Late October Treats

There is great variety in my latest escapes: 

On Animals by Susan Orlean
   “How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages,” writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she’s been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us.
   These stories consider a range of creatures—the household pets we dote on, the animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates, the creatures who could eat us for dinner, the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with who are central to human life. In her own backyard, Orlean discovers the delights of keeping chickens. In a different backyard, in New Jersey, she meets a woman who has twenty-three pet tigers—something none of her neighbors knew about until one of the tigers escapes. In Iceland, the world’s most famous whale resists the efforts to set him free; in Morocco, the world’s hardest-working donkeys find respite at a special clinic.

A Line to Kill: A Novel by Anthony Horowitz
   When Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England, they don’t expect to find themselves in the middle of murder investigation—or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer in a remote place with a murky, haunted past.
   Arriving on Alderney, Hawthorne and Horowitz soon meet the festival’s other guests—an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children’s author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic, and a war historian—along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line.
   When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?
   The third book featuring the real author as a character and his fictional detective Hawthorne is set at a book festival, which made it even more fun for me!  

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams
   Looking at the headlines--a global pandemic, the worsening climate crisis, political upheaval--it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.
In The Book of Hope, Goodall focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.
   Told through stories from her remarkable career and fascinating research, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? And for the first time, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope: from living through World War II, to her years in Gombe, to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice. She details the forces that shaped her hopeful worldview, her thoughts on her past, and her revelations about her next--and perhaps final--adventure.
   This book was a pleasant surprise because I now feel there is still hope.  

The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout, Translated by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil
   At his father’s funeral, to the great consternation of all present, Abdel Nasser beats the imam who is celebrating the funeral rite. The narrator, a childhood friend, retraces the story of Abdel Nasser from his days as a free and rebellious adolescent spirit to the leader of a student movement and then affirmed journalist.
   The 1980s and 90s were crucial years in Tunisia, with great tensions and changes coming: the growth of Islamism fighting against the strong repression by the government. Against this background full of revolutionary ferments, struggles against Islamists and demonstrations against state power stands the tormented love story between Abdel Nasser and Zeina, a brilliant and beautiful philosophy student who dreams of a career in academia.
   The dreams of Zeina and Abdel Nasser will unfortunately end up being wrecked under the ruthless gears of a corrupt and male chauvinist society, in which values are only a facade, ending up crushing the individuality, hopes, and aspirations of individuals. Abdel Nasser’s transformation from a young idealist with high hopes to a successful, but disillusioned and tired journalist is masterfully narrated in a stream of stories, digressions and flashbacks in which the narrative tension is always high.
   Shukry Mabkhout tackles xenophobia, religious extremism, and bigotry by weaving them into a deeply human story of love, loyalty, family, and fate in Tunisia.  

Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World beyond Humans by Janisse Ray
   Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change.
   Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitat, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change.
   Wild Spectacle explores the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.  Janisse shares stories of people and places that also have special meaning to me, especially the Montana essays.  

Secret Life by Theo Ellsworth an adaptation of a story by Jeff VanderMeer
   The journey begins:
   Legion: a vision of the building from on high. To the west: trees. To the east: a mall. North: fast food. South: darkness. The building housed hundreds of people. They worked day and night, as restless and constant as the seasons. The first four stories lay open to all, but no one could visit the fifth floor without a special key. Few have seen the roof. The Stairs were for emergencies only.
   Several factions vie for dominance in the workplace. A woman plants a seed of insurgency that quickly permeates every corner of the building. A mischief of mice learns to speak English. Something eerie happens once a month on the fifth floor. Second floor personnel develop their own tongue, incomprehensible to all other occupants. Custodians, too, form a cult around the head of their department.
   Theo is a graphic artist from Missoula, who every Fall has an amazing Harvest Monster in his front yard! 

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The Booker Prize Short List

 

The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a sales boost. When the prize was first created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel — a change that proved controversial. A seven person panel constituted by authors, librarians, literary agents, publishers, and booksellers is appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation.

Six titles made the shortlist for this year's Booker Prize for Fiction. Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. The 2021 winner, who will receive £50,000, ($67,281.62) will be announced on November 3 in an award ceremony held in partnership with the BBC.

The 2021 shortlist is as follows: 

A Passage North: A Novel by Anuk Arudpragasam
   A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances—found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.
   As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani’s funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek. 

The Promise by Damon Galgut
    Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
    Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—one of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones.

No One Is Talking About This: A Novel by Patricia Lockwood
   As this book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms “the portal,” where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats—from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness—begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal’s void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. “Are we in hell?” the people of the portal ask themselves. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?”
   Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: “Something has gone wrong,” and “How soon can you get here?” As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. 

