Showing results for "Jimmy Carter" in State & Local

Arizona is not just saguaros, sunsets, and the Grand Canyon. It is Tombstone shootouts stretched into legend, UFOs drifting over Phoenix, retirees clogging the left lane in golf carts, and politicians who treat chaos as a hobby. It is Indigenous ingenuity outlasting modern sprawl, Hoover Dam holding back both water and hubris, and snowbirds insisting it’s a “dry heat” while their sneakers melt on the pavement. In Cactus, Chaos, and Contradictions, Jordan Blake Carter takes you on a sarcastic, sharp-tongued romp through the state’s weird past and wild present.

This is not your high school history. From atomic showgirls and quickie divorces to Burning Man billionaires and desert survivalists, Nevada has built its reputation on contradictions. It is a place where nothing should have thrived and yet everything did, in the most outrageous ways possible. In this book, you’ll meet miners who gambled away fortunes before breakfast, mobsters who turned Vegas into a playground, politicians who looked the other way, and dreamers who set fire to wooden effigies in the desert just to see what would happen.

Welcome to Utah, where wagon ruts meet billion-dollar malls, and sacred prophecy collides with PR campaigns. This is not the version you got in seminary. From red rock petroglyphs and Spanish explorers to polygamist raids, forged scriptures, and ski resorts, Zion in the Desert tells the strange, scrappy, and often uncomfortable history of a state that was never just one thing. The book dives headfirst into the contradictions that shaped Utah: faith and resistance, empire and exodus, miracles and cover-ups.