Ivan Doig
Author
Summary
Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family. A powerfully...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1160L
Summary
"In the spirit of The Bartender's Tale, a lively and poignant coming-of-age story about a boy and his great-uncle on a cross-country odyssey. Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Doig's beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old's imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for "female trouble" in the summer of 1951, all she...
Author
Series
Summary
In the winter of 1920, a bequest draws Morrie Morgan back to Butte, Montana, with his bride, Grace. But the mansion bestowed by a former boss proves to be less windfall than money pit. And the town, with its polyglot army of miners struggling against the ruthless Anaconda Copper Mining Company, seems on the verge of implosion. These twin dilemmas catapult Morrie into his new career as editorialist for the Thunder, the fledgling union newspaper.
Author
Series
Two Medicine country volume 10
Summary
Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an "accident between the sheets" whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve....
6) Work song
Author
Series
Summary
Morrie Morgan, itinerant teacher, walking encyclopedia, and inveterate charmer, was last seen leaving a one-room schoolhouse in Marias Coulee, the stage he stole in Ivan Doig's The Whistling Season. A decade on, Morrie is back in Montana. Caught up in the mounting clash between the copper-mining company, radical "outside agitators, " and the beleaguered miners, he finds a unique way to give a voice to those who truly need one.
Author
Series
Two Medicine country volume 8
Summary
Driven by the memory of a fallen teammate, TSU's 1941 starting lineup went down as legend in Montana football history, charging through the season undefeated. Two years later, the "Supreme Team" is caught up in World War II. Ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war's various lonely and dangerous theaters. The eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine hungry for heroes. He is to chronicle...
8) Heart earth
Author
Summary
Ivan Doig grew up with only a vague memory of his mother, Berneta, who died on his sixth birthday. Then he discovered a cache of her letters—and through them, a spunky, passionate, can-do woman as at home in the saddle as behind a sewing machine, and as in love with language as Doig would prove to be. In this moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig brings to life his childhood before his mother's death and the
...Author
Summary
Often hailed as the heir apparent to Wallace Stegner, Ivan Doig is among the finest chroniclers of the contemporary American West. In Mountain Time, Lexa McCaskell and Mitch Rozier leave their Seattle home to visit Mitch's dying father in Montana. There Mitch clashes with both Lexa and his father as events from the past are explored and difficult memories resurface.
Author
Series
Two Medicine country volume 4
Summary
A family driven into relief work by the 1930s Depression joins the thousands of workers building the Fort Peck Dam, a public works project in Montana. Through the eyes of the Duffs, one of whom is an engineer, the reader sees the dam's construction, the accidents, the politics and the everyday life of the boomtowns the project created. By the author of Ride With Me, Moriah Montana.
Author
Series
Summary
Ivan Doig has been hailed by the New York Times as "dean of Western American letters." In Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, widower Jick McCaskill, his daughter Mariah, and Mariah's ex-husband Riley take a road trip back and forth across Montana. As Jick recounts his memories of the area, Riley and Mariah fall in and out of love-and Jick unexpectedly discovers a new partner.
13) English Creek
Author
Summary
The portrait of a time and a place -Montana in the 1930's -- is depicted through the McCaskill family's personal struggles.
Author
Series
Two Medicine country volume 6
Pub. Date
c2003
Summary
From one of the greatest novelists of the American West comes a surprising and riveting story set in Montana and New York during the Harlem Renaissance, drawing together an unlikely set of thwarted performers in one last inspired grasp at life's set of gold rings: love and renown. Susan Duff-the bossy, indomitable schoolgirl with a silver voice from the pages of Doig's most popular work, Dancing at the Rascal Fair-has reached middle age alone, teaching...
16) The sea runners
Author
Formats
Summary
In 1853, four Scandinavian indentured laborers in Russian Alaska steal a canoe and begin to paddle south toward the mouth of the Columbia River, twelve thousand miles away. A tense, shrewdly modulated sea adventure in which a quartet of indentured Scandinavians attempt escape from Russian America (1853 Alaska) in a stolen canoe, a Pacific journey far more rugged "than the plain arithmetic of its miles." Of the four, only one is seaworthy at the start,...
Author
Summary
This House of Sky is the moving chronicle of Ivan Doig's youth growing up in Montana. At age six, his mother died, leaving his father, rancher and cowboy, Charlie Doig, and maternal grandmother, the stalwart Bessie Ringer, to raise him. Times were hard; work was difficult; poverty always shadowed them. But drawing on their strong love and gritty determination, they find the strength to withstand these difficult circumstances. They are, Doig reflects,...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1160L
Appears on list
Summary
First published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has become an American classic, touching readers with its recollections of family, flyfishing, and the author's youth in the Montana woods. By turns raunchy, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales that express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie directed...
Author
Pub. Date
2002
Summary
Maclean writes in my family, there is no clear line between religion and fly-fishing. Nor is there a clear line between family and fly-fishing. It is the one activity where brother can connect with brother and father with son.Based on Norman Maclean's childhood experiences, A River Runs Through It has established itself as one of the most moving stories of our time; it captivates readers with vivid descriptions of life along Montana's Big Blackfoot...