We only have just 20 sets of the books for this read-and-discuss book series, and the books will go out on a first come, first served basis in the Idaho Falls Public Library... get yours today!
The selections for this year:
SEPTEMBER 9
Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life, Robert Utley
(Scholar:
Steven Hall)
Billy the Kid is both a simple narrative of the life of Henry McCarty
Antrim (alias William Bonney aka Billy the Kid) and an analysis of his place
and times, and the context of his life. It provides a means for considering his
real importance to American history and, particularly, American myth. In fact,
Robert Utley says that his purpose is to comment on violence in American
society. Utley is known primarily as a historian of the Idaho Wars. As a
National Park Service historian, he produced guides for such complex sites as
Custer (now Little Bighorn) Battlefield. Billy
the Kid grew out of Utley’s highly regarded analysis of New Mexico’s
Lincoln County War, High Noon in Lincoln:
Violence on the Western Frontier, and is aimed, he says, at “stripping away
the veneers of legendry
SEPTEMBER 23
English Creek, Ivan Doig
(Scholar:
Steven Hall)
The days of arriving summer, the rangeland green at last across northern Montana, the hundred-mile horizon of the Rocky Mountains, form the backdrop for Jick McCaskill's coming-of-age late in the Depression. Jick is fourteen and able now to share in the full life of family and town and ranch in the sprawling Two Medicine country. His father is a roustabout range rider turned forest ranger; his mother, from a local ranching family, is a practical woman with a peppery wit. His idolized brother Alec is eighteen and strong-minded, set on marriage to a town girl and on a livelihood as a cowboy. Alec's choice of "cow chousing" throws the McCaskills into conflict, and through Jick's eyes we see a family at a turning point—"where all four of our lives made their bend."
The days of arriving summer, the rangeland green at last across northern Montana, the hundred-mile horizon of the Rocky Mountains, form the backdrop for Jick McCaskill's coming-of-age late in the Depression. Jick is fourteen and able now to share in the full life of family and town and ranch in the sprawling Two Medicine country. His father is a roustabout range rider turned forest ranger; his mother, from a local ranching family, is a practical woman with a peppery wit. His idolized brother Alec is eighteen and strong-minded, set on marriage to a town girl and on a livelihood as a cowboy. Alec's choice of "cow chousing" throws the McCaskills into conflict, and through Jick's eyes we see a family at a turning point—"where all four of our lives made their bend."
OCTOBER
7
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
(Scholar: Carlen
Donovan)
To read about Native American reservation life is usually to read about illness and despair. Fiction originating from that life is also, of course, capable of wild happiness and celebration; but the darkness is a fact of life and art. James Welch, in his superb novel “Winter in the Blood,” observes his characters’ suffering from the corner of his narrative eye; Reynolds Price, in his moving novella “Walking Lessons,” confronts the sorrow directly. Sherman Alexie, whose 1993 collection, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” was justly applauded, writes about characters who are squarely in the middle of reservation life but who report it to us from a point of view that is simultaneously tangential to the mainstream of that life as well as part of its sad, slow rhythms. Here, for example, from his first novel, “Reservation Blues,” is Mr. Alexie’s description of the Indians’ mythic coyote: “a trickster whose bag of tricks contains permutations of love, hate, weather, chance, laughter and tears, e.g., Lucille Ball.” He catches the ancient and the contemporary, the solemn and the self-mocking, at once; he evokes dreary days of watching black-and-white television reruns in a place of “poverty, suicide, alcoholism,” where “Indian Health only gave out dental floss and condoms.” When Mr. Alexie writes at his best, he creates stinging commentary, and he shows his determination to make you uncertain whether you want to laugh or cry.
To read about Native American reservation life is usually to read about illness and despair. Fiction originating from that life is also, of course, capable of wild happiness and celebration; but the darkness is a fact of life and art. James Welch, in his superb novel “Winter in the Blood,” observes his characters’ suffering from the corner of his narrative eye; Reynolds Price, in his moving novella “Walking Lessons,” confronts the sorrow directly. Sherman Alexie, whose 1993 collection, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” was justly applauded, writes about characters who are squarely in the middle of reservation life but who report it to us from a point of view that is simultaneously tangential to the mainstream of that life as well as part of its sad, slow rhythms. Here, for example, from his first novel, “Reservation Blues,” is Mr. Alexie’s description of the Indians’ mythic coyote: “a trickster whose bag of tricks contains permutations of love, hate, weather, chance, laughter and tears, e.g., Lucille Ball.” He catches the ancient and the contemporary, the solemn and the self-mocking, at once; he evokes dreary days of watching black-and-white television reruns in a place of “poverty, suicide, alcoholism,” where “Indian Health only gave out dental floss and condoms.” When Mr. Alexie writes at his best, he creates stinging commentary, and he shows his determination to make you uncertain whether you want to laugh or cry.
