Вручение 2009 г.
Страна: США
Дата проведения: 2009 г.
Лучший западный роман
Лауреат
Томас Кобб
0.0
IN THE LITERARY TRADITION OF CORMAC MCCARTHY'S AND LARRY MCMURTRY'S HISTORICAL WESTERNS, SHAVETAIL TRACES THE BRUTAL COMING-OF-AGE OF A BOY SOLDIER STATIONED AT A REMOTE U.S. ARMY OUTPOST AND A YOUNG WOMAN'S TERRIFYING PASSAGE ACROSS THE AMERICAN FRONTIER.
Set in 1871 in the unforgiving wasteland of the Arizona Territory, Shavetail is the story of Private Ned Thorne, a seventeen-year-old boy from Connecticut who has lied about his age to join the Army. On the run from a shameful past, Ned is desperate to prove his worth -- to his superiors, to his family, and most of all, to himself. Young and troubled, Ned is as green and stubborn as a "shavetail," the soldiers' term for a dangerous, untrained mule.
To endure in this world, Ned must not only follow the orders of the camp's captain, Robert Franklin,but also submit to the cruel manipulations of Obediah Brickner, the camp's mule driver. Both Franklin and Brickner have been damaged by their long military service, both consider themselves able to survive the dangers of the desert -- floods, scorpions, snakes, and Indians -- and both imperil Ned.
Yet there are other characters, all richly drawn, who also confront Ned: half-wit soldiers, embattled Indians hidden in cliffs, a devious and philosophical peddler, and the fleshy whores who materialize in the desert as soon as the paymaster has left camp and dance with drunken soldiers around a fire late into the night.
After a band of Apaches attack a nearby ranch, killing two men and kidnapping a young woman, Ned's lieutenant -- a man seeking atonement for his own mistakes -- leads Ned and the rest of his patrol on a near-suicidal mission through rugged mountains and into Mexico in hopes of saving the woman's life. It is unlikely any can survive this folly, and those who do will be changed forever.
Meticulously researched and vividly told, Shavetail renders a time when the United States was still an expanding empire, its western edge bloody with the deaths of soldiers, settlers, and Indians. In language both spare and brilliant, Cobb brings readers this lost American landscape, untouched by highways or electricity and without the comforts of civilization.
Shavetail also marks the return of a great American literary voice. Cobb's first and only other novel, Crazy Heart, was published in 1987 to great acclaim and was edited by the legendary editor Ted Solotaroff. Cobb is also a former student of Donald Barthelme, who described Crazy Heart as "a bitter, witty psychological profile of genius."
Brutal and deft, laced with both violence and desire, Shavetail plunges into the deepest human urges even as it marks the ground where men either survive or perish.
Лучший первый роман
Лауреат
Карол Бьюкенен
0.0
Publisher's Weekly: ..".an excellent western with an intense moral gravity." Amazon Vine Review: ..".history is brought alive with fine description and sensory detail." Roundup Magazine: ..".the finest novel of the vigilante era ever written. ... haunting and searing." Ruffians rule and murder is tolerated in the Alder Gulch gold fields during the winter of 1863-1864. Daniel Stark, lawyer and radical abolitionist, fears he will not survive to take his gold home to New York and redeem his family from the disgrace of his father's embezzlement and suicide. When a friend is murdered, Dan prosecutes the suspect, whose five lawyers are Confederates. When the trial reveals a widespread criminal conspiracy, Dan joins Union and Confederate sympathizers united in a determination to establish law and order where there is no code of law nor reliable law enforcement. Going against everything in his training and personal beliefs, Dan helps to form a Vigilance Committee and serve as its prosecutor. Then he faces the horrible prospect of hanging the husband of the woman he loves. Winner of the 2009 Spur Award for best first novel. Book 1 of The Vigilante Quartet by Carol Buchanan. Don't miss Book 2, The Devil in the Bottle; Book 3, Gold Under Ice; and Book 4, The Ghost at Beaverhead Rock, available now.
Лучшая западная научно-популярная историческая литература
Лауреат
Ричард Рэттенбери
0.0
Hunting the American West is a thoroughly illustrated, narrative history of big-game hunting in the nineteenth-century American West. The engaging narrative draws extensively on the writings of original participants and observers of the subject and — along with an abundance of pictorial material — affords unusual insight into the diverse methods and motives for hunting big game in the Old West. No other work on the subject conveys the feeling and character of the hunt in its various eras and styles, or its profound consequences, as convincingly.