The Fortune Men: A novel by Nadifa Mohamed
   In Cardiff, Wales in 1952, Mahmood Mattan, a young Somali sailor, is accused of a crime he did not commit: the brutal killing of Violet Volacki, a shopkeeper from Tiger Bay. At first, Mahmood believes he can ignore the fingers pointing his way; he may be a gambler and a petty thief, but he is no murderer. He is a father of three, secure in his innocence and his belief in British justice.
   But as the trial draws closer, his prospect for freedom dwindles. Now, Mahmood must stage a terrifying fight for his life, with all the chips stacked against him: a shoddy investigation, an inhumane legal system, and, most evidently, pervasive and deep-rooted racism at every step.
   Under the shadow of the hangman’s noose, Mahmood begins to realize that even the truth may not be enough to save him. A haunting tale of miscarried justice, this book offers a chilling look at the dark corners of our humanity. 

Bewilderment: A Novel by Richard Powers
   The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…
   With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet? 

Great Circle: A novel by Maggie Shipstead
    Daredevil aviator Marian Graves and film star Hadley Baxter lived a century apart, but their lives become intertwined in the pages of this epic novel.
    After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their uncle in Missoula, Montana. There, Marion encounters a pair of barnstorming pilots and begins her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds a dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons. This arrangement haunts her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her dream: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
   A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has made her a cult celebrity. Her research into the character of character of Marian unfolds, the women’s fates collide. 

All these titles have been published in the US, so check your local independent bookstore or library to decide you you think might (should) win!  

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Banned Books of 2020

 

Banned Books Week was the end of September, but displays can still be seen in bookstores and libraries. These displays revolve around various banned books throughout history. Every year the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracks new challenges to library, school, and university materials and services. Overall in 2020, 273 books were targeted. Here are the most challenged books of 2020:

George by Alex Gino
   BE WHO YOU ARE.
   When people look at Melissa, they think they see a boy named George. But she knows she's not a boy. She knows she's a girl.
   Melissa thinks she’ll have to keep this a secret forever. Then her teacher announces that their class play is going to be Charlotte's Web. Melissa really, really, REALLY wants to play Charlotte. But the teacher says she can't even try out for the part... because she's a boy.
   With the help of her best friend, Kelly, Melissa comes up with a plan. Not just so she can be Charlotte -- but so everyone can know who she is, once and for all.
   Reasons: Challenged, banned, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content, conflicting with a religious viewpoint, and not reflecting “the values of our community” 

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You : A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning by Jason Reynolds, Ibram X. Kendi
   This reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.
   Reasons: Banned and challenged because of author’s public statements, and because of claims that the book contains “selective storytelling incidents” and does not encompass racism against all people 

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
   A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement?
    Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, drug use, and alcoholism, and because it was thought to promote anti-police views, contain divisive topics, and be “too much of a sensitive matter right now” 

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
   "Speak up for yourself—we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless—an outcast—because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. Through her work on an art project, she is finally able to face what really happened that night: She was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her.
  Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted because it was thought to contain a political viewpoint and it was claimed to be biased against male students, and for the novel’s inclusion of rape and profanity  

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

   Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

    Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, sexual references, and allegations of sexual misconduct by the author 

Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard, illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin
   Emma and Josh heard that something happened in their town. A Black man was shot by the police.
   "Why did the police shoot that man?"
   "Can police go to jail?"
   Something Happened in Our Town follows two families — one White, one Black — as they discuss a police shooting of a Black man in their community. The story aims to answer children's questions about such traumatic events, and to help children identify and counter racial injustice in their own lives
   Reasons: Challenged for “divisive language” and because it was thought to promote anti-police views 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
   The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

    Reasons: Banned and challenged for racial slurs and their negative effect on students, featuring a “white savior” character, and its perception of the Black experience

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
   Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. They hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.
   Reasons: Banned and challenged for racial slurs and racist stereotypes, and their negative effect on students 

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
   In Morrison’s best-selling first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

    Reasons: Banned and challenged because it was considered sexually explicit and depicts child sexual abuse 

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 

   The Hate U Give is a groundbreaking, thought-provoking debut novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, about a teen girl who is the only witness to her friend’s fatal shooting by a police officer.

    Reasons: Challenged for profanity, and it was thought to promote an anti-police message

 

 

 Remember these books were challenged last year!

