New Non-Fiction (hardcover)

1. Double Take by Kevin Connolly
2. Stones Into Schools by Greg Mortenson
3. The Aid Trap by R. Glenn Hubbard
4. Born to Run by Christopher MacDougall
5. Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof

Non-Fiction (paperback)

1. Food Rules by Michael Pollan
2. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
3. River of Doubt by Candice Millard
4. Lost City of Z by David Grann
5. Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

Regional

1. Guide to Rocky Mountain Vegetable Gardening by Bob & Cheryl Gough
2. Northern Pacific Railroad & Yellowstone National Park by Phyllis Smith & William Hoy
3. Stepping Up by Tavis Campbell
4. Montana Place Names by the Montana Historical Society
5. Food Lover’s Guide to Montana by Seabring Davis

Mystery

1. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
2. In the Woods by Tana French
3. Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
4. Scarecrow by Michael Connelly
5. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

New Fiction (hardcover)

1. Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
2. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
4. Day Out of Days by Sam Shepard
5. Farmer’s Daughter by Jim Harrison

Fiction (paperback)

1. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
2. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
3. When Will There Be Good News? By Kate Atkinson
4. Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
5. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Children’s and Young Adult

1. Percy Jackson & the Olympians (series) by Rick Riordan
2. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
3. Listen to the Wind by Greg Mortenson
4. The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney
5. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
6. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
7. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (Scribner $16)
National Book Award Finalist
Publisher’s description:
Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro’s revolution — a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.
Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom — three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child’s dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them — the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.
In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Maziere, whose seductive demeanor can’t mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raul Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of “yanqui” revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.
At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner’s first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.

Just wanted to make sure that you know that the Jon Turk event at 7pm on March 10th will be much more than a reading and signing. Here’s how Jon describes his events:

Along with the book, I’ve developed an exciting new presentation that is a lively mixture of theatre, traditional literary reading, and adventure slide show.
♦
For previews of my presentation, check out:
Raven’s Gift Presentation trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEHlOv7N_4c     �
Raven’s Gift Presentation Live:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R9Gt138jI0           �
♦

The book itself integrates two related themes — outdoor adventure and spiritual connectivity with the landscape.  Perfect fit for the Bozeman crowd.  Early feedback has been stupendous:
 ♦
Kirkus Reviews wrote:  A moving account worthy of shelving alongside Vladimir Arsenyev’s Dersu Uzala (1923), Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) and other explorations of native ways of life in the Far North.
 ♦
Henry Pollack: Co-Winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore  wrote: “The tension between his own logical scientific background and the mysterious shamanistic wisdom of his healer is at the heart of this wonderfully-told story of Koryak life, and of his own personal transformation.”

And here’s how he responded to a Montana reader who wrote him and enquired about the reading:

No, I do not stand in front of an audience with a book in front of my nose, and “Read”  Not at all.  I am a story teller, with roots in street circus.  I promise you that I “speak from my heart” for every audience and I am open to discussion.  I am in New Mexico now and have been presenting (better word than reading) to overflow, stand up crowds, wherever I go.  My events are fun and inspiring.

♦
       I’d love it if you and your friends came to Bozeman to meet with me, to hear what I have to say, and to share your feelings and insights into ancient wisdoms.  We will have a good time.

♦
 Hope to see you there, but if I don’t, I hope that you pick up a copy of The Raven’s Gift and write back when you finish it.

♦♦
 Jon turk
www.jonturk.net

We’ve had a great community response to the announcement of Jon Turk’s visit, and we’re very excited to be hosting this talented local author once again. We hope to see you there!

Best,

Country Bookshelf Staff

Dear Readers,  

We have two major readings scheduled for this spring, the launch of the Country Bookshelf Book Club, and a few other literary tidbits to share this month.    

♦

MOVIE READING  

With film awards season in full swing, we thought you might be interested in how many of recent films in theatre and on television have their origination in books.

