- Paperback: 230 pages
- Publisher: Stoddart Kids; 1 edition (Feb 5 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0773760857
- ISBN-13: 978-0773760851
- Product Dimensions: 22.1 x 13.6 x 1.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 272 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #335,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Kroetsch moves forward and backward in time, speaks in many voices, gives us parallel histories, the truth of correspondences, fully human characters and a setting rich in bones. Perhaps only in such a fiction do we have the real history and the living mythology of the vast and still largely empty Badlands."
-- Studies in Canadian Literature
Product Description
In 1916, scientist William Dawe leads a palaeontological expedition into the badlands of Alberta, obsessed with achieving world renown by discovering dinosaur fossils. Fifty years later, his daughter, Anna, enters these same badlands. In her visit to the expedition site, she exposes not only the absurdity of her father's work, but also the folly of his male ambition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stays in your memory,
By Robert Bott (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Badlands (Paperback)
I first read Badlands shortly after it came out in 1975. It stuck in my mind, especially the idea of floating down the Red Deer River through that part of Alberta, so full of contrasts from lush to stark, desolate to beautiful. Well, it took three and a half decades, but I finally did it last weekend. A friend and I rented sea kayaks, loaded up our camping gear and paddled down 62 kilometres of this unique geographic area that extends several hundred km. Kroetsch's evocative sense of landscape, strong in all his works that I've read, succeeded to such a degree that the imagined reality was in perfect sync with the actual experience. A rare enough experience in life that I'm writing this review to thank the author.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
1.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 1 of 9 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Another no-talent hack gets published. And what else is new?,
By Shadow Woman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Badlands (Paperback)
The Badlands is a terrible book. It alternates from boring the reader to making them cringe at the pathetic attmepts Kroetsch makes at creating patterns, meanings and symbols that transcend character and place. This is the kind of junk that young hacks churn out in creative writing class, and it also seems like it was written with academia in mind. It has all the requirements to meet an English Lit. course's criteria; it can be picked apart and would serve to teach students about different techniques and literary devices, although they could (and should) learn from much, much better authors. This book is dangerous and it sucks, while most books in Canons of literature don't. Also, the devices used to give significance to events are so blatantly out in the open it's as if he just threw together these elements with no concern for story whatsoever- going by the guidelines of one of thse "how to write fiction" books, as it were. (By the way, you should avoid those books at all costs if you're serious about being a writer...they homogenize your vision of the world and inhibit your originality, and you'll end up writing junk like Badlands.) How this got rave reviews I don't know- how it even got published is a mystery to me. The author seems to be lacking any sort of warmth and understanding of humanity; his characters are flat and don't act as human beings would. This is probably the work of a cold pseudo-intellectual who thinks the world revolves around him and has no concern or compassion for his fellow humans. Considering how the protagonist of this novel is a man who fits that description, I wouldn't be surprised if Kroetsch is what I've pegged him to be. Either that, or he's just a hack who got a lucky break. Maybe he knew the right people, or paid them off, or he slept with the publisher or something. Not a rewarding book. If you have to read this, I feel for you. If not, avoid at all costs! |
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