Helena: An Illustrated History, by Jean Baucus. 

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Jackalope Dreams by Mary Clearman Blew, $24.95,  ...story of Montana in which the Old West meets the new...a powerful amalgam of ranching history, Marlboro Men, and train robbery reenactments...story of the newly orphaned, spinsterish Corey is a sometimes comical, sometimes poignant tale of coming of age a little late.. University of Nebraska Press

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Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart edited by Caroline Patterson, $18.95, paperback. Witness Montana as seen through the eyes of Montana women writers who represent a spectrum of voices and perspectives and range from the past to the present, from the plains to small towns. Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Edited by Caroline Patterson with an introduction by Sue Hart. The book features excerpts from Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean," Maile Meloy's "Half in Love," and Sandra Alcosser's "Except by Nature." Writers of the past include Grace Stone Coates, Mildred Walker, and Dorothy M. Johnson; contemporary writers include Debra Magpie Earling, Patricia Goedicke, and Mary Clearman Blew.

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The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig, $25.00, hardcover. The saga of how a widow from Minneapolis and her brother--soon to become the new teacher in a tiny Montana community in 1909--change lives in unexpected ways, the long-awaited novel has all the charm of old-school storytelling, from Dickens to Laura Ingalls Wilder.The book has been receiving excellent advance praise.  

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Among Wild Horses: A Portrait of the Pryor Mountain Mustangs, by Lynne Pomeranz, $16.95 hardcover. In the Pryor Mountains, ranging along the state line between Montana and Wyoming, there lives a band of wild horses descended from the original Spanish horses brought over by the Conquistadors. This is the extraordinary photographic journal of the three years Pomeranz spent studying, admiring, and photographing these magnificent animals.

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 Big Sky Cooking by Meredith Brokaw, $35.00, hardcover. Food, life, and friends in the American West, here is the real home on the range, loaded with down-to-earth charm, delicious food, delightful stories, and great ideas for entertaining family and friends. It’s an ode to a place where nature rules and the scenery makes your heart skip a beat, and to quintessential home cooking. With reflections by Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, William Hjortsberg, James Prosek and Verlyn Klinkenborg.

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Chrysalis by Missoula author, Kim Todd, $27.00, hardcover. Before Darwin, before Audubon, there was Merian. An artist turned naturalist known for her botanical illustrations, she was born just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis--an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less a woman. When she returned she produced a book that secured her reputation, only to have it savaged in the nineteenth century by scientists who disdained the work of "amateurs." Exquisitely written and illustrated," Chrysalis" takes us from golden-age Amsterdam to the Surinam tropics to modern laboratories where Merian's insights fuel a new branch of biology. Kim Todd brings to life a seventeenth-century woman whose boldness and vision would still be exceptional today.

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To the Ends of the Earth: Adventures of an Expedition Photographer, by Bozeman photographer, Gordon Wiltsie, $35.00 hardcover. In this journey through ten unique expeditions, adventure photographer Wiltsie illustrates the daily life of an explorer--from the thrill of summiting a virgin peak to the fear of surviving a storm to the humorous and unexpected everyday moments of life on the edge. 175 color illustrations, 9 maps.

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Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, by Kingsley M. Bray, $34.95 hardcover. Crazy Horse was feared by tribal foes and honored by allies. His war record was unmatched, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Kingsley M. Bray's scholarly and authoritative biography offers a complete portrait of the man and a fuller understanding of his place in American Indian and United States history. Illustrations. Maps.

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Streams of Consciousness, by Jeff Hull, $19.95 hardcover. Booklist, In these ruminations on fishing and life, Montanan Hull shows that it's hard to fish well--and harder still to be a good person. His eloquent essays cover a wide range of fresh and saltwater fishing across an equally wide span of the globe: trout and grayling streams near Montana, trout in Patagonia, striped bass and sharks in New England, white bass in Ohio, and bonefish in Belize and Tahiti. Of particular note is the essay "Wonder Time," an exquisite reflection on the pleasures of fishing at dusk. Hull is a strong fisherman but confronts difficult times off the water. He writes movingly about his brother's long struggle with anemia and cancer, and he explores with remarkable candor his own attempted suicide and psychiatric treatment. He also writes with self-deprecating humor about his difficult encounters with clumsy anglers, with poor men who fish to live rather than for sport, with Blackfeet Indians on their reservation. A fine example not only of outdoor literature but also of creative nonfiction.

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Mineral Spirits by Heather Sharfeddin, $21.95 hardcover. Sheriff Kip Edelson investigates the story behind a woman's skeleton that a young boy stumbles across on a river bank in Montana’s Mineral County. As he traces Mineral County residents and seeks clues to who might have killed her and why, a story evolves that includes drug dealers, a shootout, an abandoned boy, and the sheriff's own marital strains.

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Montana Trivia by local author, Janet Spencer, $9.95, paperback. Our top-selling non-fiction title of 2005!

Q. Where is the only place to find answers on 1,326 questions about Montana?

A. Here! This book is your personal compendium of the most incredible, unbelievable, wild, weird, arcane, fun, fascinating, and true facts about Montana. Great easy reading!

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Montana Almanac by Missoula author, Andrea Merrill-Maker, $16.95, paperback. 

