S Is For Silver

From the manmade glitter of the Las Vegas strip to the natural splendor of Lake Tahoe, Nevada's riches go beyond the silver and gold found in Virginia City. S is for Silver showcases the hardy wildlife (the Desert Bighorn Sheep and the desert tortoise) and even hardier pioneers (the builders of the Hoover Dam) who shaped Nevada's landscape and character.Eleanor Coerr began her professional life as a newspaper reporter and editor of a column for children. She taught children's literature at Monterey Peninsula College and creative writing at Chapman College in California. For the past 25 years, Eleanor has been writing children's books, lecturing, and visiting schools across the United States and abroad. Her previous children's books include Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and The Big Balloon Race. Eleanor shares her time between Henderson, Nevada and Pebble Beach, California. Darcie Park was born and raised in Long Beach, California, and started drawing when she was five years old. She graduated with a BFA in illustration form California State University, Long Beach. She started her freelance illustration career in college and illustrated her first children's book, The Reluctant Dragon, her first year out of college. Darcie makes her home in Lake Tahoe.

From spoons to bullets to sterling coins, silver permeates our everyday culture and language. For millennia we’ve used it to buy what we need, adorn our bodies, or trumpet our social status, and likewise it’s been useful to vanquish werewolves, vampires, and even our own smelly socks. This book captures all of these facets of silver and more, telling the fascinating story of one of our most hardworking precious metals. As Lindsay Shen shows, while always valued for its beauty and rarity—used to bolster dowries and pay armies alike—silver today is also exploited for its chemistry and can be found in everything from the clothes we wear to the electronics we use to the medical devices that save our lives. Born in the supernovae of stars and buried deep in the earth, it has been mined by many different societies, traded throughout the world, and been the source of wars and the downfall of empires. It is also a metal of pure reflection, a shining symbol of purity. Featuring many glistening illustrations of silver in nature, art, jewelry, film, advertising, and popular culture, this is a superb overview of a metal both precious and useful, one with a rich and eventful history.

Plains Indians were artists as well as warriors, and Silver Horn (1860-1940), a Kiowa artist from the early reservation period, may well have been the most prolific Plains Indian artist of all time. Known also as Haungooah, his Kiowa name, Silver Horn was a man of remarkable skill and talent. Working in graphite, colored pencil, crayon, pen and ink, and watercolor on hide, muslin, and paper, he produced more than one thousand illustrations between 1870 and 1920. Silver Horn created an unparalleled visual record of Kiowa culture, from traditional images of warfare and coup counting to sensitive depictions of the sun dance, early Peyote religion, and domestic daily life. At the turn of the century, he helped translate nearly the entire corpus of Kiowa shield designs into miniaturized forms on buckskin models for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney. Born in 1860 when huge bison herds still roamed the southern plains, Silver Horn grew up in southwestern Oklahoma. Son of a chief and member of an artistically gifted family, he witnessed traumatic changes as his people went from a free-roaming, buffalo-hunting culture to reservation life and, ultimately, to forced assimilation into white society. Although perceived as a troublemaker in midlife because of his staunch resistance to the forces of civilization, Silver Horn became to many a romantic example of the "real old-time Indian." In this presentation of Silver Horn’s work, showcasing 43 color and 116 black-and-white illustrations, Candace S. Greene provides a thorough biographical portrait of the artist and, through his work, assesses the concepts and roles of artists in Kiowa culture.