From Amazon.com
As a young suburbanite from Chicago, Tom Groneberg first falls in love with horses and the rural West during a stint as a guide on a Colorado dude ranch. In this affecting memoir, he traces his decade-long attempt to shrub all evidence of his strip-mall roots through a series of cowboy jobs--mending fences, baling hay, and disposing of dead calves while working as a cattle hand. Later, he tries to command nearly 10,000 acres of inhospitable land as a way-over-his-head owner of a cattle ranch in Miles City, a tiny eastern Montana town so cold in winter, Groneberg writes, that "the clear night freezes the stars in place."
In an ever more desperate need to prove himself to "real" cowboys and himself, Groneberg briefly attends rodeo school and insists on entering a bucking bronco competition, clutching on to his three seconds of saddled glory as if it were an Olympic trophy. What saves The Secret Life of Cowboys from cliché--big-town boy learns important life lessons from craggy Marlboro cowboys--is that the more "authentic" his life becomes, the more miserable he is. Eventually, he falls into a depression so deep that he seeks the help of a psychotherapist and anti-depressants.
After a particularly disastrous year, when an alarmingly high percentage of his cows remain "open"--free of calves--he and his ever-patient wife sell the ranch and Groneberg seems destined to a particularly humiliating brand of failure. Fortunately for him, he discovers a different kind of satisfaction leading a semi-nomadic life with more modest expectations and even simpler pleasures, which he captures in his beautifully spare prose. --Keith Moerer
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From Publishers Weekly
This book's jacket (of a cowboy and his shopping cart in a supermarket frozen-food aisle) perfectly sets the tone for its offbeat theme: an account of Groneberg's evolution from Chicago suburbs to Montana ranches. Graduating from college with a degree in English and rhetoric, Groneberg, who writes for Big Sky Journal, Out and Sports Afield, shuns a traditional career. He spots an ad in the Utne Reader: "Hard work with horses in a beautiful setting." Following up, Groneberg summers at a Colorado ranch and is hooked. He moves to Montana, "a place where you can stretch your eyeballs," viewing his new life as almost fictional: "I will tell you a story about a hapless English major, a hopeless dreamer who finds a job guiding trail rides in Colorado. He falls in love with the West and a horse and a girl. Later he finds work on a ranch in Montana. He drives an hour each way, labors for ten hours a day and earns $210 a week. He marries the girl. And later still, he becomes part owner and full-time manager of nearly 10,000 acres.... It is the story I tell myself." However, the story this buckaroo tells readers takes a darker turn. Groneberg attends rodeo school, but bronc bruises are minor compared to the trials of running a ranch, which triggers a knotted stomach, depression and psychiatric sessions. "I chased a dream and it kicked me in the teeth." Groneberg succeeds as cowboy and poet, tossing a saddle on his soul and riding into the shadows: "Night is gathering. I can smell the burning stars."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
