The Last Best Place


Book Description

A guided tour of Montana's literature, including Native American stories, autobiographies, journals, fiction, and poetry.




The Last Best Place?


Book Description

Southwest Montana is beautiful country, evoking mythologies of freedom and escape long associated with the West. Partly because of its burgeoning presence in popular culture, film, and literature, including William Kittredge's anthology The Last Best Place, the scarcely populated region has witnessed an influx of wealthy, white migrants over the last few decades. But another, largely invisible and unstudied type of migration is also present. Though Mexican migrants have worked on Montana's ranches and farms since the 1920s, increasing numbers of migrant families—both documented and undocumented—are moving to the area to support its growing construction and service sectors. The Last Best Place? asks us to consider the multiple racial and class-related barriers that Mexican migrants must negotiate in the unique context of Montana's rural gentrification. These daily life struggles and inter-group power dynamics are deftly examined through extensive interviews and ethnography, as are the ways gender structures inequalities within migrant families and communities. But Leah Schmalzbauer's research extends even farther to highlight the power of place and demonstrate how Montana's geography and rurality intersect with race, class, gender, family, illegality, and transnationalism to affect migrants' well-being and aspirations. Though the New West is just one among many new destinations, it forces us to recognize that the geographic subjectivities and intricacies of these destinations must be taken into account to understand the full complexity of migrant life.




Montana


Book Description

MONTANA: SKIING THE LAST BEST PLACEPhotographs by Craig W. HergertStories by Brian HurlbutForeword by Warren MillerFrom big-mountain resorts to small town ski hills only open a few days a week, Montana is the last frontier for skiing in the West. It's a place where farmers and ranchers share the slopes with snowboarders and twin-tip skiers, a place where snow lovers can still experience skiing at a mountain not yet contaminated by the sport's increasingly commercial atmosphere. Vintage chairlifts and A-frame lodges are as much a part of Montana's skiing landscape as high-speed quads and glitzy resorts, yet they seamlessly blend together and coexist to create a winter experience like no other: Wide-open spaces, expansive mountain vistas, dry, light powder, friendly locals and a laid-back feel.This is what skiing in Montana is like, as seen through the camera lens of award-winning photographer Craig W. Hergert in this breathtaking new volume. Compiled over many years and thousands of miles, "Montana: Skiing the Last Best Place" highlights all of the state's seventeen ski areas in stunning photographs that brilliantly depict the lifestyle, atmosphere and charm of winter in the Treasure State. Combined with stories about each mountain, these timeless photos capture the people and places that make Montana a special place to ski, creating a one-of-a-kind book that uniquely and beautifully chronicles Montana's skiing culture. For skiing, Montana truly is the Last Best Place, recorded here in photographs, no doubt to be treasured for years to come.




The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon


Book Description

Lily Odilon—local wild child from a small Idaho town—has vanished after spending the night with her boyfriend, new kid Albert Morales. Now he is suspected in her disappearance. Albert, along with Lily’s prickly younger sister Olivia, set out to discover what happened to her.




Father's Day Creek


Book Description

Where would you want to be if you knew the world would end tomorrow? How would you want to remember life on Earth? For the sake of sanity and soul, everyone should have a place in the outdoors they consider their personal sanctuary, a "spirit-home" that restores faith in the natural world even as climate change threatens it. Award-winning journalist and long-time angler Dan Rodricks describes the little piece of paradise he found through fly fishing -- Father's Day Creek, his name for a river in Pennsylvania that he considers The Last Best Place on Earth. The book challenges readers to identify their own Last Best Place and spend time there. The story unfolds over three hours on a single Father's Day morning. While prospecting for trout, the author reflects, hour by hour, on his experiences with a fly rod and more than 50 years of fishing with his father, friends and children. The book offers advice on fly fishing and parenthood, and explores the wonders of finding one's "spirit-home" midst the noise of modern life. The foreword, by fly fishing legend Lefty Kreh, was composed just a month before his death in 2018.




Tim Richmond


Book Description

Last Best Hiding Place is a Montanan expression for living under the radar.' This edition documents places that adhere to that adage. Images include deserted streets with beer cans blowing down the road, meth warning billboards, a train on its way into a million acres of emptiness, a cowboy washing his shirts and a whole town for sale.'




