Twin Falls Public Library ~ Information for Life

"Tough Paradise: The Literature of Idaho and the Intermountain West"

Sep 23 ·  Oct 7 ·  Oct 21 ·  Nov 4 ·  Nov 18

All programs begin at 6PM in the Library's Program Room

Let's Talk About It! is a reading and discussion program where a guest scholar leads a discussion on that week's book. Copies of the books are available for free checkout at the Reference Desk. Please stop in or call (208) 733-2964 ext 109 for more information.

This program is sponsored by:

Book Descriptions

September 23: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and most poetically, between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

October 7: Home Below Hell’s Canyon by Grace Jordan

During the depression days of the early 1930s, the Jordan family – Len Jordan (later a  governor of Idaho and a United States senator), his wife Grace, and their three small children – moved to an Idaho sheep ranch in the Snake River gorge just below Hell’s Canyon, deepest scratch on the face of North America. “Cut off from the world for months at a time, the Jordans became virtually self-sufficient. Short of cash but long on courage, they raised and preserved their food, made their own soap, and educated their children” (Sterling North, New York World-Telegram).

October 21: Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

Lalu’s father calls his thirteen-year-old daughter his treasure, his “thousand pieces of gold,” yet when famine strikes northern China in 1871 he is forced to sell her. Polly Bemis, as Lalu is later called, is sold to a brothel and then to a slave merchant bound for America, auctioned to a saloon-keeper, and offered as a prize in a poker game. This biographical novel is the extraordinary story of a remarkable woman and her achievement of respect and dignity among the pioneer women of the early American West.

November 4: Where the Morning Light’s Still Blue: Personal Essays About Idaho edited by William Studebacker and Rick Ardinger

The places in Idaho about which these essays are written are revealed through prisms of thought about people, animals, reptiles, mortality, deserts, mountains, rivers, memory. Ultimately, they reveal more about the writers than they do about landscapes… From the general to the particular the book moves along, divided by region, but an overview of Idaho seems always present in the perspectives of all the writers (from the introduction).

November 18: Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer

In early 1950s Idaho, when Jake Weber defies his father’s order to stay away from the river, an innocent swim ends with something far beyond anyone’s expectations: Jake witnesses the brutal murder of “that woman Sugar Babe” by Harold Endicott, who owns the mortgage on the Weber farm. Jake is forbidden to speak of it and name the one responsible, even as the woman’s lover, a black man, is falsely accused. Over the course of a long hot summer, this crime and its devastating aftermath forever alter Jake’s vision of his parents and his world, teaching him the true source of danger, and the true power of forbidden knowledge.