Johnson explains it all to you.

● "Organ Pipe Cactus" (University of Arizona Press, $9.95) by David Yetman is part of the Southwest Center Series, edited by director Joseph C. Wilder. In simple prose, accompanied by good descriptive photographs, Yetman discusses this extraordinary cactus, one of the few plants with a designated home of its own, the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument off Arizona 85 at the border with Mexico.

Major publishers have released works by three Southern Arizona writers: "Web of Evil" (Touchstone, $25.95) by J.A. Jance continues her new mystery series with former TV anchor Ali Reynolds, who lives and sleuths these days in Sedona. The beautiful Ali lost her L.A. TV job because, oh horrors, she turned out to be a tad older than 30. . . . Bisbee author Betsy Thornton has written another Publishers Weekly-starred mystery called "A Whole New Life" (St. Martin's, $23.95). Series star and victim's advocate Chloe Newcombe takes up the cause of a college English teacher accused of murdering his wife. Thornton does a nice job of evoking our high-desert country. . . . Laila Halaby's second novel, "Once in a Promised Land" (Beacon, $24.95), is a poignant account of an Arab couple from Jordan living in Tucson in post-9/11 America. Jassim is a hydrologist, and his wife, Salwa, a Palestinian now twice displaced, works in a bank. They must come to terms with the fallout from 9/11 and the uncertainty that produced the terrorist hunt that followed.

● "A Howl for Mayflower" (Imago, $12.95) by Dan Gilmore is made up of a series of incidents in the life of Tobias Seltzer. He is a Tucson widower living in the Coronado, a fairly spartan residence hotel that marks the juncture of Fourth Avenue and the railroad tracks. Gilmore, whose antic humor came through in his first book, "Season Tickets: Poems and Stories," is still on his game. In one episode, Tobias and a fellow widower march up and down Fourth Avenue distributing the ashes of their late wives.

● In "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" (Five Star Legends, $14.95), Casa Grande author Gayle Martin uses the time-warp device to introduce 8-year-old Luke and his older sister, Jenny, to Tombstone in the 1880s. Guided by a handyman's spirit, the youthful siblings meet all the principal characters of that colorful town.

● "The Return of al-Qaeda" (iUniverse, $11.95) comes from Nigerian-born author/journalist Dele Ajaja. His protagonist is a teenager who joins an Afghan terrorist organization. Successfully infiltrating the United States, he heads a cell bent on killing a huge segment of the country through food poisoning. Ajaja offers an emotional tour of al-Qaeda.

● "Adobe Secrets" (Singing Valley Press, $9.95) by Penny Porter is a collection of touching pieces revolving around ranch life.

● The hopeful premise of "The Handwriting Therapist: Rewrite Your Life in Five Minutes a Day" ($19.95) by Joan Belzer, a certified graphologist, is that by changing handwriting, you can change behavior.