Here’s a brief selection:  

♦

JON TURK READING & SIGNING  

Mark your calendars for an event with Montana author Jon Turk on Wednesday, March 10th at 7pm.   THE RAVEN’S GIFT: A Scientist, a Shaman, and Their Remarkable Journey Through the Siberian Wilderness By Jon Turk

-

 Jon Turk is a PhD who has written and published 24 environmental and earth science textbooks.  He has also paddled around the Cape of Good Hope in a kayak, traversed the Northwest Passage and retraced the voyages of the ancient Jomon people from northern Japan around the North Pacific rim to Alaska.  However, the strangest journey Jon has ever taken—a journey as a man of science into the realm of the spiritual— is told in THE RAVEN’S GIFT. 

-

In 2000, in the remote Siberian village of Vyvenka, Jon Turk met an elderly woman named Moolynaut, a Koryak shaman and animist and learned about her voyages to the spirit world.  A year later, visiting her a second time, Jon fell and aggravated an old injury to his hip so badly that he was unable to walk.  Moolynaut performed a healing ritual involving the spirit of a great, black raven.  Despite Jon’s fears that the fall had broken the steel plate that holds his pelvis together, when the ritual was complete he was able to walk again without pain.   

-

The man of science could find no rational scientific explanation for the healing and the experience changed his life, irrevocably altering his view of the connection between the different spheres of the natural world.  In an attempt to understand how Moolynaut had healed him, Jon sought understanding by skiing across the frigid tundra where Moolynaut was born and raised, camping frequently with isolated bands of migrating reindeer herders, recording stories of their lives and the animistic spirituality that informs their world view. 

-

Filled with scenes of great natural beauty and informed by the spiritual questions he was asking, THE RAVEN’S GIFT is sure to become a classic of the nature shelf and will be embraced by readers interested in a spirituality outside the realm of most western understanding.  

-

About the Author:  Jon Turk, a Ph.D., has written and published 24 environmental and earth science text books. He is a world-class adventurer whose expeditions are backed by companies like The North Face and Prijon, the leading manufacturer of kayaks in this country for whom he serves as a national spokesman. He is also a contributing editor for the online Adventure and Exploration Magazine. He currently alternates his time between Fernie, British Columbia and Darby, Montana.    

♦

BOOK CLUB  

Tuesday, March 23rd 7pm- Launch of the Country Bookshelf Book Club. Open to the public, this book club will discuss the month’s chosen literary fiction or nonfiction. The first meeting’s book selection will be announced after voting ends on Friday, March 5th. For more information and to vote for your preferred book please see the full announcement. Please email us at countrybookshelf@gmail.com if you have questions or suggestions. The first meeting will be led by bookseller Ariana.  

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ALREADY PART OF A BOOK CLUB? THEN FIND OUT A SIMPLE WAY YOUR CLUB CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD.  

See this post for more information about an initiative by two Bozeman women called “Book Clubs to Books.” Brochures and stamped envelopes can also be picked up at our front counter.      

♦

MARK SPRAGG & LAURA BELL  

Tuesday, April 20th 7pm- Wyoming authors Mark Spragg & Laura Bell will grace us with a joint reading, Q & A and signing for their new books. Mark Spragg (author of An Unfinished Life and Where Rivers Change Direction) will read from his new novel Bone Fire, and Laura Bell will read from her memoir Claiming Ground. More details here.    

♦

MAILE MELOY ON YPR

This past Tuesday an interview with Helena-native and award-winning author Maile Meloy aired on Yellowstone Public Radio’s Home Ground. The audio is archived here. Well worth a listen – even if you saw her speak here last November.      

♦

We’re here because of your support. THANK YOU!!!!!!    

Best,

The Country Bookshelf Staff �
Country Bookshelf
28 West Main
Bozeman, Montana 59715
406-587-0166
www.countrybookshelf.com
countrybookshelf@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/countrybooks  

♦

 If you are so inclined, we’d love to have you help others find us. You can submit a review to TownSquareMT.com, fan us on Facebook, or do it the old-fashioned way and tell your friends about us or just bring them along to browse with you. Thanks!    

********As always, if you would like to be removed from our email list, please send an email to countrybookshelf@gmail.com with “Remove” in the subject line.**********

♦

First meeting: 7pm on Tuesday 23 March upstairs at the Country Bookshelf

Meeting schedule: 4th Tuesday of the month (no meetings November or December)

♦

General direction of the Country Bookshelf Book Club

1. The first rule of book club is ” Don’t talk about book club.”

1. All right, seriously now, the main expectation is that during book club meetings we WILL talk about the book.

2. This does not mean that you are unwelcome if you haven’t read the book. If you haven’t read the book, we’d still love to have your presence, and your questions might be exceptionally valuable, but don’t expect us to refrain from discussing the end of the book.

