Reviews

    Dr. Jim Gentry, history professor and chair of the Social Science and Education Department at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls, has written the first comprehensive, academic history of Twin Falls, Idaho.  Such à la carte histories as Donna Scott’s specialized A Tribute to the Past, a Legacy for the Future, a history of Twin Falls businesses(1); Virginia Ricketts’s anecdotal Then and Now in Southern Idaho, a reprint of articles published in her Twin Falls Times-News “Then and Now” column and in the Jerome North Side News (2); Mary J. Inman’s recent Twin Falls Centurybook, 1904-2004 (3); and James F. Varley’s  Tales of the Tract, a reprint of his Times-News articles published from December 2002 through August 2004 (4), appeal to old-timers and natives who search for anecdotes about people and places they knew or have heard about, but such books cannot place the history of Twin Falls in its wider context.

    With In the Middle and on the Edge: The Twin Falls Region of Idaho, however, published last year jointly by the College of Southern Idaho and the Twin Falls Centennial Commission, Dr. Gentry introduces readers prix fixe to the history of the “Magic City”—in the middle of the Magic Valley and on the edge of other population centers both north and south—who celebrates her centennial this year, thanks to Ira Burton Perrine, the Twin Falls Land and Water Company, and those forward-thinking east-coast engineers and investors for whom the Magic Valley’s towns are named.  Not since Charles S. Walgamott’s eyewitness account, Six Decades Back (5), was republished in 1990 in a University of Idaho reprint edition in the Idaho State Historical Society’sIdaho Yesterdays series has such a good book about Twin Falls come out(6).

     In the Middle and on the Edge, which includes a bibliographic essay for readers interested in further research, is divided chronologically into four sections—The Historical Context, The Development of the Community, World War I and the New Deal, World War II and the Modern City—each of which is itself chronologically subdivided.  Gentry thereby logically traces the Twin Falls area’s ups and downs through prehistory, exploration, settlement, the coming of the railroad, the establishment of irrigation and the new town, World War I and the post-war boom, the Depression and the New Deal, World War II, and the development of the modern city of Twin Falls.  From a personal perspective, I particularly liked Gentry’s mention of the winter of 1949 (p. 315), when my parents and sister were snowed in from November 1948 to April 1949 on Big Creek just north of the Nevada line between Shoshone Basin and Highway 93.  I enjoyed reading about the sale of houses from the Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt (p. 309), since I grew up in two of those houses in Jerome and in Wendell; Japanese families from Hunt remained in Idaho after World War II to run the Manhattan Café in Shoshone and George K’s in Twin Falls and Burley.  I missed, however, an explanation of the difference between the High- and Low-Line Canals.  (I had grown up hearing that the former had had to be dug because the latter had been dug too far north, a surveying catastrophe.)  

    Nevertheless, although Gentry must be commended for his apparently exhaustive primary research in Twin Falls newspapers, In the Middle and on the Edge reads at times a little too much like the articles which are its major source: too many sound bites and too little narrative.  It will appeal more to locals who will use the index—occasionally mis-alphabetized (e.g., Greenwood, Gregory, Greeks, Green, Greene, Grey [p. 397])—to locate specific anecdotes, and less to strangers who will desire a more readable and contextual history than Gentry provides.  This is therefore not the book for strangers to Twin Falls.
     Moreover, Gentry perhaps relies on the newspapers a little too much.  He does not always cite an original source but sometimes relies on a newspaper’s report of it, such as the New West Magazine’s special issue devoted to Bruneau, Idaho (pp. 238 and 257).  One would have to consult the December 2, 1918, issue of the Twin Falls Daily News, use an index, or browse the New West Magazine to find the issue.  Gentry should have given us the citation himself.  Likewise, at least a list of abbreviations of the newspaper titles would have helped.  Finally, although notes are given at the end of their respective chapter, the full reference for a resource is not provided the first time it is made in a chapter.  Readers must page backward three chapters and wade through three sets of notes from the abbreviated reference for Peters’s “Early History” on p. 257 to find its full form on p. 180 and discover that it is an unpublished manuscript in the Twin Falls Public Library.  The book’s index and notes could therefore be more user friendly.

     The poor quality of most of the photographs from Jim Woods, Director of the College of Southern Idaho’s Herrett Center for Arts and Science and author of the book’s foreword, is discouraging, although the quality of the others, from the Twin Falls Public Library, the Twin Falls County Historical Society, and the Idaho State Historical Society, are fine.  Some pictures, moreover, are in the wrong place.  The photo of the Twin Falls Women’s Christian Temperance Union on p. 223, for example, should be on either p. 205 or p. 245, on which the Union is mentioned.  Those of Dierkes Lake (p. 263) and of the Galloping Goose (p. 267) should be switched around.  The self-portrait of Clarence Bisbee would have been better printed on p. 169, where Bisbee is introduced, not on p. 350.  Charles Walgamott’s portrait on p. 297 is likewise misplaced.  In the Middle and on the Edge also needs a map of the city of Twin Falls marking mentioned buildings and locations, although the maps by Linda Roberts and by Jim Woods are welcome and well done.

     In the Middle and on the Edge is also unfortunately full of grammatical and typographical errors, which both the author and a copy editor should have caught.  Grammatical errors such as “more moist” for moister (p. 9) and typos such as “Shoshonl” for Shoshoni (p. 35) and “Cituy of Rocks” for City of Rocks (p. 71) will annoy readers and further detract from their enjoyment of the book.  The not infrequent inexplicable hyphenations of words in the middle of lines, such as “fash-ions” and “mer-chants” on p. 215, among other punctuation errors, are also frustrating.  (The book’s ISBN is even misprinted on the verso of the title page.)

     Nevertheless, In the Middle and on the Edge has intensified my interest in the
 history of Twin Falls, and it will likely do so for others, as well.  Those of us who grew up in the Magic Valley owe Dr. Gentry a great debt.  Every Idaho academic library and all southern Idaho public and high school libraries should therefore own a copy of his book.  Despite its problems, In the Middle and on the Edge is the best of its kind so far.