2024 BOOK REVIEW #20: SAGEBRUSHED, EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY ALAN DEUTSCHMAN

I spent parts of Labor Day weekend enjoying a student written collection on “Coming of Age and Working in Nevada,” from the strip club at the Wild Orchid to a goat farm supplying famed cheese maker Laura Chenel.

I had found it a few days earlier serendipitously lying on a table at the Reynolds School of Journalism.

The book published in 2014 is a curation of some of the best first person writing from a multitude of classes Alan Deutschman taught in his first few years at the RSJ.

It tells the story of a region imbued by its surrounding landscape, coming out of the Great Recession, left astray from the glory years of casinos and the importance of farm land, already teeming with tattoo parlors and artists not being able to work in other industries.

While teaching after me in a classroom with just a 15 minutes gap today, all my tabs left open on the shared computer, he explained to me a few boxes of this book were left behind from the now closed Sundance Bookstore, where it remained a steady seller.

That’s not surprising, as the book, a decade after publication, has aged beautifully, with young, up and coming northern Nevadans sharing some of their ordeals, in intimate, ingenious and revealing details.

Deutschman is a superb editor, introducing each entry — there are twelve in all — with concise and relevant mood setting. His delightful editing gives uniformity to each story, with sprinkles of historical context, raw descriptions and morals or in some cases immorality to ponder.

One of the stories is by a former colleague, the extremely intelligent Jessica Fagundes (in one of the photos feeding goats), who in just a few pages, in The Farmer’s Daughter, forces the reader to rethink the essential and endangered role and value of artisanal farming amid our sprawl.

The other photo in montage above is of former exotic dancer Jeanie Dugan sewing in her Midtown lingerie store called The Doll House.

There are four parts: casino life, Reno, small town and Sierra Nevada. The reader is left with a literary human embodiment of a Northern Nevada in perpetual reinvention, with its arid environment and cut throat economy, forces of gentrification and debauchery turning itself into something new yet again.