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Little Things in a Big Country: An Artist and Her Dog on the Rocky Mountain Front
 
 
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Little Things in a Big Country: An Artist and Her Dog on the Rocky Mountain Front [Paperback]

Hannah Hinchman (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

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Book Description

July 17, 2006

Winner of the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award: A unique alchemy of art and natural history—a four-color hand-lettered and illustrated tale of a year's rambles in the northern Rockies.

Whether chasing gophers (Sisu) or flirting with cowboys at the Buckhorn Bar (Hannah), artist Hannah Hinchman and her dog Sisu are excellent guides to some of the wildest country left in America.

Treading carefully near a sandhill crane's nest, testing the ice on the river, and marveling at the seasonal influx of ducks, this pair of curious naturalists takes us into the intimate corners of western Montana, inquiring into all natural phenomena—which Hannah then captures on the page in detailed sketches, notes, and watercolors.

If Annie Dillard were an artist, she might have composed a book like this. But few writers, or artists, can bring words and images together like Hannah Hinchman. Insightful, funny, and personal, she not only enables us to enter her own particular patch of the natural world, she also teaches us to see our own, bringing to her work an exceptional unity of hand, eye, and heart.

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Little Things in a Big Country: An Artist and Her Dog on the Rocky Mountain Front + A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Visual artist and "aging, single, unrepentant hippie-environmentalist" Hinchman (A Trail Through Leaves) sets out with her loyal dog, Sisu, to explore, observe and record western Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. While hiking the fields, swamps, rivers, prairies, forests, creeks and game reserves, Hinchman's exacting eye for flora and fauna is always at work chronicling, often in minute detail, all aspects of what surrounds and fascinates her. The result is a love letter to nature: a travel journal/naturalist's notebook replete with hand-written notes; illustrations and diagrams of flowers, birds, deer, animal tracks, "soul-slaying" vistas, cowboys and area maps; and many charming portraits of Sisu. Hinchman paints stones, ice formations, grasses and leaves, tree bark, and animals in motion with a fluent, sensitive hand. Her relationship with other humans on the Front, however, is not as reverent: "I value the Front for its ecological integrity; they value it as a source of livelihood... to them, my values are perverse, elitist, heretical." She exhibits further disdain for hunters: "More often, the morning stillness is violated by volleys of gunshots, as though a gang of idiots were shooting randomly at a running herd... if these aren't the sounds of brutal ineptitude, someone please enlighten me." Although her voice is strong with witty, barbed opinions, Hinchman does show an undercurrent of loneliness and melancholy, which adds deeper complexity to her forays: "Workaday sadness is diluted and absorbed outdoors in the 'more than human world'... I find it soothing to be rendered insignificant."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

An exhilarating spy hole into the wilderness by an alchemical artist-writer. (Susan Dworski - Los Angeles Times )

Product Details

  • Paperback: 176 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (July 17, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 039332866X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393328660
  • Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #398,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

11 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.6 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible, as always, August 21, 2004
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As always, I am amazed and stunned at the work produced by this marvelous, funny, talented, brilliant and quirky woman. Her powers of observation and expression are unsurpassed--and infinitely inviting. Her art is rich, detailed, and filled at once with both scientific detail and emotion to which we cannot help but respond. Though my own home area is very far from Hannah's Wyoming Front, I KNOW what it is like to walk there, I KNOW what she means when she writes that she prefers the company of her dog, Sisu, to distracting conversation. I am there, silent, listening, watching, and sketching...thank you, Hannah.

--Cathy Johnson, author of The Sierra Club Guide to Sketching in Nature and The Sierra Club Guide to Painting in Nature
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A visual and spiritual feast, August 19, 2004


Hinchman's illuminated journal welcomes the reader with nature's vast palette in the Front region of Montana. An artist/writer at home in the natural environment where she lives, Hinchman has created a series of stunningly colorful and detailed illustrations, accentuated by hand-lettering throughout.

With her Finnish Spitz, Sisu, at her side, Hannah roams the diverse flora and fauna of the Front, from the fields around her home to Tank Prairie, Redwing Slough, the Game Range and Double Creek. She stops in each place to draw and paint and annotate, her remarkable artwork is a delight, with its attention to minutiae, such as the difference between old snow and new snow, the leaf colorations that define their age, the hunting wasps and caterpillars, blooming wildflowers and artifacts found in the local meadow.

Everything Hannah views with her artist's eye is rendered more accessible and alive. Her simple observations have a spiritual quality, touching on a grandeur that stuns the imagination. With Hannah, we observe the smallest of details, the changes in cottonwood bark, the flowers, spiders and insects of the grassland and even Augusta, Montana's infamous one-day rodeo, where everyone comes out to party.

That Hannah Hinchman is an environmentalist and nature lover is clear in her exquisite artwork. In a town of locals who believe land was created solely for man's use, Hinchman is bound to have other ideas. But she has learned to coexist and make friends, the eccentric artist who minds her own business. She has obvious affection for the town folk and the friends she has made since moving to Augusta.

The author's contribution to the genre of the illuminated journal is a small gem, a book to treasure and peruse, remembering the wonderful bounty of the wilderness. Little Things in a Big Country is reader-friendly, beautifully illustrated and stunningly visual. It serves as an excellent reminder to cherish those areas of the country that still retain their pristine beauty, before the onslaught of big-money backed resource development. In any case, this is the perfect gift, but make sure to save a copy for yourself. Luan Gaines/2004.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Work, May 23, 2005
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"Little Things in a Big Country" is an artistic journal chronicling one year in the artist's life in the eastern part of Montana, known as the Front. The words and watercolors in this book work together beautifully to convey Ms. Hinchman's careful observations of the world of The Front. Her sketches include things as common as seed pods, animal tracks, and ice formations. What a treasure this book is! Reading it gave me a new appreciation for the power of keen observation of the world around me.

This was the first artistic journal I've come across, and as a new (to me, at least) genre of book, the form impressed me.

This is such a calming and inspiring book, one that I will enjoy reading again and again.
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I moved to the Front for the country: a grand swath of prairie grassland that flows down from Canada, bounded on the west by a wall of mountains. Read the first page
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