DISCOVERIES

One Man’s West

David Lavender

Bison Books: 320 pp., $19.95 paper

DAVID LAVENDER was born in 1910 in Telluride, Colo., and moved in 1939 to Ojai, Calif., where he taught at the Thacher School. “One Man’s West” was published in 1943. It was reissued in 1956 with a chapter about the uranium rush and in 1964 with an introduction in which Lavender insisted that it was not, strictly speaking, autobiographical and that the first-person pronoun was meant to “help bring immediacy to a people and a land that suddenly had become. . . worth holding onto.” In 2002, a Forbes article accused historian Stephen Ambrose of plagiarizing Lavender’s biography of Collis Huntington; the author chose not to sue and died a year later.

The immediacy of “One Man’s West” has kept this gorgeous classic alive and vivid for more than half a century, despite changes in the land and culture. Lavender wisely wove these into his narrative, a story about mining, cattle driving, horse breaking and settling a difficult territory. He was a careful researcher; the writing is instructive as well as atmospheric: “Spring came with a rush of color. Blue iris -- ‘flags,’ we called them -- lay on the damp flats like acres of spilled sky. Wild roses massed on the ditchbanks; mallow, honeysuckle, and Indian paintbrush. . . made spots of red in hollows and swales.”

There are many such lists of plants and flowers -- a profusion that becomes increasingly poignant with the overgrazing and desertification of the West. Lavender’s childhood landscape around Telluride is what he knows best. But the characters who lived there -- the miners, mule packers, mill hands and high graders (miners not above stealing a little ore now and then) -- shine, as they go about their business of hoisting, loading, drilling and blasting with characteristic stoicism, immune to freezing temperatures and harsh living conditions. Chapters on the joys of mountaineering and the perils of homesteading exude a cleaner air than any we’ll ever breathe.

But Lavender resists romanticizing the West: “It was not unknown for a man to knock at his neighbor’s door, receive no answer, push inside, and find there on the floor a grimacing corpse with a bullet hole in his head.” But there’s no hysteria here, either in style or content. This is lanky, easygoing prose, with plenty of time and space and quiet room to reflect.

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What Is Sport?

Roland Barthes, translated from the French

by Richard Howard

Yale University Press: 96 pp., $15 paper

FRENCH critic Roland Barthes and Quebecois novelist and filmmaker Hubert Aquin collaborated in 1960 on a documentary about sport as a “social and poetic phenomenon.” Aquin greatly admired Barthes’ “Mythologies” (“that Marxist social register of petit-bourgeois frauds and frivolities,” writes translator Richard Howard). The idea was to capture five national sports on film, accompanied by Barthes’ text: bullfighting in Spain (“Style is to be courageous without disorder, to give necessity the appearance of freedom”), auto racing in Italy (“Delicious rides followed by great combats”), the Tour de France, hockey in Canada and soccer in England.

“What is national sport?” Barthes asks. “It is a sport that rises out of the substance of a nation, out of its soil and climate. To play hockey is constantly to repeat that men have transformed motionless winter, the hard earth, and suspended life, and that precisely out of all this they have made a swift, vigorous, passionate sport.” Such an odd little volume, so perplexing and thought-provoking!

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com