This book covers the principal big-game species; subsistence, commerce, and sport hunting; the variety of methods used over time and among different peoples in the harvest; the evolving weaponry involved; the artistic expression engendered by the western chase; and the rise of the hunter-conservation movement, which led to the founding of the Boone and Crockett Club.
While it presumes solid scholarship, Hunting the American West is intended for a broad popular audience, including those interested in hunting, western history, firearms, sporting art, and conservation.
Лучшая современная западная научно-популярная литература
Лауреат
Линда Пиви
0.0
Most fans of women’s basketball would be startled to learn that girls’ teams were making their mark more than a century ago—and that none was more prominent than a team from an isolated Indian boarding school in Montana. Playing like “lambent flames” across the polished floors of dance halls, armories, and gymnasiums, the girls from Fort Shaw stormed the state to emerge as Montana’s first basketball champions. Taking their game to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, these young women introduced an international audience to the fledgling game and returned home with a trophy declaring them champions.
World champions. And yet their triumphs were forgotten—until Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith chanced upon a team photo and embarked on a ten-year journey of discovery. Their in-depth research and extensive collaboration with the teammates’ descendents and tribal kin have resulted in a narrative as entertaining as it is authentic.
Full-Court Quest offers a rare glimpse into American Indian life and into the world of women’s basketball before “girls’ rules” temporarily shackled the sport. For anyone captivated by Sea Biscuit, A League of Their Own, and other accounts of unlikely champions, this book rates as nothing but net.
Лучшая западная биография
Лауреат
Мередит М. Браун
0.0
The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate, coonskin cap-wearing patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. The scarcity of surviving autobiographical material has allowed tellers of his story to fashion a Boone of their own liking, and his myth has evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex -- and far more interesting -- than his legend.
Brown traces Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions. Devoted to his wife and children, he nevertheless embarked on long hunts that could keep him from home for two years or more. A captain in colonial Virginia's militia, Boone later fought against the British and their Indian allies in the Revolutionary War before he moved to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory and became a Spanish civil servant. Boone did indeed kill Indians during the bloody fighting for Kentucky, but he also respected Indians, became the adopted son of a Shawnee chief, and formed lasting friendships with many Shawnees who once held him captive.
During Boone's lifetime (1734--1820), America evolved from a group of colonies with fewer than a million inhabitants clustered along the Atlantic Coast to an independent nation of close to ten million reaching well beyond the Mississippi River. Frontiersman is the first biography to explore Boone's crucial role in that transformation. Hundreds of thousands of settlers entered Kentucky on the road that Boone and his axemen blazed from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River. Boone's leadership in the defense of Boonesborough during a sustained Indian attack in 1778 was instrumental in preventing white settlers from fleeing Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. And Boone's move to Missouri in 1799 and his exploration up the Missouri River helped encourage a flood of settlers into that region. Through his colorful chronicle of Boone's experiences, Brown paints a rich portrayal of colonial and Revolutionary America, the relations between whites and Indians, the opening and settling of the Old West, and the birth of the American national identity.
Supported with copious maps, illustrations, endnotes, and a detailed chronology of Boone's life, Frontiersman provides a fresh and accurate rendering of a man most people know only as a folk hero -- and of the nation that has mythologized him for over two centuries.
Лучшая западная научно-популярная литература для детей
Лауреат
Сид Флейшмен
0.0
"Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth." So begins Sid Fleischman's ramble-scramble biography of the great American author and wit, who started life in a Missouri village as a barefoot boy named Samuel Clemens.
Abandoning a career as a young steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, Sam took a bumpy stagecoach to the Far West. In the gold and silver fields, he expected to get rich quick. Instead, he got poor fast, digging in the wrong places. His stint as a sagebrush newspaperman led to a duel with pistols. Had he not survived, the world would never have heard of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn—or red-headed Mark Twain.
Samuel Clemens adopted his pen name in a hotel room in San Francisco and promptly made a jumping frog (and himself) famous. His celebrated novels followed at a leisurely pace; his quips at jet speed. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education," he wrote.
