The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
By Alexandra Fuller
224 pages. Penguin.

African-bred Alexandra Fuller has a feel for wildness—of a country or of a man. With the breathtaking bravado of a western windstorm, Fuller charges straight inside the mind of an American innocent, a restless cowboy with cornflower blue eyes that "went straight through you and came out the other side knowing more than when they went in." Set this real-life hero within a landscape of oil rigs in a culture of corporate greed, and you have The Legend of Colton H. Bryant (Penguin), a loving, raging portrait of the untamed but endangered American West.