On April 26, 1937, in the late afternoon of a busy market day in the Basque town of Gernika in northern Spain, the German Luftwaffe began the relentless bombing and machine-gunning of buildings and villagers. Three-and-a-half hours later, the village lay in ruins, its population decimated. This act of terror and unspeakable cruelty outraged the world and one man in particular, Pablo Picasso. The renowned artist, an expatriate living in Paris, reacted immediately to the devastation in his homeland by creating the canvas that would become widely considered one of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century--Guernica. Weaving themes of conflict and redemption, of the horors of war and of the power of art to transfigure tragedy, Russell Martin follows this monumental work from its fevered creation through its
journey across decades and continents.

Absorbing . . . Picasso's War is a fetching and well-crafted account of Pablo Picasso's huge and astounding painting, Guernica.
--Los Angeles Times

Refreshingly original . . . Martin is above all a first-rate investigator [who] deftly weaves together world and art history.
--The Boston Globe

A fascinating and lively read.
--The Denver Post

An engrossing story of a landmark work of art . . . Martin is, first and foremost, a consummate storyteller.
--Kirkus Reviews

When Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer, snipping a lock of Beethoven's hair as a keepsake--as was custom at the time--in the process. For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews.

After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence.

In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, a tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.

Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize, with a new foreword by the author

This is the story of one particular little boy trapped in silence, struggling to regain language. And it is the story of every one of us who uses language in much the same way we breathe: effortlessly, intuitively, taking this gift for granted in our daily lives. In a work that captures the whole universe of language, Russell Martin probes this most profound and complex human trait but never abandons his central concern, always circling back to the troubling question of the speechless child. Investigating the mystery of what went wrong and why, he spins a tale of detection, unearthing disturbing truths and reaching surprising conclusions. In the end, his is a spellbinding drama; a tale of one family's determination to help their child find his way back to words; a story of one school's willingness to make room for this child; a story, too, about big, seemingly insurmountable problems, and small but noble victories. In combining this story, with an elegant inquiry into the totality of language, Martin takes us on a voyage of discovery into the very essence of what makes us human. Moving us with the miracle of language, he tells a tale that is a cause for celebration.

A wholly remarkable book . . . Martin leaves us with a deeper understanding of language itself, a richer appreciation of its promise, and a realization that the ability to communicate is a kind of grace. --The Los Angeles Times

A deeply moving rendering of human beings in adversity. . . Other accounts of the suffering of autism have been published, but few can vie with this one for thoughtfulness, scholarship, and personal accent. --New York Times Book Review

The journey into language is a magical passage for any of us, and Russell Martin's brilliantly observed story of a boy struggling to speak takes us into the latest realms of how and why words come to us, and we to them. --Ivan Doig, author of This House of Sky and English Creek

John Ferrier is the pseudonym of a young neurologist who, having completed residencies and research fellowships at Oxford, Vancouver, Denver, Cornell, and Columbia, returned to his home in a medium-sized Rocky Mountain city to take up private practice. Ferrier, whose recreations range from architecture to jazz, combines a passionate interest in neurological research with the sensitivity and compassion of the best clinicians. For over a year, widely acclaimed writer Russell Martin followed him through the days and ways of his practice. The result is a fascinating picture of the brain and its diseases, a moving account of human courage, and a revealing insight into the practice of modern medicine. Matters Gray and White is science writing at its very best.

A book of fascinating insights into modern medical practices and heartening accounts of individual courage. ... Martin records with uncommon sensitivity and understanding the clinical work and thoughts or a first-rate physician. ... It is excellent.

New York Times Book Review

An honest and moving book that covers a wide swatch and leaves us full of awe.

Washington Post Book World

Compelling ... Martin doesn't merely isolate cases, he weaves them together with the skill of a novelist.

The Denver Post

The Denver Broncos' 1986-1987 season was an extraordinary one-the first year in which Hall-of-Fame quarterback John Elway won the NFL's MVP award, the season that finally ended the team's decades-long laughingstock legacy, the year Elway's heroics helped forever secure the team in the hearts of fans throughout Broncos Country. Back in print at last, this is sports writing at its very best.

In The Color Orange, bestselling writer Russell Martin offers a series of reports from the city at the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains, letters posted from a football town during the course of a single season, beginning with the long hot days of training camp in mid-July, climaxing in the emotional tumult of the play-offs in frigid January, and ending in a sun-drenched Pasadena Super Bowl. They are letters concerning an illness called Broncomania, letters about the relationship between the team and its city, its region-focusing on the players who work wearing pads and plastic helmets, who are celebrated or ignored depending on what they have done for Denver lately; on the owner and his administrators and coaches, for whom football is big and serious business; on the beat reporters who cover the team as if the assignment were the State Department, and the television talent who stand in front of video cameras to record facile practice-field updates; on the bookies and bettors and the souvenir sellers; and, of course, on the fans-the fans who, over the cascade of years, have spent more money than they care to admit to buy tickets to more games than they care to remember, the fans who surely bleed in blue and orange, who root religiously for the home team, who are affected by its fortunes in ways that are not simple to explain. This is a book about football-how the game on the grass (or on the imitation grass) is sometimes enlarged by us into something mythic, something hugely important.

