Wildlife - Richard Ford

Winter Wheat - Mildred Walker

Miseducation of Cameron Post - emily m. danforth

The big burn - Timothy Egan

 The big burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the fire that saved America - Timothy Egan

Summary: Narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire of August, 1910, and Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservation efforts that helped turn public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.


BookPage Reviews
The recent “Station Fire” in California’s Angeles National Forest, the worst in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 160,000 acres and killed two firefighters. In comparison, the 1910 Northern Rockies forest fire remembered in The Big Burn covered nearly 3.2 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. At least 85 people were killed, most of them members of ill-trained firefighting crews. That blowout, the biggest wildfire in American history, devastated the economy of a booming timber and mining region. It traumatized the survivors—and as New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows in The Big Burn, it set the course for U.S. forest conservation for the next hundred years, for good and ill. The national forests that burned were brand new, the product of President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade. Spurred on by fellow aristocrat Gifford Pinchot, the founding head of the National Forest Service, Roosevelt had worked at breakneck pace to protect millions of acres from logging, railroad and mine companies. But when Roosevelt left office, the land barons’ allies in his own party starved the Forest Service of resources, and forced out Pinchot. The scope of the disaster and the heroism of so many forest rangers turned public opinion in favor of conservation at a crucial moment. National forests were subsequently created throughout the country, and the Forest Service became a thriving agency. For his National Book Award-winning account of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, Egan was able to interview survivors. For The Big Burn, he had to comb through Forest Service reports, memoirs and old newspapers. But he’s equally effective here in telling the story through individuals—the homesteaders, the fire crews of immigrants and drifters, the idealistic Ivy League grads who followed Pinchot’s siren call to the Forest Service. Egan is a gorgeous writer. His chapters on the “blowup,” when thousands fled burning towns and desperate fire crews burrowed in mine shafts or submerged in streams to escape the inferno, should become a classic account of an American Pompeii. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

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Prairie nocturne - Ivan Doig

Prairie nocturne - Doig, Ivan

Summary: Teaching voice lessons to the privileged members of society during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Susan Duff is hired by a man who once harbored political ambitions to teach his African American chauffeur how to sing. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
Doig returns to several of the characters from his much-loved Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987) in this gripping story set not only in Montana's Two Medicine country, the landscape indelibly associated with the author, but also in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. It's 1924, and Susan Duff, the headstrong schoolgirl from Rascal Fair, is now a middle-aged voice teacher in Helena, resigned to spinsterhood after her affair with gubernatorial candidate Wes Williamson cost him the election. Then Wes seeks her out with a proposition: teach his black chauffeur, Monty, to sing. Returning to Two Medicine country, Susan does just that, as the narrative twists and turns its way back into the pasts of the three principal characters and ahead into their shared futures in New York: Monty on the concert stage and Susan and Wes, their relationship still tumultuous, in the wings. As always, Doig incorporates a vast amount of fascinating historical material into his personal drama: the story of the "Buffalo soldiers" of the tenth cavalry in the late nineteenth century; the saga of the Ku Klux Klan's incursion into Montana; and, of course, the Harlem Renaissance itself. The heart of the matter, though, is the three-sided relationship among Susan, Wes, and Monty; skirting the melodrama into which this triptych might easily have tumbled, Doig tightens the reins on his sometimes mannered prose and constructs a subtle, highly textured love story, nicely balancing period detail and well-modulated emotion. ((Reviewed August 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews

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Work song - Ivan Doig

Work song - Doig, Ivan

Summary: In 1919, itinerant schoolteacher Morrie Morgan journeys to Butte in the hopes of making his fortune in copper mining but finds instead a rich assortment of local characters before an encounter with a former student leads to a violent union uprising.



Booklist Reviews
Doig's fictional forays into Montana history have long been distinguished by the author's ability to make compelling human drama out of the small-canvas concerns of everyday people. He did it with a one-room school in the outstanding Whistling Season (2006), and he does it again here with seemingly even more mundane subjects: the on-the-job tribulations of a librarian and the composition of a work song to inspire the beleaguered miners in Butte, Montana, in the early twentieth century. The librarian, the charismatic, quasi–con man Morrie Morris, returns from his stint as a teacher in Whistling Season; this time he lands in Butte eager to fill his pockets with some of the cash that's pouring from the city's copper mines but winds up working in the library instead. That leads to some clandestine songwriting, as the local miners attempt to create a suitably moving ditty to drive the troops in what looks like an upcoming strike. As usual, Doig incorporates plenty of large-canvas history into his mix of romance and human drama—the role of the Wobblies in confronting the West's implacable industrialists; the particulars of coal mining; and even the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series—and, also as usual, he tiptoes ever so carefully on the literary ledge that separates warm, character-driven drama from sentimental melodrama. He nearly loses his footing a time or two here, unlike in the perfectly balanced Whistling Season, but on the whole, this is an engaging, leisurely paced look at labor, libraries, and love in a roughneck mining town. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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The whistling season - Ivan Doig

The whistling season - Doig, Ivan

Summary: Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent and perpetually whistling Rose and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's reluctant sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project. 60,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Doig's latest foray through Montana history begins in the late 1950s, with Superintendent of Public Instruction Paul Milliron on the verge of announcing the closure of the state's one-room schools, seen as hopelessly out of date in the age of Sputnik. But quickly the narrative takes us back to Paul's pivotal seventh-grade year, 1910, when he was a student in one of those one-room schools, and two landmark events took place: the Milliron family acquired a housekeeper, and Halley's comet came to Montana. Throughout his long career, Doig has been at his best when chronicling the passing of a season in the lives of a Montana family, usually farmers at around the turn of the century. It's no surprise, then, that this is his best novel since the marvelous English Creek (1985). As in all of his books, he digs the details of his historical moments from the dirt in which they thrived. We see Paul, his father, and his two younger brothers struggling to make a life on their dryland farm in the wake of their mother's death, and we feel their shock when they lay eyes on their new housekeeper, a recent widow who looks nothing like the "great-bosomed creature shrouded in gray" they had come to expect. The saga of how this stranger from Minneapolis and her brother (soon to become the new teacher) change lives in unexpected ways has all the charm of old-school storytelling, from Dickens to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Doig's antique narrative voice, which sometimes jars, feels right at home here, coming from the mouth of the young Paul, who is eagerly learning Latin as he tries to make sense of his ever-enlarging world. An entrancing new chapter in the literature of the West. ((Reviewed December 15, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.


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Both ways is the only way I want it - Maile Meloy

Both ways is the only way I want it - Meloy, Maile

Summary: An award-winning author presents a volume of eleven short works that explores the complexity of life in austere landscapes of the American west, from the tale of a ranch hand who falls for a reluctant newcomer to the story of a young father who is shocked by the reappearance of his late grandmother. - (Baker & Taylor)

Kirkus Reviews
Meloy (A Family Daughter, 2006, etc.) explores loneliness in 11 stories set mostly in her native Montana."Travis, B." depicts a young cowboy, working away from his family and desperately lonely, attempting to woo an adult-ed teacher. His growth in self-awareness does not mitigate the heartbreak of his failure. "Lovely Rita" is another lost young adult; after her lover dies in a power-plant accident, she raffles herself off to raise money to find the father who abandoned her years before. While Travis and Rita are cut off from family, most of Meloy's characters are alone within their families. The adolescent protagonist of "Red from Green" loves her father but goes away to school; recognizing his inability to protect her, she chooses loneliness as a permanent state. In "Liliana," a Los Angeles man's supposedly dead grandmother shows up on his doorstep, alive and ready to reject him all over again. "Nine" is Valentina's age when her mother begins an affair with an Italian professor. It soon becomes clear that the affair is doomed, but Valentina mourns the loss of the man's ten-year-old son in her life. "Spy vs. Spy" shows a man and his brother dealing with long-simmering sibling rivalry. Despite their relative brevity, these are complex stories, often showing several characters being pulled in different directions. In what may be the volume's masterpiece, Leo meets with "The Girlfriend" of the man who raped and murdered Leo's daughter. In an anti-O'Henry twist, the loving father unearths a truth better left buried: that his own protectiveness may have caused his daughter's death. The author seldom allows a trickle of hope to lighten her characters' anguish, but she gives them a consciousness and dignity that make their experiences deeply moving. Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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