The Last Best Place


Book Description

A writer returns to Nova Scotia, and finding it almost unrecognizable, sets out to capture the essence of his ancestral province--a place as strange and wild as anywhere on the continent. John DeMont visits places as diverse as a Buddhist abbey; the first free black settlement outside Africa; an island that harbours pirate treasure; and a backwoods barndance where the music of 18th-century Scotland lives on. He visits tuna smugglers and moonshiners; the brooding painter Alex Colville; spiritual seekers from Japan, the US and Europe; and Anne Murray's greatest Austrian fans. He also races yachts with summer residents; patrols the coast for drug smugglers with the Mounties; and casts for salmon with the wisest fishing guides. A road book with a difference, and an endearing search for home, The Last Best Place is wry and wise, as quirky and lively as Nova Scotia itself.




Zero Waste in the Last Best Place


Book Description

What will the world look like in fifty years? In one hundred years? Four hundred years? Will we still pollute our skies with carbon? Will we still build monuments by the curb to nameless waste gods only to have our diapers, wrappers, cartons, and packaging squished into a foul-smelling hell-on-wheels to be hauled to the methane-emitting monument of NIMBY our global civilization is creating? No! Lets drive cars, build gardens, and live in buildings that leave the earth cleaner than we found it! In this little book Professor Bradley Layton takes us on a journey through the bowels of MIT, the dumpsters of our cities, and shares his own personal account of moving away from the landfill in Missoula, Montana, home of A River Runs Through It, downtown river surfing, and epic fly fishing. Once youve made your way through this book, youll never look at garbage or trash the same way again. You will see and help create a future where nothing goes to waste. You will help restore the earth to The Garden that we were entrusted with in The Beginning.




Ghosts of the Last Best Place


Book Description

“With a ghostly twist on history, Baumler captures Montana’s cultural heritage and brings the state’s supernatural past to life.” —Humanities Montana Montana’s past embodies the rough, unforgiving and often vicious nature of the old Wild West. Unscrupulous gold camps and railroad expansion attracted the good, bad and ugly from all across the Union and as far as China. Many a soul shed blood under the Big Sky, leaving restless spirits to linger. Discover the famous cowboy artist who refuses to leave his Missoula home. Exhume the truth behind Stormit Butte, investigate the mystery at Brush Lake and become enraptured with the firsthand account of a Browning rancher’s attempts at reconciliation with the ghost of a murdered Chinese rail laborer. Historian and award-winning author Ellen Baumler presents this collection of Last Best Place hauntings. “Ellen Baumler explores hauntings across the state with the suspenseful voice of a campfire storyteller.” —Missoula Independent “Baumler, an interpretive historian with the Montana Historical Society, takes you to some of Montana’s ‘most spiritually charged spaces’ in her fifth book of ghost stories.” —Independent Record “Ellen Baumler’s books are sure to put you in the perfect mood to enjoy all of the Halloweeny history Southwest Montana has to offer.” —Visit Southwest Montana




The Last Best of All Times


Book Description

Robert Semenza has always considered himself fortunate to have been brought up in what may have been, in his mind, the "last best of all times" "an era that spanned only a little more than a decade and a half, from the early forties to the midfifties, from World War II to the Korean police action,' from FDR to Harry [the buck stops here] Truman to Ike." He was even more blessed to be raised in an environment where he was "surrounded by a wealth of love and warmth from our parents and a seemingly unlimited number of relatives and "piasians"; however, the adults in our lives were there only when we needed them sort of a Charlie Brown' type of existence but without his anxiety." He felt that all his wonderful memories would be lost forever and wanted to preserve them for the generations to follow. His tale is told in a self-effacing way and from the perspective of a young boy being raised in "the West," a neighborhood in New Rochelle, New York; "of Italians and colored people" (you never called them "blacks" or "African Americans" unless you were prepared for a fight); and the rest of civilization, referred to simply as the Americans.It tells of his Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn type of youthful adventures and mishaps centered around a cast of colorful and unforgettable "characters" that roamed the streets of the West, from the likes of the "Goat Man," who would "proudly parade his goats down Union Avenue" and whose "route was undeniably marked by a trail of small round soft black pellets, which the goats expelled as they merrily strolled to their noonday repast [presumably to make more pellets]" to the "Iron Horse" to Louie "Chicken Breast," and to a whole host of other characters. As he explains, they "were just there and accepted as they were, except that they, like everyone else in the neighborhood, had a nickname, which was generally linked to their physical appearance, which, in each case, was obvious." He has attempted the impossible task of trying to list all of these nicknames his nickname was "Chesty" the reader will learn why. His personal memories transport the reader back to that time and to his boyish recollections of his family, the school, the church, the Boys Club, the games they invented, and the special joys brought by each season of the year. www.readerscircle.org