3. The Country Bookshelf will provide the location and staff members or other volunteers to lead discussion, but as with any such endeavor, individual participants will gain more from the event through participating: active listening, commenting, posing theories, suggesting ideas, asking questions, answering questions. While having read the book and/or even done some basic research on the book or author will be helpful, these are not required. The discussion leader will have some background information to share and some questions to begin the discussion.

4. We hope to stay focused on the ideas, characters, style and choices of the novel as opposed to whether we liked or disliked the book. Positive attitude, people!

♦

♦

How to pick books for people you don’t yet know

The list of criteria used to select nominees for the first choice seems like a good general reference point for future selections as well.

1. Not too long. We don’t want to intimidate anyone or make book club feel like too large of a commitment.

2. Not over-exposed; that is, not already a local bestseller or one that is being talked about everywhere else all the time. It’s often better for genuine and thoughtful conversation not to be full of others’ ideas or opinions on a work.

3. Make it new. The other side of this point is that we hope that our book club helps introduce books to readers that they might not otherwise have encountered or noticed. This may include older books that we felt were overlooked (especially the fabulous titles so often “saved” by the New York Review of Books) or books in translation.

4. Accessibility. We expect to focus primarily on fiction available in paperback with a literary bent that would seem to appeal to both men and women, young and old.

5. Quality. As we expect to focus discussion on ideas and characters, the book will need to be more than just a page-turner. One possible mark of literariness is being short-listed for a major book award.

♦

♦

Vote for your choice

To get the party started (and to not be overbearing), we’ve selected the nominees for the first book of the Country Bookshelf Book Club (CBBC) and would like the final selection to be made by customer votes.  One voter will be randomly chosen to win a free copy of the chosen book (note: you must be able to come to the store to pick up the book if you are the winner).

Voting will continue until noon (MST) on Friday 3/5. Votes will be tallied, the winner will be drawn, and both will be announced by 5pm.

Here’s how to vote.

1. Send an email to countrybookshelf@gmail.com with “Book Club Vote” in subject line & your choice in the body. You can also take this time to say, “Hey, sign me up for that email newsletter thing-y.”

2. On Twitter, send an @ reply to @countrybooks with your choice & the hashtag #bookclubvote.

3. Come into the store and fill out a simple ballot.

4. Call us at 406-587-0166 and say “Add my vote.”

5. Since, almost by accident, I have discovered this Google feature, I’m going to try embedding a way to vote right here. Don’t hate me if it doesn’t work.

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Nominees for first ever Country Bookshelf Book Club book selection:

Publisher’s description: 

Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro’s revolution — a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.

Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom — three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child’s dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them — the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.

In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Maziere, whose seductive demeanor can’t mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raul Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of “yanqui” revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.

At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner’s first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.

♦

Publisher’s Description

From Sarah Hall, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Daughters of the North and The Electric Michelangelo comes the Harper Perennial paperback original novel How to Paint a Dead Man, a daringly imaginative tale in which multiple lives are woven together through the prism of a still life painting. Moving from Italy to England, spanning nearly half a century, and bringing together the lives of four disparate characters, How to Paint a Dead Man is Hall’s fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives. The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, “one of the most significant and exciting of Britain’s young novelists” (The Guardian), delivers “a maddeningly enticing read . . . an amazing feat of literary engineering” (The Independent on Sunday).

♦

Publisher’s Description

In this masterful work of historical fiction set during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, the schemes of Western powers grappling for a foothold in Mesopotamia come vividly to life. English archaeologist John Sommerville begins excavating a historical site, believing he has uncovered a find that will revolutionize his field. But when the Germans threaten his dig with their railroad, he hires an Arab spy, not recognizing the spies dwelling in his own house.

