The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee
by Stewart Lee Allen
from Ballantine Books
In this captivating book, Stewart Lee Allen treks three-quarters of the way around the world on a caffeinated quest to answer these profound questions: Did the advent of coffee give birth to an enlightened western civilization? Is coffee, indeed, the substance that drives history? From the cliffhanging villages of Southern Yemen, where coffee beans were first cultivated eight hundred years ago, to a cavernous coffeehouse in Calcutta, the drinking spot for two of India’s three Nobel Prize winners . . . from Parisian salons and cafés where the French Revolution was born, to the roadside diners and chain restaurants of the good ol’ U.S.A., where something resembling brown water passes for coffee, Allen wittily proves that the world was wired long before the Internet. And those who deny the power of coffee (namely tea-drinkers) do so at their own peril.
Idaho for the Curious: A Guide
by Cort Conley
from Backeddy Books
The Enders Hotel: A Memoir (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)
by Brandon R. Schrand
from Bison Books
Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America's First Nuclear Accident
by William McKeown
from Ecw Press
Home Below Hell's Canyon
by Grace Jordan
from University of Nebraska Press
Massacre At Bear River: First, Worst and Forgotten
by Rod Miller
from Caxton Press
Rod Miller tells the story of the West's worst, but least remembered attack on Native Americans in Massacre at Bear River: First, Worst and Forgotten.
Although it has been largely ignored by historians, it was the war waged against the Shoshoni tribe that opened the book on Indian massacres in the West. The Shoshoni were victims of a bloodbath more extreme than that at Wounded Knee, and more deadly than the more famous slaughter at Sand Creek.
The Bear River Massacre, on January 29, 1863, claimed at least 250 Shoshoni lives and changed the culture of the natives who lived in the area along what later became the Utah-Idaho border.
The author provides a compelling narrative of the massacre and the events leading up to the bloody clash on a frozen riverbank in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Miller also explains why the massacre has remained in the historical shadows for 145 years while detailing the fight waged by Shoshonis and a few dedicated researchers to raise the event to its rightful place in Western history.
Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
by Karl Boyd Brooks
from University of Washington Press
In the years following World War II, the world's biggest dam was almost built in Hells Canyon on the Snake River in Idaho. Karl Boyd Brooks tells the story of the dam controversy, which became a referendum not only on public-power expansion but also on the environmental implications of the New Deal's natural -- resources and economic policy.
Private-power critics of the Hells Canyon High Dam posed difficult questions about the implications of damming rivers to create power and to grow crops. Activists, attorneys, and scientists pioneered legal tactics and political rhetoric that would help to define the environmental movement in the 1960s. The debate, however, was less about endangered salmon or threatened wild country and more about who would control land and water and whether state enterprise or private capital would oversee the supply of electricity.
By thwarting the dam's construction, Snake Basin irrigators retained control over water as well as economic and political power in Idaho, putting the state on a postwar path that diverged markedly from that of bordering states. In the end, the opponents of the dam were responsible for preserving high deserts and mountain rivers from radical change.
With Public Power, Private Dams, Karl Brooks makes an important contribution not only to the history of the Pacific Northwest and the region's anadromous fisheries but also to the environmental history of the United States in the period after World War II.
We Sagebrush Folks
by Annie Pike Greenwood
from University of Idaho Press
In Mountain Shadows: A History of Idaho
by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes
from University of Nebraska Press
Schwantes reaches back to 1805, when Lewis and Clark were among the first white men to enter present-day Idaho. He describes the Indians then living in the Great Basin and Plateau, and proceeds through layers of history to show how fur traders, missionaries, and overland emigrants defined the land that became a territory in 1863 and, finally, a state in 1890. The vigilantism, Indian wars, mining booms and busts, and an-imosity toward Mormons and Chinese immigrants that marked the territorial years gave way to more troubles in the early years of statehood: an economic downturn, industrial violence, political protest. The arrival of automobiles promised to end isolation, but the formidable terrain slowed the building of north-south highways, just as it had railroads. Nevertheless, future Idaho would be a product of engineering and witness the coming of irrigation systems and hydroelectric plants. Schwantes brings his history through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, noting everyday life, colorful personalities, political and economic cycles, raging controversies, and current trends.
Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family
by Jess Walter
from Harper Perennial
On the last hot day of summer in 1992, gunfire cracked over a rocky knob in northern Idaho, just south of the Canadian border. By the next day three people were dead, and a small war was joined, pitting the full might of federal law enforcement against one well-armed family. Drawing on extensive interviews with Randy Weaver's family, government insiders, and others, Jess Walter traces the paths that led the Weavers to their confrontation with federal agents and led the government to treat a family like a gang of criminals.
This is the story of what happened on Ruby Ridge: the tragic and unlikely series of events that destroyed a family, brought down the number-two man in the FBI, and left in its wake a nation increasingly attuned to the dangers of unchecked federal power.
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