Local author Robert Bonville has published a historical novel entitled Voyages of Malolo: Secret of the Rongo. (578 pages, $21.95) The novel tells the story of Polynesian navigators and their journey across the Pacific on the great seagoing canoe Malolo.

Bonville says the tale is fiction but based on archaeological and anthropological evidence as well as widely accepted theory. He says it's "an epic adventure that speaks to the will of ancient man to discover, learn and survive in the fact of the harshest of conditions." Bonville's inspiration for the book came from living in Hawaii as a young man and later travels throughout the Pacific.

Book summary:

When young Auka’i discovers a piece of driftwood from the east containing mysterious hieroglyphics, the “Rongo”, he and his people believe it is a message from the gods directing them to discover its meaning and the secret it contains. The young adventurer and his crew of uniquely skilled men build a large, double-hulled deep sea sailing canoe and sail east across the Pacific to the coast of Ecuador, more than 8,000 kilometers (5000 miles) from their island home. Their nearly 3-year voyage of exploration, which ranges up to Mexico and California before heading west to Hawaii, finds them facing many hardships and dangers before returning for a final surprising conflict at home.

Author bio:

Robert Bonville is a native of South Florida and a United States Coast Guard veteran. He served as a radioman on deep sea weather cutters, Antarctic ice-breaking expeditions and serviced coastal navigation devices before attending college on the GI Bill. Upon graduation, Bonville worked in aerospace and defense-related projects associated with quality assurance, engineering and management, retiring after 37 years. Robert is married with four adult children and resides in Arizona with his wife, Linda.

For more information, visit www.authorrobertbonville.com.

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Based on my deeply scientific analysis at several airport bookstores, the Fifty Shades of Grey series isn't going away anytime soon, so perhaps Tucson hardware stores should have someone working the rope station, complete with advice like one Philadelphia shop owner provides to go with the softer stuff.

Former Arizona legislator and all-around nice guy Tom Prezelski is raising money on Kickstarter to finish his quite-cleverly-titled book on a bit of Mexican-American history during the Civil War, Knights of Woeful Countenance: 1st Battalion of Native Cavalry, California Volunteers, 1863-1866:

The current political dogma is based on the premise that Mexican-Americans are a new community, largely without roots in the United States. This is pure bunk. Mexican-Americans have always been here, though their role in building this country is too frequently dismissed and forgotten. In particular, the role of Mexican-Americans in the Civil War usually goes unmentioned.

Thousands of Mexican-Americans served on both sides of the great conflict, from Pennsylvania to the Pacific Coast. This project focuses on one battalion, about 400 men (plus their wives, in a few cases), raised from among the californios, the Spanish-Speaking natives of California, in the hopes that their legendary horsemanship could be put to good use in the federal service. These men served in California by supporting a campaign against Indians in the northern counties, pursuing bandits in the Central Valley, securing the roads across the southern deserts, and generally enforcing federal authority during the national crisis. Later, they were posted to a squalid post on the Mexican border in Arizona, from where they patrolled against Apaches and partisans of the Emperor Maximilian.

The Civil War is the great American Epic, our Iliad. That Mexican-Americans were a part of this story and therefore share in our national heritage is an inconvenient truth that is too little known. I hope that in a small way, this book can give this record its proper place in the popular imagination.

As found on Tony Jones' blog on the website Patheos, Christian publisher Zondervan might be stretching their need to find new ways to sell the same book a bit:

If you love puppies, you will love this Bible! Inside you will find 12 color pages of adorable puppy photos with inspirational thoughts that will encourage you day after day. The Playful Puppies Bible is just the right size to take along wherever you go.

Features include:
* Presentation page for gift giving
* Ribbon marker
* Words of Christ in red
* 12 pages of adorable puppy photos, Scripture references, and inspirational thoughts
* The entire Bible in the New International Version (NIV)

Arizona author Loretta Kantor, originally from the Bronx, NY, has written a story of personal triumph in the aftermath of the Vietnam War entitled Private War, Personal Victory: Footnote to the Vietnam War. (Windy Acre, 199 pages, $18, available on Amazon.) Kantor and her husband moved to Tucson in 1980. They now reside in Hereford.

Book summary from the author:

Private War, Personal Victory: Footnote to the Vietnam War is the true story of how great courage and deep love overcame a tragic explosion in Vietnam that claimed one soldier's arms, legs and an eye. The author tells how she and her college sweetheart struggled to restore a future that was stolen from them by the draft, Vietnam, and a booby trap explosion. Surviving and learning to live with injuries of war were only part of the struggle. They had to live in an America that had turned it's back on the Vietnam soldier. They had to battle with an unresponsive Veteran's Administration. They had to endure the lack of support and at times, outright hostility from the author's family. They had to overcome an inaccessible world. In spite of all the obstacles thrown at them, Lloyd and Loretta restored their future, and have been happily married for over 40 years.

Old Tucson may be closed for the summer, but you can get a glimpse of its past in the book Henry Darrow: Lightning in the Bottle by Jan Pippins and Henry Darrow. (BearManor Media, 392 pages, $24.95)

Henry Darrow, born Enrique Tomás Delgado, played Manolito Montoya in the western The High Chaparral. The show, about the fictional Cannon family in the Arizona Territory circa 1870, was filmed at Old Tucson, among other locations. It aired from 1967 to 1971.

Henry Darrow: Lightning in the Bottle chronicles Darrow's "seventy-five years of life, stage and screen." Check out the website and read on for more information.

Henry Darrow (born Enrique Tomás Delgado) catapulted to international stardom in 1967 as sexy, complex “Manolito Montoya” in the western The High Chaparral. He was the first actor of Puerto Rican heritage to star in a television series. “Henry survived and had a career when, if you were Latino, you couldn’t be just good, you had to be beyond great, and that’s Henry,” says noted writer/entertainer Rick Najera.

At the height of his fame Darrow put his career on the line to open doors for other Hispanics. He has continued to break ground for over fifty years as a working actor and was recently featured on the PBS series Pioneers of Television. Lightning in the Bottle is the must-read portrait of this inspirational, fiercely determined, endearing and enduring Emmy-winning performer.

The New York Times notes the passing of Ray Bradbury at age 91:

By many estimations Mr. Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream. His name would appear near the top of any list of major science-fiction writers of the 20th century, beside those of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and the Polish author Stanislaw Lem. His books have been taught in schools and colleges, where many a reader has been introduced to them decades after they first appeared. Many have said his stories fired their own imaginations.

Bradbury once told me that his own imagination was fired up when he was kid right here in Tucson:

RAY BRADBURY BEGAN his long career as a master of imaginative fiction as a 12-year-old boy right here in Tucson.

"My parents gave me a primitive, $6 typewriter for Christmas in 1932 and I began to write short stories about landing on the moon and going off to Mars," Bradbury recalls. "I worked alone, I believed in what I did and I didn't listen to anyone who doubted me."

The result has been nearly unparalleled success in the field of fantasy writing. Along with such classics as Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury has penned somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 short stories, 100 television scripts and dozens of plays, radio programs and screenplays. He's taken his readers across space, through time and into those eerie parallel dimensions next door.

He fondly remembered a gig on Tucson radio:

"I loved radio and went and hung around the local station there in Tucson and told my friends I was getting a job as a radio announcer," he says, recalling how he'd get out of class at Amphi Junior High and race over the station, getting underfoot until he landed a gig on the air reading comic strips to kids on Saturday night.

"It was a perfect occupation for someone like myself, who had been collecting them since I was nine years old," he says. "And my pay was free tickets to see King Kong, Murders in the Wax Museum and The Mummy. You can't do any better than that. I've never had better income in my life since."

Bradbury told me how excited he was that Republicans had won the House of Representatives in 1994. Dave Weigel of Slate recalls Bradbury's conservative politics.

If you watched an old episode of TV show Emergency! (1972-1979) and followed it up with an episode of Rescue Me (2004-2011), you would notice a big change in how fire sequences are filmed. There would also be a huge difference in story lines, from more tame to gritty.

But if you have an eye for detail and want to know about the specific fire trucks and other equipment used in these shows and others like them, check out The First Responders of Television by local writer Richard C. Yokley. (BearManor Media, 492 pages, $32.95.)

Publisher's summary:

BearManor Media proudly announces the release of its new book, The First Responders of Television, by Richard C. Yokley.
From the first live telecast of an actual fire in 1938, to such weekly television series as Rescue 8, Emergency!, Saved and Rescue Me in the US and International favorites of England's London's Burning, Germany's Medicopter 117, and Japan's Burning Flame trilogy, this book offers detailed coverage of the many First Responders of Television. They include Fire-fighters, Police Officers, Paramedics, EMTs, Lifeguards, Aeromedical, Forest Rangers, and the Coast Guard. Over 150 dramatic and comedic programs from around the world are discussed, including the apparatus they rode on, helicopters, aircraft, and boats utilized, as well as the hospitals they filmed from. Also included are reality programming, (Rescue 911, The Paramedics, and others), made-for-television movies (Firefighter, Pine Canyon is Burning), unsold pilots, and individual fire or rescue episodes from programs such as Perry Mason, Hunter, The A-Team, Law and Order, and others are covered.
To learn about this or other BearManor Media titles, please visit our website at www.bearmanormedia.com.

Author bio:

Richard C. Yokley was a member of the Bonita-Sunnyside Fire Protection District (San Diego, California) from 1972 to 1999. He received Firehouse Magazine's Heroism and Community Service Award in 1987. He has written several newspaper and trade journal articles, this is his third book. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to The Los Angeles Fire Department Historical Society.

Local astrologer Juliana Rose Teal has written about the major astrological events taking place this year in 2012: An Astrological Perspective.

She writes, "I describe three major astrological events that take place this year, and what these events mean when happening in each of the 12 houses in a birth chart. The three events are: The Uranus/Pluto square (which means that these two planets are forming a 90 degree angle to each other in the sky, which is a stressful angle), the Venus/Sun (transit), and the Sun aligning with the Galactic Center in December."

In reference to the today's Venus transit, she writes: "Venus represents what we are drawn to in relationships, and the qualities we find important and attractive in relationships. Venus also represents our values. The Sun is who we are at the core of our being and we spent a life time working on incorporating the positive traits of our Sun sign into our personality. When these two planets meet in the sky, I believe that we will be given the opportunity to become aware of who we are within our relationships, and if we are bringing our true self into our relationships. The energy of this eclipse also provides with the ability to bring balance within our relationships as well."

For more information, visit www.hawkflightastrology.com.

Food trucks have come a long way since the little carts with hot dogs and pretzels. Adam Borowitz, blogger and Noshing Around columnist extraordinaire, has chronicled the Tucson food truck scene in his column and Food Truck Diaries. Read the latest post here.

And now there's a new book about the national trend. Last month, Workman Publishing released The Truck Food Cookbook: 150 Recipes and Ramblings from America's Best Restaurants on Wheels by John T. Edge. The book includes the following recipes from Tucson trucks:

• OOP’S HOT DOGS: Toritos (Stuffed Güero Chiles)
• EL GUERO CANELO: How to Build a Sonoran Hot Dog w/Jalapeño Salsa
• TAQUERIA SAMMY EL SINALOENSE: Top of the Dog: Guacamole Sauce, Red Onion in Vinegar

Read on below the cut for more information about the book and author: