“American Dude Ranch,” “Tell Me Everything” and more books to read this month

Regional books of interest for April:

“American Dude Ranch,” by Lynn Downey (University of Oklahoma)

Nothing embodies the life of the Old West more than the dude ranch. Over the years, Hollywood stars such as Bela Lugosi and Gary Cooper (a real cowboy) to the Rockefellers flocked to these guest ranches to live the cowboy life, riding horses and hunting and fishing — or, in the case of Ernest Hemingway, finishing a novel.

In her highly entertaining and fact-filled “American Dude Ranch,” Lynn Downey, a former historian at Levi Strauss & Co., gives a cultural history of the dude ranch phenomenon.

The first dudes and dudines (sorry, that’s what they’re called) might have been surrogate hands, but ranchers quicky realized there was money to be made in hosting well-paying guests. Switching to dude ranching saved many a ranch from bankruptcy. Guests expected good food, campfires, trail rides and, of course, handsome cowboys.

Dude ranching survived economic ups and downs by adapting. When World War I and II broke out and Americans couldn’t go to Europe, dude ranches attracted them west. Guests pitched in to perform the duties of cowboys who’d been drafted. When automobiles and good roads brought the middle class, ranches offered shortened vacations.

“American Dude Ranch” profiles a uniquely American institution, one that for 150 years has sold the idea of a few days or weeks of the romance of the Old West.

“The School for German Brides,” by Aimie K. Runyan (William Morrow)

When Hanna’s mother dies, she leaves her rural German town to move to Berlin to live with her aunt and uncle. All Hanna wants to do is study medicine, but it’s 1938. Her relatives thrust her into high society in hopes she’ll find a husband among the officials of the Nazi party. Neither Hanna nor her Berlin friend, Klara, who had wanted to be an artist, want to marry, but what choice do they have?.

Friedrich, an arrogant SS official, is immediately smitten with Hanna. Both Hanna and Klara, who finds herself a fiancé as well, despise the Nazis, but neither can hold out against the pressure of family to marry.

Meanwhile, Klara’s half-Jewish dressmaker, Hilde, is trying to escape from Germany. She marries a Jewish man and hides him in the apartment above her fabric shop. When he disappears to search for his family, who has been taken by the Nazis, the pregnant Tilde turns to Klara for help. Hanna is taken into Klara’s scheme to hide Tilde, just as the two girls are sent to a school to learn how to be subservient wives and mothers.

Set against the background of the Third Reich, Colorado author Aimie K. Runyan’s “The School for German Brides” is an engaging novel about the horror of the treatment of Jews as well as how the Nazis attempt to subjugate their own women.

“Tell Me Everything,” by Erika Krouse (Flatiron Books)

Erika Krouse was an investigator, prying into the lives of clients for a Boulder lawyer. Then, in 2003, after a few months of looking into car accidents, her boss asked her to investigate the rape of a woman by University of Colorado football players and recruits.

In this memoir, Krouse discovered that the athletic department of the university, which she did not name (but how many Colorado universities are there near the Flatirons?) had a rape culture. Female employees who reported sexual abuse were ostracized or fired, the university covered up the claims, even the police didn’t file reports. The investigation by Krouse’s attorney, who she calls “Grayson,” is part of a wider investigation that ultimately cost the university millions and led to widespread resignations.

Krouse’s assignment in the scandal was to track down and interview victims and witnesses for Grayson, who planned to file a civil suit for victims, charging Title IX violations. The author developed techniques to draw out interviewees, who told her of being held down and raped by players or forced to perform other sexual acts. “They think they can get away with that stuff … because they’re allowed … and they’re just that way,” a player told the Colorado author.

In “Tell Me Everything,” Krause combines the story of the CU rapes with her own tale of being raped repeated as a young girl by “X.” At times, Krause has a hard time keeping it together as she shuffles her thoughts between her own life and that of the women raped by football players.  All are victims whose lives were nearly destroyed by sexual violations.