OCTOBER
21
The Brave Cowboy, Edward Abbey
The Brave Cowboy, Edward Abbey
(Scholar:
Michael Corrigan)
Caught in his own limbo, the cowboy Jack Burns has been reduced to herding sheep. Jack Burns is a cowboy, not of cows, but of nature. Abbey has drawn Burns’ character out of the western land, that geography, specialized topography where supposedly all good cowboys come from—pine forest, surrounding desert flats and mountains, all bordered by a winding river. Yet we get little of the calf-roping, hard-hitting, straight-shooting, bronc-busting stereotype Hollywood has conned us to expect. There are many approaches one could take in evaluating this novel. Symbolism, imagery, the unities, character, plot, theme, structure, and more. The jail is a microcosm of the world. We have the intruder, Jack; the inmates; the caretakers, guards, both good and bad; the overseer, a well-intentioned but inept and bungling sheriff. Devoid of and unaffected by pure cool water, lush green grass, fresh cold wind, or snow-pocked peaks to which Burns, as a would-be “everyman,” must return for purification, rejuvenation, life.
Caught in his own limbo, the cowboy Jack Burns has been reduced to herding sheep. Jack Burns is a cowboy, not of cows, but of nature. Abbey has drawn Burns’ character out of the western land, that geography, specialized topography where supposedly all good cowboys come from—pine forest, surrounding desert flats and mountains, all bordered by a winding river. Yet we get little of the calf-roping, hard-hitting, straight-shooting, bronc-busting stereotype Hollywood has conned us to expect. There are many approaches one could take in evaluating this novel. Symbolism, imagery, the unities, character, plot, theme, structure, and more. The jail is a microcosm of the world. We have the intruder, Jack; the inmates; the caretakers, guards, both good and bad; the overseer, a well-intentioned but inept and bungling sheriff. Devoid of and unaffected by pure cool water, lush green grass, fresh cold wind, or snow-pocked peaks to which Burns, as a would-be “everyman,” must return for purification, rejuvenation, life.
NOVEMBER 4
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
(Scholar:
Leslie Leek)
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for its distinction as a novel about the West that transcended “regional” and “pioneer” stereotypes. Geologically, the angle of repose is the slope at which rocks stop rolling down a mountain. In the novel, it serves as a metaphor for the accommodation, the equilibrium, that Susan and Oliver Ward arrive at in relation to each other and to the circumstances of their lives. In its larger application, it suggests “the uneasy truce in which all paired opposites rest,” the opposites in the marriage of the Wards and in the culture of the American West. Lyman Ward, the narrator, sifts through his grandmother’s letters trying to penetrate the “hidden lode of Susan Ward’s woe.” Himself orphaned as a small boy and brought up by this grandmother, he is now crippled, fifty-eight years old, and a retired historian. In his searching, he comes upon what turned the marriage of his grandparents into an unloving, unforgiving truce that lasted the rest of their lives, and in doing so confronts some hard truths in his own existence.
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for its distinction as a novel about the West that transcended “regional” and “pioneer” stereotypes. Geologically, the angle of repose is the slope at which rocks stop rolling down a mountain. In the novel, it serves as a metaphor for the accommodation, the equilibrium, that Susan and Oliver Ward arrive at in relation to each other and to the circumstances of their lives. In its larger application, it suggests “the uneasy truce in which all paired opposites rest,” the opposites in the marriage of the Wards and in the culture of the American West. Lyman Ward, the narrator, sifts through his grandmother’s letters trying to penetrate the “hidden lode of Susan Ward’s woe.” Himself orphaned as a small boy and brought up by this grandmother, he is now crippled, fifty-eight years old, and a retired historian. In his searching, he comes upon what turned the marriage of his grandparents into an unloving, unforgiving truce that lasted the rest of their lives, and in doing so confronts some hard truths in his own existence.
Questions? Call Liza 208.612.8460 or levens@ifpl.org
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