Montana Books

Kate and Scott were a young, athletic, married couple in the prime of their lives when Kate received the diagnosis of cervical cancer. It immediately became "their" cancer.

Their love of wilderness and their desire to return to nature became the focal point of their healing process. Kate and Scott take us along on their post-treatment hike though the beauty of Montana's section of the Continental Divide while relating the story of their cancer ordeal.

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants an insight into cancer and everything that relates to it. I especially liked the story because they won.

Actually, a river runs through this book. It's the Big Blackfoot River, the same one that figures in Norman Mclean's story about fly fishing and family. Maclean, in fact, lives close by, and she comes to know him, eventually becoming a guiding force behind the film adaptation. (She shares credits as co-producer with fellow writer and friend Bill Kittredge, and the film's director, Robert Redford. She has also produced the film "Heartland," set in frontier Montana. Her twin sons Alec and Andrew have become filmmakers in their own right, writing and directing "The Slaughter Rule," also set in Montana.)

Smith's book meanders casually across a variety of topics. There are accounts of the Montana seasons, a local band called the Mudflaps, the work of brand inspectors, her Hungarian Jewish parents who live in Chicago, summers with her two young sisters on the Michigan shore of Lake Michigan, travels to Spain and Alaska, fishing and hiking, celebrity friends, family gatherings on holidays, Montana wildlife, the Nez Perce, and the environmental impact of mining and clear cutting.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Montana, the outdoors, Western living, and a certain 1960s spirit that survives among the graying hippies who once fled into what was then the wilderness. I also recommend Gretel Ehrlich's "The Solace of Open Spaces," about a California filmmaker who visits Wyoming and decides to stay.

good book for any kid interested in becoming a QB or for anyone who just needs a little inspiration.

Trust me. I'm being kind with the 3 Star review.

This is a book that began strong. The writing is vivid. The characters are familiar and, and the setting is seductive. For the first 50 to 100 pages, I thought I was going to thoroughly enjoy this story (hence the third star), but that was before I realized that the author had no idea where it was going.

To say that the main characters in this book are cliché gives new meaning and intensity to the word cliché. The characters quickly degenerated from being interesting to being ridiculous.

A 14 year old boy is sent by his otherwise responsible parents by bus from their home in upstate New York to visit his Grandfather in Montana for the summer. If you've ever had a 14 year old boy you know that this in itself is suspect. He reaches Montana and is finally met by his Grandfather WHO IS John Wayne in the role of Rooster Cockburn. Following in the footsteps of all good Grandpas, Cole (Rooster) teaches the boy to fly fish the local rivers, drink beer and whisky, have sex with the Indians, and shoot at the local police when they come to arrest him for the destruction of another man's property. No kidding.

To his credit as a Grandpa, Cole/Rooster also passes on a bit of family history to the boy (which he never saw fit to share with his own son for no good reason, in the form of a leather-bound diary, written by the boy's Great Great Grandfather. The diary was written as this pioneer made his way West, alone, during the 1860s to settle in Montana. This character is both cliché and not believable. He IS Robert Redford in the role of Jeremiah Johnson ("Liver Eatin' Johnston), complete with the character of Bear Claw Chris Lapp, who saves him before he dies from exposure. He later becomes Kevin Kostner in the role of "Dances With Wolves", complete with his tribal bride and the Medicine Man who predicts the extermination of the Indian people by the oncoming hordes of whites. I kid you not. But this character is also not believable because even as he is dying of exhaustion, sunburn, and starvation and is brought down to such a condition that travel means pulling himself across the prairie by his fingertips, he stops to write in his journal with the proficiency of a literary master. GIMME A BREAK! Even his horse had died of thirst at this point.

This book is chock full of good Indians who have been abused by the evil white man and of course most of these Indians have incredible mystical powers. What else? Heck, I was engaged to an Apache girl for years and if she had any mystical powers she surely never let me see them. I guess she was the exception to that rule.