"Montana Almanac is an indispensable fact book that should grace the shelves of every Montana household. Completely revised and updated, the second edition is just as fact-packed and fascinating as the first, and offers a few more surprises for even the most knowledgable Montanaphile. Photographs, charts, maps, illustrations, and a handy index put this wealth of information about the Treasure State at your fingertips.“

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Montana: High Wide and Handsome: A Montana Anthology by Rick & Susie Graetz, $35.00, hardcover.  Husband-wife team Rick and Susie Graetz are Helena writers, photographers, publishers, and adventurers. Rick founded Montana Magazine and together the couple developed it into one of the largest regional magazines in the nation. In addition to their weekly syndicated newspaper column "This is Montana," Rick and Susie have published books on Montana, Southeast Asia, the West Indies, and many areas of the United States. Rick is a faculty member of the geography department of the University of Montana-Missoula and teaches Montana Geography/Geographic History.

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Best of Montana’s Short Fiction edited by William Kittredge and Allen Morris Jones, $14.95, paperback.  Montana has long drawn the outcasts and the dreamers, the searchers and the hiders - and the writers. Here are twenty-one stories from the frontier of our country and the edge of our national imagination.

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The Lady Rode Bucking Horses: The Story of Fannie Sperry Steele, Woman of the West by Big Timber author, Dee Marvine, $14.95, paperback.  This is the remarkable story of Fannie Sperry Steele (1887-1983), who won the title “Lady Bucking Horse Champion of the World” - twice- and went on to become a western perfomer and legendary rancher.

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Montana Century, edited by Michael Malone, $50.00, hardcover.  A magnificent book which chronicles the coming of age of the Treasure State in the 20th Century.  It includes essays by some of the best contemporary Montana writers, accompanied by more than 300 historic and color photographs, some of them never before published. 

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Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn by Larry Colton, $14.95, paperback. This work by freelance journalist Colton is a brilliant account of a teenage Native American girl from the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, who fought for honor on and off the basketball courts. 8-page photo insert.

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Helena: An Illustrated History by Vivian Paladin & Jean Baucus, $22.95, paperback. 'A modern society has grown out of what it was yesterday. So understanding history is essential to understanding ourselves. Helena: An Illustrated History is a priceless historical collection of faces and stories about our special state's capital and the lives and events that have shaped it-and us.' --Mark Racicot, Governor, State of Montana

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Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter Alone in the Wilderness by Great Falls author, Pete Fromm, $13.00, paperback.  Always a staff and customer favorite as well as Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award, Indian Creek Chronicles is Pete Fromm's account of seven winter months spent alone in a tent in Idaho guarding salmon eggs and coming face to face with the blunt realities of life as a contemporary mountain man. A gripping story of adventure and a modern-day Walden, this contemporary classic established Fromm as one of the West's premier voices.

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Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker, introduction by James Welch, $13.95, paperback. Selected as the first One Book Montana reading choice for Montana. A classic Montana novel of life in the dryland wheat country of central Montana in the 1940s.  James Welch offers a brief biography of Walker, who wrote nine of her thirteen novels while living in Montana.

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The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., winner of the Pulitzer Prize, $14.00, paperback.  Originally published more than fifty years ago, The Big Sky is the first of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.'s epic adventure novels of America's vast frontier. The Big Sky introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, three of the most memorable characters in Western American literature. Traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love. With The Big Sky, Guthrie gives us an unforgettable portrait of a spacious land and a unique way of life.

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This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig, $13.00, paperback, National Book Award Finalist.  This work introduced a major modern author to the reading public. Doig's life was formed among the sheepherders and other denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches as he wandered beside his restless father in the rugged wilderness of western Montana. A powerfully told story, This House of Sky is at once especially American and universal in its ability to awaken a longing for an explicable past. New preface by the author. 2006 One Book Montana Selection

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Crown of the Continent by Ralph Waldt, forward by Ivan Doig, $29.95, hardcover. A professional naturalist's incredible, personal portrait of America's largest and most pristine wilderness in the lower 48 states: the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem in Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia. This vast area includes two national parks in two countries (Glacier in the U.S. and Waterton Lakes in Canada), three designated wilderness areas (including the famous Bob Marshall Wilderness, the largest in the lower 48) and numerous adjacent national forests and private land. The book describes the area's geology, wildlife, plant life, and crucial environmental issues. An extremely timely release because of renewed plans to drill for oil and gas along the Rocky Mountain Front.

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Thomas Francis Meagher: Irish Rebel, American Yankee, Montana Pioneer by Gary R. Forney, $22.95, paperback. The life of Thomas Francis Meagher reads like the script of a Hollywood action-adventure film - with just a touch of mystery. Meagher not only witnessed, but was a leading character in some of the most dramatic historical events of his time. 

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Letters from Yellowstone by Livingston, Montana author, Diane Smith, $14.00, paperback. Selected as a One Book Montana reading choice.  Set in the late nineteenth century in Yellowstone Park, this novel describes a young woman's journey to a greater understanding of her place in the world through her triumph over societal expectations of her abilities.  It is creatively composed of letters from various members of a field study commissioned to study the park and is extremely cleverly written.  The novel has received much acclaim from well-known western authors and has been thoroughly enjoyed by customers and staff members.  It is also a beautiful book in appearance.

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Richard Buswell: Traces – Montana’s Frontier Revisited: Black and white photographs of Montana's back country frontier. The exhibition contains photographs of hidden Montana ghost towns and isolated sites of early settlement. Through photographs of personal possessions and eroding structures, Dr. Buswell tells tales of nature’s reclamation of frontier sites. His new work explores abstract patterns seen in landscapes and everyday objects.

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Kathe LeSage

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We have only highlighted a few of the Montana Book Company favorites.  Please contact us for more information or wonderful suggestions.  We at the Montana Book Company are always happy to go the extra mile to research your questions.