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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,
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.,
By Tim A. Moore (T.Moore@crl.co.nz) (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,
By
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.
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