Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
- The Good Rain (1990)
- Breaking Blue (1992)
- Lasso the Wind (1998)
- The Winemaker’s Daughter (2004)
- The Worst Hard Time / The Long Darkness (2005)
- The Big Burn (2009)
- Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (2011)
- The Immortal Irishman (2016)
- A Pilgrimage to Eternity (2019)
Non-Fiction Book Covers
Timothy Egan Books Overview
The Good Rain
A fantastic book! Timothy Egan describes his journeys in the Pacific Northwest through visits to salmon fisheries, redwood forests and the manicured English gardens of Vancouver. Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.
Breaking Blue
In 1935, the Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money from the reluctant hobos many of them displaced farmers who had fled the Midwestern dust bowls, robbed dairies, and engaged in all manner of nefarious crimes, including murder. This history was suppressed until 1989, when former logger, Vietnam vet, and Spokane cop Tony Bamonte discovered a strange 1955 deathbed confession while researching a thesis on local law enforcement history. Bamonte began to probe what had every appearance of widespread police crime and a massive cover up whose highlight was the unsolved murder of Town Marshall George Conff. The fact that many of those involved, now in their 80s and 90s, were still alive made it imperative that Bamonte unravel this mystery. The result is Breaking Blue, a white knuckle ride through institutional corruption and cover up that vividly documents Depression era Spokane and an extraordinary case that few believed would ever be brought to light.
Lasso the Wind
A New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Mountains and Plains Book Seller’s Association Award’Sprawling in scope…
. Mr. Egan uses the past powerfully to explain and give dimension to the present.’ The New York Times’Fine reportage…
honed and polished until it reads more like literature than journalism.’ Los Angeles Times’They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it,’ writes Timothy Egan of the West; still, ‘this region’s hold on the American character has never seemed stronger.’ In this colorful and revealing journey through the eleven states west of the 100th meridian, Egan, a third generation westerner, evokes a lovely and troubled country where land is religion and the holy war between preservers and possessors never ends. Egan leads us on an unconventional, freewheeling tour: from America’s oldest continuously inhabited community, the Ancoma Pueblo in New Mexico, to the high kitsch of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where London Bridge has been painstakingly rebuilt stone by stone; from the fragile beauty of Idaho’s Bitterroot Range to the gross excess of Las Vegas, a city built as though in defiance of its arid environment. In a unique blend of travel writing, historical reflection, and passionate polemic, Egan has produced a moving study of the West: how it became what it is, and where it is going.’The writing is simply wonderful. From the opening paragraph, Egan seduces the reader…
. Entertaining, thought provoking.’ The Arizona Daily Star Weekly’A western breeziness and love of open spaces shines through Lasso the Wind…
. The writing is simple and evocative.’ The Economist
The Winemaker’s Daughter
Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times national correspondent Timothy Egan turns to fiction with The Winemaker’s Daughter, a lyrical and gripping novel about the harsh realities and ecological challenges of turning water into wine. When Brunella Cartolano visits her father on the family vineyard in the basin of the Cascade Mountains, she’s shocked by the devastation caused by a four year drought. Passionate about the Pacific Northwest ecology, Brunella, a cultural impact analyst, is embroiled in a battle to save the Seattle waterfront from redevelopment and to preserve a fisherman’s livelihood. But when a tragedy among fire jumpers results from a failure of the water supply her brother Niccolo is among those lost Brunella finds herself with another mission: to find out who is sabotaging the area’s water supply. Joining forces with a Native American Forest Ranger, she discovers deep rifts rooted in the region’s complicated history, and tries to save her father’s vineyard from drying up for good…
even as violence and corruption erupt around her.
The Big Burn
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen.