Last Bus to Wisdom

Last Bus to Wisdom
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110198256X

Named a Best Book of the Year by the Seattle Times and Kirkus Review The final novel from a great American storyteller. Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old’s imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for “female trouble” in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate–bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical—is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German, and Donal can’t seem to get on her good side either. After one contretemps too many, Kate packs him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound. But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way. Charming, wise, and slyly funny, Last Bus to Wisdom is a last sweet gift from a writer whose books have bestowed untold pleasure on countless readers.

The Bartender's Tale

The Bartender's Tale
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2013-08-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1594631484

A national bestseller, the story of “a boy’s last days of youth and a history his father can’t leave behind” (The Daily Beast). Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge in the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an “accident between the sheets” whose mother deserted them both years ago. The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his own. The Bartender’s Tale wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.

Waiting for the Last Bus

Waiting for the Last Bus
Author: Richard Holloway
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2018-03-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1786890232

Where do we go when we die? Or is there nowhere to go? Is death something we can do or is it just something that happens to us? Now in his ninth decade, former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway has spent a lifetime at the bedsides of the dying, guiding countless men and women towards peaceful deaths. In The Last Bus, he presents a positive, meditative and profound exploration of the many important lessons we can learn from death: facing up to the limitations of our bodies as they falter, reflecting on our failings, and forgiving ourselves and others. But in a modern world increasingly wary of acknowledging mortality, The Last Bus is also a stirring plea to reacquaint ourselves with death. Facing and welcoming death gives us the chance to think about not only the meaning of our own life, but of life itself; and can mean the difference between ordinary sorrow and unbearable regret at the end. Radical, joyful and moving, The Last Bus is an invitation to reconsider life's greatest mystery by one of the most important and beloved religious leaders of our time.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2013-08-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1439124949

The central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Ivan Doig's supple tale of landseekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country.

The Eleventh Man

The Eleventh Man
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2009-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547350589

After Pearl Harbor, the lives of eleven Montana college football teammates are changed forever in an “intensely suspenseful and moving” novel (Scott Turow). In the early 1940s, the starting lineup of Treasure State University’s football team are local heroes. But as America is pulled into World War II, they feel called to become heroes of another kind. Now, ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war’s lonely and dangerous theaters. The eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine. He is to chronicle the adventures of his teammates, man by man, for publication in small-town newspapers across the country like the one his father edits. Ready for action, Reinking chafes at the assignment—not knowing that it will bring him love from an unexpected quarter and test the law of averages, which holds that all but one of his teammates should come through the conflict unscathed . . .

English Creek

English Creek
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2005-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743271270

The portrait of a time and a place -Montana in the 1930's -- is depicted through the McCaskill family's personal struggles.

Montana

Montana
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2018
Genre: Frontier and pioneer life
ISBN:

The Last Bus

The Last Bus
Author: Paul Summers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 80
Release: 1998
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

The Last Bus to Albuquerque

The Last Bus to Albuquerque
Author: Lewis Grizzard
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1994
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 9781563521836

Brief appreciations of the late humorist accompany a selection of his most recent newspaper columns.