Rating: 
Summary: Powder Burn
Review: Dan Glick writes an impressive highly interesting treatise on the 1998 arsons on Vail Mountain. This book not only covers the fires but also the money lust and greed of Vail Associates (VA) and serves as a political-social commentary on big business in small Colorado mountain towns. For Coloradans and residents of the Rocky Mountain west, those interested in current social activism, and money hungy Wall Street-ers this is a must read.
Rating:
Summary: Powder Burn
Review: Dan Glick writes an impressive highly interesting treatise on the 1998 arsons on Vail Mountain. This book not only covers the fires but also the money lust and greed of Vail Associates (VA) and serves as a political-social commentary on big business in small Colorado mountain towns. For Coloradans and residents of the Rocky Mountain west, those interested in current social activism, and money hungy Wall Street-ers this is a must read.
Rating:
Summary: VA is not Darth Vader
Review: Great read - Exciting, intriguing - lot's of local folklore - VA may not be quite as big a monster as everyone makes them out to be - a great whodunnit?
Rating:
Summary: meticulous journalism; fascinating story
Review: How do you make an unsolved arson case sound interesting? You look beyond the arson to the people and passions that swirl in the background. Glick uses a rather unsatisfying arson investigation (unsatisfying in that no villain was ever identified) as a springboard to exploring a much larger story of environmentalism vs. corporate greed. Most fascinating (and amusing) to me were the chapters about conflicts between the haves and the have-nots in Vail. The anecdotes were so outrageous one would almost think they were fictional! But as Glick so ably demonstrates, truth is stranger -- and more absurd -- than fiction could ever be.
Rating:
Summary: Great read
Review: I am a professional indexer who provided the index at the back of this book. What a page-turner! Dan Glick's prose is clean and clear, and it was a pleasure to read this book. Sometimes I had to slow myself down in order to pay attention to the indexing process, and not just zoom through the book to find out "what happens next". I am recommending it to all my friends.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Another Vail Valley Coffee Table Book
Review: I've always thought the goings on in the Vail Valley would make for an interesting read. Dan Glick was the right author to write about the social tensions and arson mystery in this faux Austrian village ski town. This book is an easy page turner and is a fascinating read for anyone who has lived or spent some time in the town. It's refreshing to see a book about Vail with perspectives from the variety of social and economic groups in the Valley. There are many coffee table books published on the town, yet virtually nothing has been written about the people of Vail. A quick, easy to read book that I did not want to finish.
Rating: 
Summary: Powder Burned
Review: If you enjoy 257 pages of strung together clichés - this books for you. The author trips over his writing and tries so hard to be clever - the book becomes painful to read. If you like lines like " Microsoft of the powder processors" stung together with "AT&T of the uphill transportation business" go for it! If you really want to read this book - just read the 19-page epilogue - this must have been the only part reviewed by an editor!
Rating:
Summary: Vail Singed Again in Sizzling Arson Probe
Review: If you've ever stood on the rim of the Back Bowls at Vail,looking far across at Blue Sky Basin, poised to descend a slope offresh powder, it's hard to imagine that this place could be tarnished.Vail, Colorado, the U.S.' largest ski resort, has lon had a fabledreputation among skiers. Yet Vail is more than a legendary collectionof trails. It has become a corporate behemoth that has transfigured aonce-serene slice of Rocky Mountain reverie, to such a degree thatsomebody -- in the cold, autumn darkness of October 1998 -- tried tosend a message back by setting some spectacular fires on themountaintop. At first glance, "Powder Burn" is acapitivating "whodunit," an investigation into the arsonthat did $12 million in damage to ski lifts and buildings at the poshresort. Yet the probe of the fires is but an entree to a wider taleof intrigue, a saga of the cultural clash that ensues when outrageouswealth and Wall Street power invades a once-pristine alpine valley andski town. It is a story happening not only in Vail but throughout theWest, as lattes and laptops displace cowboys and pick-up trucks inrural hamlets blessed -- or cursed -- with gorgeous natural amenities.Discovered by skiers, mountain bikers and fly-fishermen, they've beenturned into high-end recreation meccas, catering to "gentlemanranchers" whose 10,000 square-foot getaway homes are more likelyto front a golf course than a working pasture. While the arson waswidely assumed to be the work of "eco-terrorists" opposed tothe ski resort's expansion into prime, old-growth lynx habitat,"Powder Burn" reveals that any number of irate parties couldhave had cause to strike the match.Daniel Glick, a Newsweekcorrespondent who covers the Rocky Mountain West, takes readers on aprovocative trip behind Vail's faux-Alpine facade, into a world wherecorporate logic has defined an entire way of life. "PowderBurn" is really a collection of interwoven