Selling Your Father's Bones: The Epic Fate of the American West by Brian Schofield
Schofield's history-cum- travelogue tells the genuinely epic story of a group of Red Indians in the late 19th century, as they fled before the white man. The Nez Perce weren't at all keen on “celebrating diversity”, or sympathetic towards these swarms of economic migrants, and wanted only to “restore the whole country to the Indians”. Finally defeated by the whites' “cancerous and tenacious” religion and “technology of extinction”, as Schofield puts it, they took flight on a 1,700-mile trek from Oregon to Canada. Schofield doesn't actually retrace the journey on foot or horseback, but his visits to the tough frontier towns of the northwest are illuminating. Much of the public discourse, he notes, takes place through the medium of bumper stickers. “This family supported by timber dollars”, and “Earth Firsters suck!” It's also interesting to learn that “squaw” is, allegedly, a colloquial term meaning “the c-word”. Christopher Hart

Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico by Richard Grant
The Mexican Sierra Madre has long resisted the rule of law. In its impenetrable network of canyons and forests, power lies firmly in the hands of the feuding drug lords, the only way to make a living is to grow marijuana and the first thing you buy when you have enough money is an AK-47. Grant, whose first book Ghost Riders won the Thomas Cook Travel Book award, is a writer with an almost pathological need to seek out danger and he makes the perfect guide around the lawless sierras. He treks up and down the region, and attempts to negotiate the strict honour code that holds sway in the area while sifting through old tales about the last of the wild Apaches and the various famous bandidos who buried their treasure in the mountains. His sociological observations are somewhat cursory, but what he excels at is capturing that moment of animal fear when he's surrounded by cocaine-fuelled, drunk and inexplicably hostile drug smugglers and realises just how much trouble he's in. Ed King

Selling Your Father's Bones by Brian Schofield
HarperPress £17.99 pp414
Bandit Roadsby Richard Grant
Little, Brown £16.99 pp285

Times Recommends

• Sarah Palin and the Palindromes: 7 extraordinary connections
• Physics for Future Presidents: The Podcasts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die