Every year end, I read lists of top books and feel relief if I recognize a few titles! So I decided to provide you have a unique list of my 2021 highlights
THREE MONTANA FAVORITES
On December 21, 1866, Crazy Horse and his warriors lured 80 US soldiers into a trap, killing them all. Whether you know the battle as The Fetterman Massacre or The Battle of the Hundred Hand, this book tells who was there and what happened. The prologue is set on the day of the battle and then moves into the five months leading up to that day. Punke lists the key players—The Lakota, soldiers, and civilians that came to a valley in Wyoming.
Crazy Horse and his people called the valley sacred. They came to teach the ways of the tribe, to wander the land and to hunt. Col Henry Carrrington led “a traveling circus” of cavalrymen, a military band, a herd of cattle and women and children to bring civilization to the valley. Fort Phil Kearney was established to protect miners going to and from the Montana gold fields despite Jim Bridger’s advice.
The key players come to life as Punke imagines the inner thoughts and conversations of these real people. He states: “I have worked to stay true to important facts so that readers are not left with as misimpression of historical events.” The “Historical Notes and Further Reading” section at the end of the book gives further insight. Ridgeline is historical fiction at its best.
Home Waters is about a family and a river. A place that many have become familiar with because of a book and a film called A River Runs Through It. Perhaps this can be called the rest of the story, as John Maclean recalls time spent at a Seeley Lake cabin in his memoir of fathers and sons, the lore of fly-fishing, and importance of nature. Woodcuts by Wesley W Bates, maps and photographs make this a beautiful book and rightful tribute.
In nine chapters, the reader learns more about Reverend Maclean, Paul’s mysterious death, Norman’s achievements and frustrations as an author. Montanans will recognize the names of family friends including: Jack Boehme, George Croonenberghs, K Ross Toole, Theodore Geisel, Paul Dornblaser, Elers Koch, AJ and Maud Gibson and Don Mackey. Neighborhoods, rivers, local history, fishing flies, larch trees and fire are revisited as the author takes his place in the generations that are haunted by water.
From the epilogue: “I do not fish alone on the Blackfoot, ever, even though now I mostly fish it by myself. When I’m on the water, and especially when no one else is around, I feel the presence of generations of my family whose stories run through it.”
A History of Montana in 101 Objects: Artifacts & Essays from the Montana Historical Society
A History of Montana in 101 Objects showcases the remarkable collection of artifacts preserved at the Montana Historical Society. Since 1865, the Montana Historical Society has pursued its mission to collect and protect items of significance to Montana’s past for the pleasure and education of residents and visitors. This assemblage of objects and interpretive essays draws attention to the diversity of experiences— the triumphs and the sorrows, the everyday struggles and joys—that made Montana.
Featured objects span a breadth of time and cultures, ranging from a petroglyph, to famous guide and trapper Jim Bridger’s “Hawken” rifle, to the camera owned by legendary Montana photographer Evelyn Cameron. Each artifact is expertly photographed and accompanied by a short interpretive essay written by historians and staff at the Montana Historical Society.
SOME OF MY FRIENDS FAVORITE BOOKS
At recent holiday gatherings, these titles seemed worth listing and looking for in the new year:
After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state.
There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. But it’s a canny move on the part of the president. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate.
As the new president addresses Congress for the first time, with Secretary Adams in attendance, Anahita Dahir, a young foreign service officer (FSO) on the Pakistan desk at the State Department, receives a baffling text from an anonymous source.
Too late, she realizes the message was a hastily coded warning.
What begins as a series of apparent terrorist attacks is revealed to be the beginning of an international chess game involving the volatile and Byzantine politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; the race to develop nuclear weapons in the region; the Russian mob; a burgeoning rogue terrorist organization; and an American government set back on its heels in the international arena.
As the horrifying scale of the threat becomes clear, Secretary Adams and her team realize it has been carefully planned to take advantage of four years of an American government out of touch with international affairs, out of practice with diplomacy, and out of power in the places where it counts the most.
To defeat such an intricate, carefully constructed conspiracy, it will take the skills of a unique team: a passionate young FSO; a dedicated journalist; and a smart, determined, but as yet untested new secretary of state.
Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father urged her to get out of their blighted corner of northern England: “There is nothing for you here, pet,” he said.
The coal-miner’s daughter managed to go further than he ever could have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served three U.S. Presidents. But in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave testimony in the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over the brink—and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from Russia’s fate. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy.
Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery.
Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty.
The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.
MY TOP BOOKS OF 2021
Drawing on a breadth of research about eels in literature, history, and modern marine biology, as well as his own experience fishing for eels with his father, Patrik Svensson crafts a mesmerizing portrait of an unusual, utterly misunderstood, and completely captivating animal. In The Book of Eels, we meet renowned historical thinkers, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud to Rachel Carson, for whom the eel was a singular obsession. And we meet the scientists who spearheaded the search for the eel’s point of origin, including Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt, who led research efforts in the early twentieth century, catching thousands upon thousands of eels, in the hopes of proving their birthing grounds in the Sargasso Sea.
This came out in paperback in April an one of my book groups decided to discuss it. I became obsessed—watching PBS Nature video and going to other sites to see and read more!
Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr’s novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.
Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.
Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.
The plot may sound complicated but Doerr is more than capable of bringing this tale to life as he celebrates libraries and storytelling!
EAT. SLEEP. READ.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
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