Some people have the great good fortune to be born in the Land of Enchantment; others seek it out and claim it as their homeland.  Barrett Price is one of the latter.  He came to New Mexico as a student at UNM and has been deepening and expanding his relationship and love affair with this special place ever since. He has done so while inviting and challenging us all to see it with new eyes - not rose colored glasses.

V.B. Price (b1940), is a poet, human rights and environmental columnist, editor, journalist, architectural critic and teacher. He is co-founder of the online publication New Mexico Mercury . A member of the faculty at the University of New Mexico's Honors College, he teaches seminars on Greek and Roman literature in translation, urban issues, the U.S. Constitution, and world poetry. He is the former series editor of the Mary Burritt Christensen Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press. He is also an adjunct associate professor at UNM's School of Architecture and Planning.

Price was a columnist for the now-defunct Albuquerque Tribune. He has written a weekly column for various publications since 1971.

You are bidding on the following 4 Books:

The Orphaned Land: New Mexico's Environment Since the Manhattan Project with Photographs by Nell Farrell

A Panelist Pick for Southwest Books of the Year, Best Reading of 2012

Although most people prefer not to think about them, hazardous wastes, munitions testing, radioactive emissions, and a variety of other issues affect the quality of land, water, and air in the Land of Enchantment, as they do all over the world.

In this book, veteran New Mexico journalist V. B. Price assembles a vast amount of information on more than fifty years of deterioration of the state's environment, most of it hitherto available only in scattered newspaper articles and government reports. Viewing New Mexico as a microcosm of global ecological degradation, Price's is the first book to give the general public a realistic perspective on the problems surrounding New Mexico's environmental health and resources.

The Oddity, a novel set in Cold War New Mexico and riot torn Los Angeles, UNM Press, 2004

This dramatic philosophical novel spans more than half the twentieth century in Albuquerque and Los Angeles. The story centers on Hana Nicholas, a liberated woman ahead of her time who is the center of a circle of devoted friends in Albuquerque's North Valley. Her eccentric world comes to a sudden end in the early 1950s, and Lowell Briscoe, her young protégé, is haunted for the rest of his life by the rude destruction of Hana and her home. From New Mexico Christmas celebrations to the riots that shook Los Angeles in 1992, from psychotherapy to the courtroom, The Oddity is a heartfelt tribute to the ecumenical mixture of cultures that makes New Mexico unique. It is also a timely examination of issues that concern many Americans at the dawn of the twenty-first century, bringing to life conflicts between individual rights and institutionalized justice, spirituality and conformity, love, and fear.

"This is a novel about meaning and the spiritual sickness that comes from searching for meaning and finding nothing that makes any sense."--from the Introduction

Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World, UNM Press, 2003 with photographs by Kirk Gittings (updated from the original 1995 version) which uses Albuquerque as an example of rapid growth in mid-sized cities around the world.

This impassioned book, both a loving description and a critique, defines urban values in a milieu that is rarely recognized as a city. Updated more than ten years after its initial publication, it is more relevant than ever to Albuquerque's future. A new chapter describes Albuquerque's recent development, placing it in the context of urban growth in the West.

Acclaim for Albuquerque:

The University of New Mexico with photographs by Robert Reck

This photographic portrait of the University of New Mexico shares the lure and magic of the campus and its unique architecture. Formally established in 1889, UNM has evolved into a major American university, overcoming geographical isolation and the relative poverty and rural circumstances of much of the state's small population.

"Since its founding on the sand hills above downtown Albuquerque in 1889, the University of New Mexico has graduated countless thousands of students who have been the mainstays of New Mexico's economic, political, and cultural life. The heart and soul of Albuquerque, and beloved by its alumni across the country and around the world, UNM is much more than an alma mater. It has querencia, a place in our hearts, like a homeland.

"Designed to exclude automobiles from its inner core, the main campus is an oasis of cultured civility, at once brimming with the youthful vigor of its student body and rooted in the American West's most venerable social and aesthetic traditions. It's what makes UNM an academic symbol of the mind-opening sense of enchantment that New Mexico is known for around the world. UNM's cutting edge vitality in literature, fine arts, physics, biology, anthropology, medicine, law, engineering, and dozens of other fields gives voice to the rich diversity and genius of the people of New Mexico."--V. B. Price