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Montana Book Festival 2021

This year the Montana Book Festival is again a virtual experience, but much expanded. The sessions began with two weekends full of readings and talks in September. You can watch all those sessions on You Tube. But MBF continues for many more events in October, view the schedule  highlights of October 16 and 23 include:  

Our National Forests: Stories from America’s Most Important Public Lands by Greg M. Peters
   Across 193 million acres of forests, mountains, deserts, watersheds, and grasslands, national forests provide a multitude of uses as diverse as America itself. Welcoming 170 million visitors each year to hike, bike, paddle, ski, fish, and hunt, “the people’s lands” offer more than just recreation. Timber is harvested, lost habitats are recovered, and endangered wildlife is protected as part of the Forest Service’s enduring mission.
   In Our National Forests, Greg Peters reveals an inside look at America’s most important public land and the people committed to protecting it and ensuring access for all. From the story of how the Forest Service grows millions of seedlings in the West each year, to their efforts to save the hellbender salamander in Appalachia, the narrative spans the breadth of the country and its diverse ecology. People are at the center of the stories, whether the dedicated folks in the Forest Service, or the everyday citizens who support and tend to the protected lands near their homes.

Register for Stories From Our National Forests    

 

The Center of Everything: A Novel by Jamie Harrison
   For Polly, the small town of Livingston, Montana, is a land charmed by raw, natural beauty and a close network of family that extends back generations. But the summer of 2002 finds Polly at a crossroads: a recent head injury has scattered her perception of the present, bringing to the surface long-forgotten events. As Polly’s many relatives arrive for a family reunion during the Fourth of July holiday, a beloved friend goes missing on the Yellowstone River. Search parties comb the river as carefully as Polly combs her mind, and over the course of one fateful week, Polly arrives at a deeper understanding of herself and her larger-than-life relatives. Weaving together the past and the present, from the shores of Long Island Sound to the landscape of Montana, The Center of Everything examines with profound insight the memories and touchstones that make up a life and what we must endure along the way.  

And It Will Be a Beautiful Life: A Novel by Craig Lancaster
   Max Wendt has a family . . . but it's sliding sideways, and he has been complicit in its faltering. His wife and his daughter have pulled away from him amid his frequent absences, leaving him to bridge the distance between what he remembers and the way things are now. Max Wendt has a job . . . but it carries him away from home most of the time, and its dynamics are quickly changing. There's a surprising new hire on his pipeline crew, strife among coworkers, and a boss whose proclivities put everything in peril. Max Wendt has a friend . . . but this odd man Max meets during his travels perplexes him, prods him, pushes him, and annoys him. He sees something in Max that Max can't see in himself, and he's holding tight to his own pain. Max Wendt has a problem . . . More than one, in fact, and those problems are flying at him with increasing velocity. Can someone who has spent his life going with the flow arrest his own destructive inertia, rebuild his relationships, and find a better way?

Register for Family and Fiction 

 

Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
   Charmian Kittredge London (1871–1955) was the epitome of a modern woman. Born on the mudflats of what would become Los Angeles’s harbor, Charmian became an orphan at age fourteen. Raised by her aunt Netta Wiley Ames, a noted writer and editor for the Overland Monthly, Charmian attended college, became an expert equestrian and concert pianist, and had a successful career as a stenographer. But her life shifted when, in 1905, she married Jack London, already a bestselling author. For the rest of Jack’s life, until his untimely death at the age of forty, reporters would follow the couple’s every move. Charmian and Jack traveled the world, exploring and writing together.
   In addition to collaborating with Jack on many of his projects, Charmian wrote three books about her travels, as well as countless articles. After Jack’s death in 1916, she remained a celebrity, continuing to travel and write—and seek adventure. She also wrote a biography about her late husband and managed his estate, influencing how Jack’s literary legacy was remembered. 

Burning the Breeze: Three Generations of Women in the American West by Lisa Hendrickson
   In the middle of the Great Depression, Montana native Julia Bennett arrived in New York City with no money and an audacious business plan: to identify and visit easterners who could afford to spend their summers at her brand new dude ranch near Ennis, Montana. Julia, a big-game hunter whom friends described as “a clever shot with both rifle and shotgun,” flouted gender conventions to build guest ranches in Montana and Arizona that attracted world-renowned entertainers and artists.
   Bennett’s entrepreneurship, however, was not a new family development. During the Civil War, her widowed grandmother and her seven-year-old daughter—Bennett’s mother—set out from Missouri on a ten-month journey with little more than a yoke of oxen, a covered wagon, and the clothes on their backs. They faced countless heartbreaks and obstacles as they struggled to build a new life in the Montana Territory.