♦

Publisher’s Description

Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan’s cities to the harsh mud villages beyond, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s linked stories describe the interwoven lives of an aging feudal landowner, his servants and managers, and his extended family, industrialists who have lost touch with the land. In the spirit of Joyce’s Dubliners and Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, these stories comprehensively illuminate a world, describing members of parliament and farm workers, Islamabad society girls and desperate servant women. A hard-driven politician at the height of his powers falls critically ill and seeks to perpetuate his legacy; a girl from a declining Lahori family becomes a wealthy relative’s mistress, thinking there will be no cost; an electrician confronts a violent assailant in order to protect his most valuable possession; a maidservant who advances herself through sexual favors unexpectedly falls in love. Together the stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders make up a vivid portrait of feudal Pakistan, describing the advantages and constraints of social station, the dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. Refined, sensuous, by turn humorous, elegiac, and tragic, Mueenuddin evokes the complexities of the Pakistani feudal order as it is undermined and transformed.

Balancing between “logic and magic,” Turk attests to the innate powers of body, mind, and soul that are awakened when we immerse ourselves in “Wild Nature.”

—BOOKLIST (starred review)

A moving account worthy of shelving alongside Vladimir Arsenyev’s Dersu Uzala (1923), Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) and other explorations of native ways of life in the Far North.

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

THE RAVEN’S GIFT: A Scientist, a Shaman, and Their Remarkable Journey Through the Siberian Wilderness By Jon Turk

 Jon Turk is a PhD who has written and published 24 environmental and earth science textbooks.  He has also paddled around the Cape of Good Hope in a kayak, traversed the Northwest Passage and retraced the voyages of the ancient Jomon people from northern Japan around the North Pacific rim to Alaska.  However, the strangest journey Jon has ever taken—a journey as a man of science into the realm of the spiritual— is told in THE RAVEN’S GIFT. 

In 2000, in the remote Siberian village of Vyvenka, Jon Turk met an elderly woman named Moolynaut, a Koryak shaman and animist and learned about her voyages to the spirit world.  A year later, visiting her a second time, Jon fell and aggravated an old injury to his hip so badly that he was unable to walk.  Moolynaut performed a healing ritual involving the spirit of a great, black raven.  Despite Jon’s fears that the fall had broken the steel plate that holds his pelvis together, when the ritual was complete he was able to walk again without pain.  The man of science could find no rational scientific explanation for the healing and the experience changed his life, irrevocably altering his view of the connection between the different spheres of the natural world.  In an attempt to understand how Moolynaut had healed him, Jon sought understanding by skiing across the frigid tundra where Moolynaut was born and raised, camping frequently with isolated bands of migrating reindeer herders, recording stories of their lives and the animistic spirituality that informs their world view.  Filled with scenes of great natural beauty and informed by the spiritual questions he was asking, THE RAVEN’S GIFT is sure to become a classic of the nature shelf and will be embraced by readers interested in a spirituality outside the realm of most western understanding.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jon Turk, a Ph.D., has written and published 24 environmental and earth science text books. He is a world-class adventurer whose expeditions are backed by companies like The North Face and Prijon, the leading manufacturer of kayaks in this country for whom he serves as a national spokesman.

He is also a contributing editor for the online Adventure and Exploration Magazine. He currently alternates his time between Fernie, British Columbia and Darby, Montana.

New Non-Fiction (hardcover)

1. Stones Into Schools by Greg Mortenson
2. Double Take by Kevin Connolly
3. Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
4. Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
5. Daring Young Men by Richard Reeves

Non-Fiction (paperback)

1. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
2. My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
3. Wesley the Owl by Stacey O’Brien
4. Food Rules by Michael Pollan
5. The Most Dangerous Animal by David Livingstone Smith

Regional

1. Northern Pacific Railroad & Yellowstone National Park by Phyllis Smith & William Hoy
2. Montana Place Names by the Montana Historical Society
3. Montana Women Homesteaders edited by Sarah Carter
4. Montana Gardener’s Companionby Bob & Cheryl Gough
5. Portrait of Paradise by Carol Polich

Mystery

1. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
2. Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
3. Runner by Thomas Perry
4. Below Zero by C. J. Box
5. Blue Heaven by C. J. Box

New Fiction (hardcover)

1. Farmer’s Daughter by Jim Harrison
2. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3. Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
4. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
5. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
6. Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Fiction (paperback)

1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
2. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
3. The 19^th Wife by David Ebershoff
4. Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
5. Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
6. When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson
7. Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven

