come to the library and check out one of our many, many get-aways...

we like to call them BOOKS!

program begins in just two weeks on JUNE 1, 2009!

Montana? what about IDAHO?

many of you have asked about this...

on my last post, I was fresh from the Montana

awards that we're announced last month, that I wanted to share some of the great stuff that is being written in (and about) our beautiful region!

But just so you know that I love

Idaho Book Awards

too, here is a list of past winners:

2007 Winner
At Nature's Edge: Frank Lloyd Wright's Artist Studio by Henry Whiting

At Nature’s Edge chronicles the design and history of the studio and the restorations that were necessary to preserve it after years of neglect. Written for all readers who are inspired by nature and architecture, the book is vividly illustrated with contemporary color photographs, historical black and white images, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s original drawings.



2006 Winner
A Danish Photographer of Idaho Indians: Benedicte Wrensted by Joanna Cohan Scherer
Benedict Wrensted, a remarkable photographer who worked in Pocatello, Idaho, from 1895 to 1912, greatly contributed to the visual legacy of the Northern Shoshone, Lemhi, and Bannock ("Sho-Ban") American Indian tribes. This beautifully designed volume, illustrated with 176 duotone photographs and 2 maps, reproduces a substantial number of Wrensted's photographs, along with a detailed description of each image, including the names of the subjects, their biographical data, and an ethnographic analysis of their Native attire.


2005 Winner
The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in the America's Richest Silver Mine by Gregg Olsen, Crown Publishers
In The Deep Dark, Gregg Olsen looks beyond the intensely suspenseful story of the fire and rescue to the wounded heart of Kellogg, a quintessential company town that has never recovered from its loss. A vivid and haunting chapter in the history of working-class America, this is one of the great rescue stories of the twentieth century.






2004 Winner
The Cyanide Canary by Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni, Free Press
The Cyanide Canary is the riveting true story of a horrific crime — of a brave young man left for dead, an unscrupulous business mogul, and the relentless EPA investigator who fought to overcome injustice. On a crisp summer morning in Soda Springs, Idaho, twenty-year-old Scott Dominguez kissed his fiance goodbye and went to work for Allan Elias, the owner of Evergreen Resources, an enterprise Dominguez thought was in the business of producing fertilizer from mining waste. A former high school wrestler blessed with Tom Cruise-like good looks, Dominguez seemed to have unlimited potential, but by eleven o'clock that morning he was fighting for his life, pulled unconscious from a cyanide-laced storage tank and not expected to live through the night. In Seattle, Special Agent Joseph Hilldorfer of the Environmental Protection Agency was given the job of finding out what happened to Dominguez and why. Initially Hilldorfer did not want the case, still frustrated by an intense two-year investigation that concluded with corporate polluters walking out of a federal courthouse free. But as he learned more, Hilldorfer, the son of a Pittsburgh cop with a blue-collar work ethic, was touched by Scott's suffering and outraged at Elias's callous disregard for his employees' well-being. Hilldorfer and his partner, Special Agent Bob Wojnicz, joined forces with seasoned Boise Assistant U.S. Attorney George Breitsameter and an indefatigable, brilliant young attorney from the Department of Justice's Environmental Crimes Section named David Uhlmann. Together they would uncover the horrifying truths and build the criminal case against Elias. A former New York whiz kid and Arizona realestate and business mogul, Elias owned businesses that had polluted Idaho with hazardous waste for nearly a decade. Yet Elias never spent a single day in jail, openly boasted of beating the environmental quality regulations, and avoided any significant fines. Would this case be any different?

2003 Winner
Traplines: coming home to Sawtooth Valley by John Rember, Pantheon Books
In 1987, John Rember returned home to Sawtooth Valley, where he had been brought up. He returned out of a homing instinct: the same forty acres that had sustained his family's horses had sustained a vision of a place where he belonged in the world, a life where he could get up in the morning, step out the door, and catch dinner from the Salmon River. But to his surprise, he found that what was once familiar was now unfamiliar. Everything might have looked the same to the horses that spring, but to Rember this was no longer home.

2002 Winner
The Secrets of the Magic Valley and Hagerman's Remarkable Horse, edited by Todd Shallat, Black Canyon Communications
In Idaho's Magic Valley, water transformed a desert into a significant agricultural region. Here fur trappers encountered Snake River Native Americans; Oregon Trail emigrants suffered deprivation and death; miners rushed for placer gold; and an ancestor of the modern horse was found in a world-class fossil trove that would become a national monument site.





2001 Winner

Standing up to the Rock, T. Louise Freeman-Toole (University of Nebraska Press)
Chronicling her ten-year romance with the rugged and spectacular landscape of a small Idaho town, the author takes readers along as she and her son round up cattle, fix fences, hike, kayak, meet bears and encounter rural traditions and values that force her to reexamine her own views on environmentalism, the treatment of animals, property rights, child rearing, and death.

2000 Winner:
Out of the Ruins, William Johnson (Confluence Press)
Johnson's poems recreate his world in the Pacific Northwest where wild rivers, moose, and lightning are common sights. Whether beholding the Northern Lights, or staring into a high meadow where the dark shape of a bear "lumbers through patches of late melting snow", Johnson pledges his allegiance to the indescribable joy we find in creation. He uses the most homely objects in his poems — a worn out pair of work boots, a collapsed barn — to embody the past and unite it with the present. In doing so, he leads us out of the ruins along the path to love and redemption.





1999 Winner:
Irrigated Eden: the Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West, Mark Fiege (University of Washington Press)
This study of irrigation in southern Idaho's Snake River Valley describes a complex interplay of human and natural systems. At a great effort millions of acres were brought into cultivation, but the intended agricultural order was soon compromised by nature.






**Again, we are trying to get all of these titles not currently on our shelves. You can also use the library's interlibrary loan service to request one of these titles...

See you in the library!