April 21, 2012
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Week 16: Idaho
So awhile back, Dad was talking about visiting Idaho. I think he was sitting next to someone on the plane once who was raving about the scenery and whatnot. So on one of our trips to the library, he decided to get some travel books. He got some for Washington, Victoria Island, and Alaska as well as for Idaho. I really didn’t know much about Idaho other than it’s physical location so I got a couple big coffee table book types. I figured if it was known for its landscapes I’d benefit from some nice glossy, full spread pictures.
I checked out So Incredibly Idaho! by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes and another book called simply Idaho by Cort Conley, with photographs by John Marshall.
The subtitle of So Incredibly Idaho! is “Seven Landscapes that Define the Gem State” and I thought that sounded promising so I started with that. Was really disappointed to find that it wasn’t just full of landscape photos. What he did was he categorized seven different types of landscapes, and had one or two full-spread images of that type of landscape, then a lot of text about what made it important, why it defined Idaho, and a lot of superfluous information that I just didn’t care about.
Idaho was much more my style. I wanted an oversized book for its pictures, but I still wanted to learn something about Idaho. This book had a lot of large, beautiful photographs (thumbs up, John Marshall), and a lot of the important information was in the captions. There’s a brief history of Idaho in the beginning, and scattered pages of text explaining more current events of the state, and that was enough for me.
