Hole In The Sky : A Memoir [Hardcover]

William Kittredge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 26, 1992

The descendant of three generations of a frontier family describes his frontier childhood and details the end of that way of life, offering an understanding of the West as it was and as it is now.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author's grandfather, William Kittredge, began in 1911 to amass what he thought would be paradise for himself and for his descendants: a cattle and farming empire of more than 15,000 acres in the Warner Valley of southeastern Oregon. He reshaped the land and his family to fit the dream. But within the span of three generations, this willed Garden of Eden, which once had drawn the powerful and famous, fell into disarray. The author recounts the destruction not only of the land but of his family and, especially, himself--his flights into alcohol and extramarital affairs. Kittredge ( Owning It All ) parlays vivid prose and storytelling talent to produce a powerful indictment of materialism and its capacity to undermine the spirit and dissolve human connections with the universe.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Kittredge's ( Owning It All , LJ 8/87) breathless and elliptical memoir, set largely in the cattle country of southern Oregon, illuminates a unique struggle of the American West between fealty toward land and the need for new adventure. When in the 1960s Kittredge reached age 35, he and his siblings sold the vast ranch that had belonged to the family for 80 years. His marriage ending, his life a cloud of booze, Kittredge found salvation in the written word. A good part of that word is devoted here to respectful remembrances of the cowboys and drunks who populated the ranch and to the ancestors who left their marks on Kittredge. The rest is devoted to the sparsely populated Great Basin itself. The Great Basin is rarely the subject of Western writing which makes Kittredge's book more welcome. Enjoyable reading.
- Tim Zindel, Sacramento
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 238 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; First Edition edition (May 26, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679411666
• ISBN-13: 978-0679411666
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,541,317 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost on the range, June 13, 2003

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (Vintage) (Paperback)

Kittredge's excellent, thoughtful, and well-written book is a memoir of growing up on a ranch in southeastern Oregon. This is arid country where spring runoff from the mountains gathers in lakes and swamps used for millennia as a stopover by migrating waterbirds. Enter the enterprising Kittredge family, and during the 20th century thousands of acres here were transformed into a vast irrigated ranch, its chief output evolving from cattle to grain to hay to feed milling and feedlots. More to the point, they built an agricultural empire and became wealthy.

The author, born into this world in the 1930s, looks back from the vantage point of 1992, long after leaving the ranch behind and settling in Montana. What he sees is the wreckage of three generations blighted by ambition, greed, arrogance, and no small amount of alcohol. Kittredge talks often about how personal stories illuminate and ground people's lives, yet he and so many of the people around him are directionless and unmoored. His book is a story in which words like "reckless," "hapless," and "heedless" are often used to describe actions.

It is a painful book because there is so much heartache in it, so much confusion, shame, isolation, and fear. There are betrayals, infidelities, friendships and marriages ended, deaths from accidents and mishaps. In all of it, from earliest memories to those of a man on the verge of middle-age, the author describes a deep uncertainty about his own worth and his purpose in life. For many years, it seems to be only the grueling hard work of the ranch, which he only half understands, that keeps him distracted from a sense that nothing is real. (Steady consumption of alcohol and extramarital sex also figure into the mix.)

The book is something of a coming-of-age story about a young man whose manhood continually seems to elude him, well into his thirties. He can go through the motions in the hardworking environment of seasoned cowboys and field hands (an episode in which he takes the place of an injured hay stacker is an example), but he remains unsure of himself, wanting the security of the family ranch, while hating himself for not pursuing the writing career he believes is his real vocation. It's a wonderfully (and frustratingly) complex picture of a young man self-destructing. And in his seeming indifference to his own children, you sense a repetition of the same indifferent parenting that has led him into this emotional cul-de-sac. Significantly, he remarks often about the lack of a guiding hand to show him the way to be a man.

As a kind of confessional, it is a compelling book, and the impact of the story is underscored by the vast Western landscape against which it plays out. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the West and ranch life, cowboys, family sagas, and coming-of-age memoirs. As a companion volume, I'd also suggest Judy Blunt's ranch memoir "Breaking Clean" for its similar themes of emotional dislocation.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dispelling the romantic myth of the American West, September 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (Vintage) (Paperback)

I read this book to gain a better understanding of my cowboy neighbors in Eastern Oregon, but I gained so much more. Anyone with a passion for southeastern Oregon will love this book. At times, Kittredge's descriptions of the land are poetic. I found myself driving through Kittredge's Oregon recently, and so much of what he wrote kept leaping to the forefront of my consciousness, stimulating my own fresh perspective of this open country and those who call it home.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tough, sensitive and personal portrait of hopes refound, August 7, 2000

By 

J. Remington "John Remington" (Adams, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (Vintage) (Paperback)

William Kittredge, like Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane and William Stafford, uses the modern fall of the Western Myth as a backdrop for creating the personal memoir. In Hole In The Sky, Kittredge mangages to capture the sad fallacy that underscores western machismo with often heartbreaking results. Kittredge pulls off the near impossible in this modern age of weepy pseudo therepy memoir writing: he reveals inner failings without sounding tiresome, whiny or trivial. He writes in a prose style that is devoid of any pretensious posings or trappings. He also captures a true sense of time and space. As my fellow reviewer has said, this book is a must read for anyone about to venture into Eastern Oregon (where I am from) or the rodeo backwater towns of the west. Well worth a look.