the milagro beanfield war is an excellent book.

i remember mamacita and the dad reading it and enjoying it back in the 80's, and i found it at the best bookstore ever awhile ago. it kind of reminds me of edward abbey; the profound injustices of land and resource allocation in the american west are a centerpiece of the book, but there's a magical realism flavor to the whole operation that is reminiscent of isabel allende.

this description makes me think of a good friend:

The sheriff would have liked a mind that could deal with abstract thoughts and ideas. Instead, he possessed a mind capable of tinkering with things just enough to make them impossibly confusing and himself so dissatisfied with his own intellectual inadequacies that he would never be happy.

-from john nichols' the milagro beanfield war, p. 234