One hot Colorado afternoon, physician-turned-archaeologist Sarah MacLeish unearths the skeleton of an Ancestral Puebloan girl with a deformed leg. Her efforts to understand something of the long-ago life of that girl confront her with the flaws in her own body and her marriage. Sarah struggles with multiple sclerosis, and she is increasingly persuaded that her husband, archaeologist Harry MacLeish, is profoundly discontented in their childless marriage. Sarah must contend, too, with the question of where she comes from, what her pioneer heritage truly means to her, how she can live up to the values of her grandmother--whose long life is drawing to its inevitable close--and whether she has both the power and the will to shape the days that remains to her.

Employing archeology as both subject and metaphor, The Sorrow of Archaeology is a provocative and always lyrical novel whose characters grapple with the deepest human questions: How can we know who we really are? What is best for us? How do we construct satisfying narratives of our own lives out of the broken materials fate hands us? Set near Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, where the author grew up and lived for many years, it is a novel rich with emotional, medical, archaeological, and cultural truths.

Russell Martin's remarkable first novel brings to mind the wonderful early books of Larry McMurtry, wherein the gorgeous but unforgiving landscape of the American West is evoked as powerfully and majestically as the characters who inhabit it.

Martin's narrator is Jack Healy, a decent man struggling to make sense of the cosmos, and to define his place in it. Growing up in Durango, Colorado, the son of an Episcopal priest, Healy dreamed of journeying to space as an astronaut. As Beautiful Islands begins in 1985, Healy has fulfilled his lifelong ambition, having just returned from a successful space shuttle mission. But there are problems awaiting him back home on terra firma. His marriage has come undone, thanks mostly to the pressures of his career. And his brother, Michael, with whom he was once close, has drifted deeper and deeper into the tortured realm of schizophrenia.

In Beautiful Islands, Jack Healy relates his experiences in the difficult year that follows his flight--a year that brings tragedy first to his family, then to the nation, when the shuttle Challenger explodes high above the Florida swamps. It is a year that takes Healy on a very difficult kind of journey from his own voyage in weightless space, a journey that beckons him now toward a reassessment of his life and toward a kind of tentative understanding.

The Essential Russell Martin is a collection of work by the internationally renowned writer that spans forty years. Collected here are three excerpts from novels and a novella, five articles, and excerpts from seven narrative nonfiction books-all of them published between the years 1983 and 2022. As he describes in the book's introduction, Martin has written often over the years about the work people choose to do and how they go about it. He has written about people with disabilities a number of times and has been lured by the inspired work of artists-painters, musicians, writers-who have achieved monumental creative heights. Both Europe and the New World have captured his attention, and he has always been as interested in history as the present moment. He written about death repeatedly, and once wrote about the young men, most of them actually still boys, who forged a football team that had a transcendent season.

When Colorado College awarded him an honorary doctorate, the citation read, in part, Mr. Martin offers to general audiences precise and accurate, but highly readable, studies of extraordinarily complex issues. He does more: he sees beyond what is already known; he moves beyond synthesis to new insights. His work is disciplined, analytical, and creative. It is also profoundly humane.

This is an important retrospective collection of some of the very finest work by one of America's most celebrated writers.

On a bright afternoon in February 1910, thirteen-year-old Tommy Dumont witnesses the most stupendous event he has ever seen-the first flight of a powered airplane in Denver history. But only months later, this enterprising son of a wealthy banker is living on the city's streets and alleys because his father is appalled by the epileptic seizures that have begun to regularly overtake him. Eventually looked after by both an Irish immigrant who earns her living as a prostitute and Denver's renowned juvenile court Judge Ben Lindsey, Tommy survives by his bountiful wits and his determination to make something of his life despite his seizures until the judge make a life-changing request of him. Tommy is a remarkable character, and his story is one of courage and the meaning friendship, tragedy and redemption. Martin is, first and foremost, a consummate storyteller, says Kirkus Reviews. Daily Bread is a novella that will capture your heart and linger in your memory.

In recent years, a vital and valuable regional literature has emerged from America's interior West: work that reflects the region, its people, and their concerns, yet transcends this rugged country at large. This collection includes fiction and nonfiction from this impressive group.

Works by: Rudolfo A. Anaya, Charles Bowden, Ron Carlson, Denise Chavez, Ivan Doig, Gretel Ehrlich, Joanne Greenberg, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, Barbara Kingsolver, William Kittredge, David Long, Robert Mayer, Russell Martin, Thomas McGuane, Deidre McNamer, N. Scott Momaday, Gary Paul Nabhan, David Quammen, Lisa Sandlin, James Welch, Terry Tempest Williams.

Follow the trail of Beethoven's hair as it was passed on from the boy who cut it to his son and down through the years, as it was safeguarded from Nazi Germany and eventually sold at auction in 1994. Through careful forensic testing, the hairs in the lock revealed the causes of Beethoven's deafness and his many illnesses. This fascinating story is not only a study of the secrets that forensics can reveal, but a moving history of many people's devotion to Beethoven's music.

Husband and wife team Russell Martin and Lydia Nibley follow the success of Martin's adult book, Beethoven's Hair, with this retelling for younger readers.