Here, in high style, is the story of a wisecracking adventurer who came of age in the untamed West; an ink-stained rebel who surprised himself by becoming the most famous American of his time. Bountifully illustrated.
Лауреат
Фрэнк Китинг
0.0
In The Trial of Standing Bear, award-winning author and former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating tells of the anguish and resolve of Ponca Chief Standing Bear and his people as they are forced from their homeland and their subsequent fight to be treated like human beings. Through the historically-accurate illustrations of Oklahoma artist Mike Wimmer, you will follow Chief Standing Bear, his family, and members of his tribe from their forced removal from the banks of the Niobrara River in northeast Nebraska to Indian Territory, and the ultimate victory that began the long struggle for civil rights for Native Americans.
Лучший западный рассказчик (Иллюстрированная детская книга)
Лауреат
Alison L. Randall
0.0
It is the late 1800s. Mary Ann lives with her family in the rugged Utah territory, where she tends the vegetable garden, dips candles, and braids rags into rugs. Mary Ann has a busy life, and a special friend to share it with: her beloved homemade doll, Betty.
Betty's wheat-filled body sits straight and tall. Her embroidered eyes never blink. Still, Mary Ann knows that Betty is always paying attention, and listening to her secrets.
But one afternoon, a sudden, fierce storm forces Mary Ann and her family into their cabin before the young girl can retrieve her doll from the garden. By the time the wild wind and rain subside, Betty is gone. Heartbroken, Mary Ann refuses to give up searching for her best friend. Then one day, when winter turns to spring, Mary Ann spies a familiar shape growing as a patch of slender grass near the bottom of a hill...
An afterword by the author reveals the story of the real-life Mary Ann and her doll, the inspiration for THE WHEAT DOLL.
Лучшая западная краткая проза
Лауреат
Крейг Джонсон
0.0
Walt Longmire unravels a mystery that connects two murders across forty years
When the body of a young Vietnamese woman is found alongside the interstate in Absaroka County, Wyoming, Sheriff Walt Longmire is determined to discover the identity of the victim and is forced to confront the horrible similarities of this murder to that of his first homicide investigation as a marine in Vietnam.
To complicate matters, Virgil White Buffalo, a homeless Crow Indian, is found living in a nearby culvert and in possession of the young woman's purse. There are only two problems with what appears to be an open-and-shut case. One, the sheriff doesn't think Virgil White Buffalo--a Vietnam vet with a troubling past--is a murderer. And two, the photo that is found in the woman's purse looks hauntingly familiar to Walt.
In the fourth book in Craig Johnson's award-winning Walt Longmire series, the tough yet tender sheriff solves two murders tied in blood but separated by nearly forty years.
Лучшая западная краткая документальная проза
Лучший массовый роман в мягкой обложке
Лауреат
Джон Д. Несбитт
0.0
Will Dryden picked the wrong time to ride onto the Redstone Ranch. He was looking for a job - and a missing man. But one of the Redstone's hands was just found killed, so tensions are riding high and not everyone's eager to welcome a stranger.
Лучшая аудиокнига
Лауреат
Стэн Линд
0.0
Sheepman Abel McKenzie and cattleman Zack Rainford were once the best of friends, but are now, in 1887 Montana Territory, mortal enemies. Their escalating feud threatens to throw the people of Meriwether County into a bloody range war. Three ranchers have already been killed, and the investigation into the homicides received only cursory review. One of those three men was McKenzie's employee. Deputy United States Marshal Merlin Fanshaw is sent to investigate and enforce the law. Shortly after his arrival in Meriwether County, Deputy Fanshaw's assignment is complicated by the activities of a corrupt sheriff, a mysterious range detective, and a clandestine romance between the shepherd's son and the cattleman's daughter. Deputy Fanshaw accepts the burden of their secret and becomes an ally to the young lovers. If the two young people get married, it could help unite the feuding families, or it could light the fuse on the lethal powder keg. With conditions in the area becoming more strained, the McKenzie and Rainford homes become armed camps, with malice running rampant between the cowhands and sheepherders. Can Deputy Fanshaw prevent any further bloodshed? What will it take for him to put an end to the Meriwether County War?
