What we're reading:

January/February 2007

Category:
Montana Author/Montana Theme

Author:
Frank Bird Linderman

The Montana Stories

About the Book:
Frank B. Linderman knew the frontier types who appear in these robust stories and sketches. A trapper in Montana during his youth, he stayed on as a publisher, politician, and businessman, beginning to write in middle age. The Montana Stories of Frank B. Linderman, originally published in 1920, still crackles with the freshness of arctic wind, the pungency of aged whiskey, the impact of a whip.

"In the Name of Friendship" sets up a deadly bluff with ironic results. "Was Chet Smalley Honest?" shows a good deed in danger of punishment. "Jake Hoover’s Pig" describes a hungry man’s sentimental attachment to a fat porker. "Cranks" is a frontier precursor of the Odd Couple. "What Followed a Sermon" testifies to the sobering effect of preaching in a saloon. These and other stories are filled with rustlers and hustlers, Mounties and tenderfeet, Crows and Blackfeet, mountain men, prospectors, bartenders, lawyers, townspeople, and assorted dogs, cats, and horses.

February/March 2007

Category:
Montana Author/Montana Theme

Author:
Larry Watson

Montana 1948


About the Book:
A young Sioux woman tossing with fever on a cot; a father begging his wife for help; a mother standing uncertainly in her kitchen with a 12-gauge shotgun: from these fragments of memory, evoked by the narrator as the novel opens, Watson builds a simple but powerful tale. It is Montana in 1948, and young David Hayden's father, Wesley, is sheriff of their small town--a position he inherited from his domineering father. Wesley is overshadowed by his older brother, Frank, a war hero who is now the town doctor. When Marie, the Sioux woman who works for the Haydens, fall ill, she adamantly resists being examined by Frank. Some probing reveals that Frank has been molesting the Indian women in his care. Wesley's dilemma--should he turn in his own brother?--is intensified when Marie is found dead and David confesses that he saw his uncle near the house before she died. The moral issues, and the consequences of following one's conscience, are made painfully evident here. Watson is to be congratulated for the honesty of his writing and the purity of his prose. Highly recommended.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"