stories, eachfascinating in its own right yet most potent when told together. Itis a mystery thriller, an inquiry into a brilliantly dispatched crime.It is a history that challenges the more sugar-coated, coffee-tableversions recently published by a couple of Vail's founders. Glickcharts the transformation of Vail from a "high-altitude lettucepatch" to its current status as a publicly traded corporation,the plum acquisition of of a ruthless New York investment firm headedby a former junk bond trader once the protege of Michael Milken. Itis a portrait of a place and its people, a sort of geo-social analysistold through intimate glimpses of the individuals who call the valleyhome, with varying degrees of commitment.The author's journalistbackground is evident in the book's persistent, meticulous reporting.But "Powder Burn" reads like novel: with electric detail, ittakes the reader inside the minds of a diverse cast of characters,from ski instructors to slope groomers to sheriff's investigators andsociety-types. From struggling coffee-shop owners to the Manhattantycoons who run the show, Glick has talked with them all, includingVail Resorts CEO Adam Aron, an East-coast executive now residing inBeaver Creek who gained local notoriety for checking on liftoperations in tasseled loafers. That anecdote seems to symbolizeVail's contemporary identity struggle, which Glick unveils in hisquest to discover whose simmering discontent had reached the explosionpoint -- literally."Powder Burn" probes into Vail'seconomics, politics and social dynamics, examining the same sorts ofissues that trouble other mountain resort towns, places like JacksonHole and Moab that are also trying to manage suburban-style sprawl andthe social dislocation that occurs with a flood of outside capital.Anyone who's driven the stretch of I-70 from East Vail to Eagle hasobserved the trophy homes juxtaposed with trailer parks, the fur-cladcafe crowd and the Mexican immigrant workers who serve their everyneed at minimum wage. Glick presents Vail as a microcosm of such"New West" dichotomies, perhaps the apotheosis.One ofPowder Burn's many revelations is the extent of Vail Resorts' verticalintegration. Not only does the corporation control 40% of all skiingin Colorado (in addition to Vail and Beaver Creek, the company alsobought Keystone and Breckenridge in 1996), but an array of hotels,rental shops, retail outlets, restaurants and real-estate developmentas well. In fact, the largest realtor in the Vail Valley, involved in65% of Eagle County real-estate transactions to the tune of nearly $1billion last year, is a Vail Resorts joint venture. The readerdoesn't have to delve too far into "Powder Burn" beforeVail's owners, Apollo Partners LLP, begin to look like robber barons,hell-bent on doing whatever it takes to increase shareholder returns-- traditions and community be damned.Glick makes it painfullyevident that the lynx isn't the only 'endangered species' around Vail.Others may just have had easier access to revenge. And while thearson remains unsolved, Glick does some speculating in his epilogueabout culpability. It's not the sort of suspect one might expect,though. But let's not give the ending away.You don't have to be askier or snowboarder to find "Powder Burn" an engrossingread. Anyone concerned about the changing rural West should read thisbook. From the prologue on, it's a punchy, witty, quick-moving taleof greed and suspense, equally entertaining and disturbing, which willrivet your attention through to the final page. If you are a Vailafficionado, however, one thing is certain: once you've read"Powder Burn," you'll never be able to stand on the edge ofthe Back Bowls, or anywhere else on the mountain, and think of it thesame way again.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Title, Great Epilogue
Review: My room mate asked me why it was taking so long to read this book, and my reply was that it was hard to stumble through Glick's clumsy writing. My interest, however, lay in my previous residency in CO and my interest in the subject, so I struggled through the chapters (many with very clever titles). I lived near Telluride for several years, and watched many of the same actions take place as did in Vail, re: the disparity of money and living conditions and in the attitudes of the haves and have-nots. Environmental issues are just one of the many issues in combat with residents and eco-groups against many of these new conglomerate ski companies, some with owners based far from operations.Glick does a great job with the interviews and investigation; but his long, run-on sentences left much to be desired. If I didn't have an interest in his viewpoint on the subject, I would have put the book down in the third chapter. If you want the gist of it all, just read the epilogue, which - IMO - contains the best information and most well-written part of the book. This, alone, is worth the money, as well as the information. I'll never drive past Vail again without remembering the issues and the personal stories in this book. Long live the lynx.
Rating:
Summary: Powder Burn
Review: Powder Burn was a GREAT book that provided me with the information that i needed to know about the mystery of who tourched vail. I learned some stuff in my political geography class about this that is what got me interested in it and made me read it. I recommend it to all people who like mystery books with a small twist of history.
|