The book was complete with the old western scene of the cowboy who dies, gets up and dies again, and then does it again and again ad nauseum too. At one point, Grandpa Cole, who fis always near death from having inhaled too much coal dust in his younger years, rips the oxygen tubes out of his nose while he is dying in the hospital, is carried out of the hospital so that he can man a canoe and shoot the most dangerous rapids in Montana and he dies in the canoe with his head under water, only to resurface at the end of the ride strong of body and of voice, and immediately go jogging through the woods!

But it was the last few pages of the book that really took the cake. At this point, Grandpa Rooster Cockburn Cole grabs an old Sharps rifle and heads on to a neighbor's property intent upon killing the neighbor's entire herd of bison, which he does. The last Bison left standing is ol' Splinter Horn, the biggest, meanest bull this side o' Hell. The bull charges, Cole squeezes the trigger on the Sharps, the old rifle, which had belonged to his "Dances with Wolves" Grandfather, explodes in his hands, sending the bullet into the bison. But before the Bison dies, Cole/Rooster is transformed into, of ALL literary characters, Captain Ahab, as he rides off into the woods on Splinter Horn / Moby Dick's horns, never to be seen again.

Again, three stars is generous. Bear in mind that I did not deduct points for one of the worst editing jobs I have ever encountered in a published book. The book is full of typos, like the one on page 202, 6th line down: "...and handed my his razor,..." and the one on page 235, 23rd line down: "...to shot dozens of imaginary arrows at me". At the end, the publisher tells us about the fancy type setting job he did for the book, which led me to wonder if he was too busy setting type to have someone check the book for annoying typographical errors.

If you want to read a much better book of this type, check out Vardis Fischer's "Mountain Man".

Sorry, but if this book will teach its reader anything it is that you too can get a novel published.

Fine story, and like the other reviewers, I was sorry it ended. Lily has chosen her child over less important things, and Quist is looking for sister. He finds love. Nice, strong development of the characters and the author's description of the blizzard will make you feel the cold too. The scene at the end where she gets the cowboy D.J to stand near her when her ex-brother-in-law shows up was great. She has learned that she doesn't have to shoulder everything herself--she can get help.

Footnotes are used extensively to bring to the fore conflicting testimony as well as useful background information. All of this is augmented by excellent maps that illustrate the action. Greene avoids wasting the reader's time with moralizing sermons. He correctly portrays the military as simply trying to do the job thrust upon them by their civilian masters.

Truly, the best parts of this work are the final chapters detailing the culminating conflict at Bear Paw Mountain. At last, I feel like I am on the way towards understanding this battle. I walked away from this book with new respect and understanding for Greene, the Nez Perce and the much-maligned frontier army.

Even if you don't agree with everything that Gabriel believes in or does, he will make you think. You will love this book.

There are reasons police might not want Du Pré at the scene of a crime. He spits a lot as he circles the corpse, rolls his own cigarettes and mashes them out beneath his boot heel. A forensic specialist would find traces of him all over the scene. In "Notches," he even hides evidence because he wants to track a killer without interference from the FBI.

On the plus side, nothing at the scene escapes him. If he is called in to examine one body, he may find two others near by that no one else has noticed--which is exactly what occurs in "Notches." Someone has been killing girls and dumping them "like old guts in the brush for the coyotes to eat," according to Du Pré's long-time mistress, Madelaine.

There are two serial killers on the loose in "Notches" which makes for a confusing plot. There are also two FBI agents who add to the scenery, but don't do much more than engage in slanging matches with Du Pré, who after all is said and done isn't even a policeman, merely a part-time brand inspector. Madelaine finally presses Du Pré into tracking the killers down when her own daughter runs away from home.

Du Pré is laconic to the point of partial sentences, but the interrupted staccato of his speech is a perfect counterpoint to the harsh Montana landscape and to the sometimes abbreviated lives of its inhabitants. Over 150 corpses form an even grimmer than usual backdrop to Du Pré's musings on the long history of his people and the land. This book is not so much a murder mystery as it is a complex landscape of hell from the pen of a Montanan Hieronymus Bosch.

I myself was very impressed with Ms. Miller's writing--as well as the predominant message of family, hope and God threaded throughout the story.

Realistic, touching and inspiring. I cannot wait to read more of her work!