Juvenile & Young Adult

1. Listen to the Wind by Greg Mortenson
2. Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
3. Warriors series by Erin Hunter
4. Three Cups of Tea Young Readers Edition by Greg Mortenson
5. Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney
6. Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart
7. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Dear Friends,�
     The current disaster in Haiti is another reminder of the unfairness of life.  Do you often wonder how one person can make a difference?  So were we!!   Then we had this idea.  What if once a month when you met with your bookclub, there was a stamped, addressed envelope in the middle of the table.  What if each member put $5 and someone mailed it that day to the non-profit disaster relief or education program of your chosing.  There is a list of local and international organizations in the Bookclubs to books attachement.  Bookclubs to books is a Bozeman (Montana) based grass roots effort to foster literacy and financial confidence for mostly women, internationally and locally.  Then sometimes there is a disaster that trumps literacy and micro-finance, like tsunamis,  earthquakes and hurricanes.  To help in Haiti, for the next few months your book club could mail their $5s to
The American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C.  20013 and designate Haiti.  To help with literacy, schools, orphans, food supply,  micro-finance and on going disaster relief locally and internationally open and download the attach ment for our ideas.  Certainly you will have your own concerns and we hope that you will copy this idea and forward it to your friends.   Robin Owen and Jeanne Gracey-Etgen in Bozeman,  Montana.
PS: Don’t forget to respect your friends confidentiality.  When you forward this use BCC and erase any addresses that come your way.

And here is the text from the brochure that can be picked up here at the store:

Book Clubs

to Books

Book Clubs to Books:

Is a Bozeman-based grass roots effort to foster literacy and financial confidence in those less fortunate locally and internationally. Born out of a providential encounter between two strangers at the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana, Book Clubs to Books is a simple idea. At your monthly book club meeting, each member brings $5 which is collected and mailed that day in a pre-addressed stamped envelope to a not-for-profit organization of your choice.

 

BONE FIRE

by Mark Spragg

“A tribute to the human state and an outstanding work. . . . Not one word is out of place, and each and every character is well drawn and intensely believable. . . . This ‘bone fire’ is in fact the burning we call life, symbolizing our shared pain as human beings.”     —Henry Bankhead, Library Journal (starred review)

Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic nowadays. The sheriff, Crane Carlson, needs no reminder of this but gets one anyway when he finds a kid not yet twenty murdered in a meth lab. His other troubles include a wife who’s going off the rails with bourbon and pot, and his own symptoms of the disease that killed his grandfather.

 

CLAIMING GROUND

by Laura Bell

“In prose both gorgeous and precise, Laura Bell perfectly captures the Western landscape and the creatures that still walk upon it.  The best memoir I have read in I don’t know how long.”                             —Beverly Lowry

“In a sheep wagon, called an ark, parked under cottonwoods along a creek in Wyoming, Laura Bell began the life she came west to find. Decades later, after seasons spent with sheep and cows and horses and dogs, after a failed marriage and death and grief, she now works to protect the place of her heart as a conservationist.  Love, she says, never seems to be enough until we decide that it is.  This is a wonderfully written, refreshing story.”                                                                                                                    —William Kittredge

“Intriguing and eloquent, by turns guarded then vulnerable, and always written with honesty and keen observation, Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground merges exquisitely the human condition of wonder, celebration, fear and longing with the western landscape that so arouses and nurtures these same senses.”    —Rick Bass

“This is a book that compels you to the last sentence, both because of its sheer beauty and its profound meaning.  It goes deep and way out to the edges, in beautifully composed, exact prose.  It makes you think of Thoreau out in the woods, confronting the essential.  This is just a fresh, wonderful piece of writing, about the isolated and attentive kind of life almost nobody lives nowadays, or ever did.”         —Kent Haruf

“First, it is the language you notice: phrases, whole passages composed with the musical authority of psalms.  Then it is the evocation of place, Wyoming rising from these pages as actual as a wild perfume.  But, start to finish, it is her honesty that keeps you up in the night, wondering at the frailty of what it means to be human and glad and brave and, at times, broken.  Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground is the finest memoir I’ve read.”                                                                                                                        —Mark Spragg

In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.

Laura Bell’s work has been published in several collections, and from the Wyoming Arts Council she has received two literature fellowships as well as the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. She lives in Cody, and since 2000 has worked there for the Nature Conservancy.

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