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."
OCTOBER
7
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.
OCTOBER
21
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.
NOVEMBER 4
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.
Questions? Call Liza 208.612.8460 or levens@ifpl.org
AMERICAN NATIONS
