Bozeman News

Western Book Roundup

Helena Native Born Without Legs Shares his Perspective in “Double Take”

By Jenny Shank, 10-27-09

Helena-raised Kevin Connolly is on the road talking about his new memoir, Double Take.  He’ll visit Bozeman today (Country Bookshelf, 7 p.m.), and he’ll be in Helena on October 28 (Montana Book Company, 7 p.m.), and in Missoula on October 29 (Fact & Fiction, 7 p.m.). 

The 24-year-old Connolly was born without legs, but according to his bio on his publisher’s website, he “was otherwise a healthy baby and grew up like any other Montana kid; getting dirty, running in the woods, and getting dirty some more.”

Connolly began taking photographs four years ago, traveling around the world on a skateboard and “documenting the reactions” people had to him.  The photos in this series became ”The Rolling Exhibition,” which Connolly’s website describes as: 31 Cities, 32,000 photos, one stare.” Double Take is getting great reviews; Kirkus Reviews described it as “A courageous, immensely rewarding chronicle expressed in arresting words and pictures.” Visit Connolly’s website for an entertaining trailer about his experience reading an ebook on an over-sized PC.

• Utah State senior John Gilmore won the first annual Norman Mailer Award in Creative Nonfiction for college students.  He traveled to New York to attend a banquet in Mailer’s honor last week.  According to the New York Times, when Gilmore’s name was announced, it created a bit of a stir:

“When William Kennedy announced his name and home state, one could see the heads of audience members tip sideways as they whispered. Could he be related to Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who asked Utah officials to execute him, and whose life was chronicled by Mailer and Mr. Schiller in the Pulitzer Prize winning 1979 novel ‘The Executioner’s Song’?

‘No,’ Mr. Gilmore said afterward with a laugh as he stood arm in arm with his wife, Maryssa DeLeon, who is also in college, studying mortuary science. He added that Mr. Schiller told him the awards committee had spent three weeks investigating if there were any connection before it contacted him about the prize.”

• I recently read about two book deals in Publishers Marketplace that should be of interest to fans of novels set in this region.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Oregon-based Anna Keesey‘s debut novel Little Century, described as “the story of a young woman who stakes her claim in Oregon’s high desert during the violent range wars and the expansion of the railroad at the turn of the century, pitched as in the spirit of Willa Cather’s My Antonia.” Keesey’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, and she teaches in the English Department at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. 

And in 2011, Norton will publish Alexi Zentner‘s first novel, Touch, “set in the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and earlier, about a man who returns to his home town on the eve of his mother’s funeral and reconnects with the stories of his mythic grandfather.” Zentner, born in Kitchener, Ontario, lives in Ithaca, New York, and his short stories have won the O. Henry Prize and appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.

• David Sax’s new book Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen would seem at first glance to have little to do with the West, but actually Sax discovered many authentic Jewish delis in the West, including one, Jimmy and Drew’s 28th Street Deli in Boulder, that I used to live next door to.  Sax writes:

“Since I’d left Chicago I’d had some good deli, but Jimmy and Drew’s blew me away, largely because it was so unexpected.  In that bite of kugel, I realized great Jewish delicatessens could happen anywhere.  People, philosophy, and ingredients mattered so much more than place...I can say that I tasted more hope that night in Boulder than in any other delicatessen I had encountered on my journey so far.”

Sax also praises Zaidy’s in Denver and Kosher on the Go in Salt Lake City, which “had a frontier feel to it.”

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