- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Graywolf Press (Nov 15 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1555974791
- ISBN-13: 978-1555974794
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.6 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #987,273 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The American West writing of author Kittredge (The Willow Field), who grew up on a cattle ranch in Oregon and has lived and worked for three decades in Montana, is known for its honesty and reverence. In this collection of essays, many of which appeared in 2002's Owning It All, Kittredge examines the region's character and contradictions. Describing his personal history with the land, Kittredge considers the area's draw for himself and those who arrived before him, 19th century travelers lured by promises of "free land, crystalline water, great herds of game... and gold, all in unfettered abundance." A former creative writing professor, Kittredge has a knack for the poetic, and isn't above putting a mythical sheen on an otherwise skillful and sincere assessment of the alternately challenging and comforting place he calls home. In pieces such as "How to Love This World," "Lost Cowboys" and "The Next Rodeo," for example, he speaks of the joys of wandering slow and easy; elsewhere, he worries over a present in which the "devastation of the interwoven system of life" is already under way. The reclamation of hope, responsibility and wisdom-the ongoing process of "redefining what we take to be sacred"-is the driving force behind these effective, at times profound reflections.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"You may never again see the American West in quite the same way if you take the time to view it through the eyes of William Kittredge." --The Seattle Times
"Reading this richly detailed book is like listening to Hank Williams. Its twangy, melancholic strains cut to the bone." --Booklist (starred review), on Owning It All
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Living in the Past and Embracing the Future, Dec 23 2007
By Harold Shepherd - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Next Rodeo (Paperback)
Who better to describe the Westerner condition than William Kittredge. Not only is he one of the West's most celebrated writers but is the son of a rancher from southeastern Oregon. Kittredge inherited his father's ranch and stuck it out until he hit 33 when headed off to study and teach creative writing first in Iowa and then Montana.
Kittredge's homeland is not the kind of place where most family car loads whizzing through the vast expanses stop to take in the scenery. Such perspectives make it difficult to garner public sentiment in favor of, not only protecting desert ecosystems, but also convincing the public that such places are an important part of our western tradition.
A good writer, however, has the ability to consistently re-evaluate his circumstances. Kittredge makes no bones about what's been lost, in part, due to his own father who "got his hands on a paradise of waterbirds and fertility, and ... remade it into what he understood as useful, a sprawling system of irrigation and drainage canals and agribusiness fields." While he is driving along the Salmon River on a cold solitary night thinking about the paradigm between the loss of salmon and grizzly bears and our inertia to do anything about it he says: "[i]n wintertime moonlight, the icy Sawtooth Range was aglow under a swirling sky. I contemplated the serious, classical, fool-making mysteries. How to proceed? Can it be true we suffer from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy on earth?"
Kittredge's genius lies in his ability, in a few short sentences, to, not only put you right inside of the writer's mind when they reflect on their experience, but allow you to visualize just what he is seeing, almost as if you where there. Most of all, he brings home the inherent conflict experienced by all of us who are deciding whether to hang on to the past or to embrace the new west.
Harold Shepherd is the Author of Compromising Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Second Conquest of Western Rangelands
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