Register for Trailblazing Women of the American West 

 

Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire by Liz Brown
   In the booming 1920s, William Andrews Clark Jr. was one of the richest, most respected men in Los Angeles. The son of the mining tycoon known as “The Copper King of Montana,” Clark launched the Los Angeles Philharmonic and helped create the Hollywood Bowl. He was also a man with secrets, including a lover named Harrison Post. A former salesclerk, Post enjoyed a lavish existence among Hollywood elites, but the men’s money—and their homosexuality—made them targets, for the district attorney, their employees and, in Post’s case, his own family. When Clark died suddenly, Harrison Post inherited a substantial fortune—and a wealth of trouble. From Prohibition-era Hollywood to Nazi prison camps to Mexico City nightclubs, Twilight Man tells the story of an illicit love and the battle over a family estate that would destroy one man’s life.  

Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien
   O. Alan Weltzien's insightful and detailed literary biography chronicles the life and work of the neglected but deeply talented novelist, Thomas Savage (1915—2003) one of the intermountain West's best novelists. Savage, a closeted gay family man, was both an outsider and an insider, navigating an intense conflict between his sexual identity and the claustrophobic social restraints of the rural West. Unlike many other Western writers, Savage avoided the formula westerns— so popular in his time— and offered instead a realistic, often subversive version of the region. His novels tell a hard, harsh story about dysfunctional families, loneliness, and stifling provincialism in the small towns and ranches of the northern Rockies, and his minority interpretation of the West provides a unique vision and caustic counternarrative contrary to the triumphant settler-colonialism themes that have shaped most Western literature. Savage West seeks to claim Thomas Savage's well-deserved position in American literature and to reintroduce twenty-first-century readers to a major Montana writer.

Register for Stranger Here in My Own Land 

 

Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America by Ryan Busse
   A former firearms executive pulls back the curtain on America's multibillion-dollar gun industry, exposing how it fostered extremism and racism, radicalizing the nation and bringing cultural division to a boiling point.
   As an avid hunter, outdoorsman, and conservationist–all things that the firearms industry was built on–Ryan Busse chased a childhood dream and built a successful career selling millions of firearms for one of America’s most popular gun companies.
   But blinded by the promise of massive profits, the gun industry abandoned its self-imposed decency in favor of hardline conservatism and McCarthyesque internal policing, sowing irreparable division in our politics and society. That drove Busse to do something few other gun executives have done: he's ending his 30-year career in the industry to show us how and why we got here.

Register for Gunfight: My Battle Against an Industry That Radicalized America

No matter how hard I try to edit and test links, mistakes may happen.  So if you have trouble linking to any events please enter Montana Book Festival into your search engine and look for October calendar.

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October Releases, Part One

  The first Tuesday of October has quite a line-up of books, including: 

Crossroads : A Novel by Jonathan Franzen On Sale October 5
   It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
   The action unfolds over a single winter day, and is the first of three books!

The Lincoln Highway: A Novel by Amor Towles On Sale October 5
   The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America
   In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.
   Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes. 

Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci On Sale October 5
   Stanley Tucci grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the kitchen table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, and now he takes us beyond the savory recipes and into the compelling stories behind them.​
   Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about his growing up in Westchester, New York; preparing for and shooting the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia; falling in love over dinner; and teaming up with his wife to create meals for a multitude of children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burned dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last.
   There will be a season 2 of Searching for Italy on CNN but no release date has been announced. 

King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King by Daniel de Vise On Sale Date: October 5
   Riley “Blues Boy” King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister’s guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge.
   King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (some 15,000 concerts in 90 countries over nearly 60 years)—in some real way his means of escaping his past. Several of his concerts, including his landmark gig at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, endure in legend to this day. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of color. 

World War C: Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic and How to Prepare for the Next One by Sanjay Gupta, with Kristin Loberg On sale October 5
   Gupta argues that we need to prepare for a new era where pandemics will be more frequent, and possibly even more deadly. As the doctor who’s been holding America’s hand through the crisis with compassion, clarity, and well-earned wisdom, he gives you the unvarnished story behind the pandemic, including insights about the novel virus’s behavior, and offers practical tools to ready ourselves for what lies ahead. He answers critical questions: Can we stamp out the virus for good (and if not, how do we live with it)? Should we put our parents in a nursing home? Where should we live? What should we stockpile? What should we know before taking a trip? Does it make sense to spend more on health insurance to deal with any long-term effects? How do you decide when it’s safe to go to a public pool or schedule elective surgery? What should Covid survivors know about protecting their future health? What if you become a long-hauler with chronic health challenges stemming?

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