Bad Land: An American Romance [Paperback]

Jonathan Raban (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 1997

A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award


"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. "
--Washington Post Book World

In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert.  But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive.    

In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West.

"Exceptional. . . .  A beautifully told historical meditation. "
--Time

"Championship prose. . . .  In fifty years don't be surprised if Bad Land is a landmark."
--Los Angeles Times

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jonathan Raban ambles and picks his way across the Montana prairie, called "The Great American Desert" until Congress offered 320-acre tracts of barren land to immigrants with stardust in their eyes. Raban's prose makes love to the waves of land, red dirt roads, and skeletons of homesteads that couldn't survive the Dirty Thirties. As poignant as any romance novel, there's heartbreak in the failed dreams of the homesteaders, a pang of destiny in the arbitrary way railroad towns were thrown into existence, and inspiration in the heroism of people who've fashioned lives for themselves by cobbling together homes from the ruined houses of those who couldn't make it. Through it all, Raban's voice examines and honors the vast open expanses of land and pays homage to the histories of families who eked out an existence.

From Publishers Weekly

Raban (Old Glory), an Englishman now settled in Seattle, has written a vivid and utterly idiosyncratic social history of the homesteading movement in eastern Montana that went boom and bust during the first three decades of this century. It is the story of a dream turned sour that still echoes in the western American consciousness. Lured by free land from the government and a deceptive publicity campaign mounted by the local railroad, thousands from all over the eastern United States and northern Europe went to Montana to make their fortune as farmers. Raban follows the stories of several families, most of which end in heartbreak. He examines the literature that lured them there and the how-to books they read once they arrived. He tells the story of an early photographer, a woman, who recorded life on the prairie. He covers the weather, the homegrown school system, the early bankrupting fad of replacing horses with tractors, a Depression-era town built by the WPA and?most recently?the failed attempt of the dying community of Ismay to revive itself by changing its name to Joe, Montana, in the vain hope of luring football fans. Raban combines his personal experiences during the two years he traveled in Montana with historical research to argue that, given the land and the weather, the homesteading scheme was doomed to failure. The legacy today, seen most dramatically in the anti-government militia movement, is the belief, rooted in family memory, that government and big business conspire together against the little folk. This seemingly informal yet careful blend of chronicle and personal reportage is social history at its best.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 7, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679759069
• ISBN-13: 978-0679759065
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #273,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two years after reading it, I still can't forget it, December 12, 1999

By 

"electrontom" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Land: An American Romance (Paperback)

This is one of my favorite books...it really brought to life for me the odd mix of idealism and severe hardship of our midwestern settlers. Raban's style of story telling is relaxed and detail oriented, but once I'm into it, it has a life of its own....the writing is just incandescent. I could really imagine myself trying to get my family through a minus thirty degree winter with the wind howling through my thin wooden house, and hardly any food in the pantry. It seems that Raban's British sensibilities may have caused some unsatifying stereotyping of Montanans among his readers, but I didn't read this book to get a politically correct viewpoint. I read it because as much as any writer working today, Raban is able to let me experience the situations he is writing about. One of the very few books I have read twice.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The old and the new West revealed., April 27, 1998

By 

Tim A. Moore ([e-mail]) (Christchurch, New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Land: An American Romance (Hardcover)

The world, it seems, is replete with images of the American West. In the age of film and television you don't have to have been born in the United States to recognise the iconography of long, stretched shadows from sunsets slipping through the buttes and prairieland of Montana or Wyoming or Utah. The book Bad Land by British-born Jonathan Raban, therefore presents nothing new, until, as it does, it scratches at a little of that image, through the dry high-plains dirt and grime to reveal the people behind the landscape; the flesh and lives and stories of individuals who endured the cold, the wind, the loneliness. Raban's exquisite descriptions of the Montana terrane of the late 1800s reflect the almost fruitless attempts of immigrants to tame those wilds. Having lived and worked in Montana I found the portrayal of this region disturbing; not because of its inaccuracies (they fit almost exactly with my memories) but with how little the landscape was really changed by those honyockers (homesteaders).

It is evident that the book was not just researched, it has been lived. Raban over many years travelled from his home in Seattle, Washington to those sand washed prairie beaches of central and eastern Montana. One feels his ghost intermingling with the spirits of last century as he slips in and out of roofless, sundried timber cabins set in the tall, mostly snake filled grasses of abandoned ranches. If there is fault in this book, it is that it sometimes slips too far into the minutiae of the lost lives of people, who we somehow feel, we never or could never have known; these are people so unlike most of us - willing to rush headlong into something we can not fathom. We travel with Raban not only eastward from Seattle but backward in time to view the west through such players as Evelyn Cameron and her amateur, but surprisingly surreal, photographs of the infant west. We walk in the shoes of the displaced and lonely; immigrants who were wooed by flashy railroad pamphlets that were spread all over Europe like so many modern day get-rich schemes. Some things, like the landscape, seem never to change.

Ultimately, bad land is a book about people. And the details of their lives are bought to life by Raban. Perhaps it takes a non-American to see a specialness in seemingly dreary, worn and weather-beaten people and land. For those wanting to know what the American West was and is now like, this book will be more than just a pleasurable read, it will beckon you to travel there and seek yourself.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent blend of psychology, history and geography, June 12, 2000

By 

Buckeye (Harvard, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Bad Land: An American Romance (Paperback)

This very well written book is an excellent expression of how geography, history, and psychology (at an individual and group level) are completely intertwined with each other. The author does a wonderful job of telling the bleak and often heartbreaking stories of the early homesteaders of the Montana badlands. He traces the history of some of these families to the present day and even "follows" some of those who pulled up stakes and moved further west. Throughout the book one continuously senses the overwhelming influence of the vast "great American desert" and how it shaped the lives of the people who tried to make a living farming it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

My only complaint is that a particular 20-30 page section of the book makes extensive reference to photographs which sound as if they would have added a great deal to the reader's experience of the book. Unfortunately, the author is describing HIS experience of looking at the photos - none are included anywhwere in the book - and I found myself wishing I could take a look at them too.

The last rather minor complaint aside, I considered this to be an excellent book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone.