The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays [Paperback]

William Kittredge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2007

William Kittredge's relationship to the spare, often unforgiving Western landscape is fraught with contradictions. Having grown up on a cattle ranch in Oregon, he has an intimate connection to the vast landscape that was once vital to his family's trade. He has also witnessed, over many decades, the depletion of the West's natural resources due to overuse. These luminous essays move effortlessly from the personal to the political. With grace and integrity, Kittredge directly confronts the myths that lie at the heart of the Western experience: male freedom and female domesticity, the wild and the tame, self-interest and the love of the land.

On the heels of Kittredge's first novel, The Willow Field, published to wide critical acclaim in 2006, we are pleased to offer the best of his nonfiction writings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The American West writing of author Kittredge (The Willow Field), who grew up on a cattle ranch in Oregon and has lived and worked for three decades in Montana, is known for its honesty and reverence. In this collection of essays, many of which appeared in 2002's Owning It All, Kittredge examines the region's character and contradictions. Describing his personal history with the land, Kittredge considers the area's draw for himself and those who arrived before him, 19th century travelers lured by promises of "free land, crystalline water, great herds of game... and gold, all in unfettered abundance." A former creative writing professor, Kittredge has a knack for the poetic, and isn't above putting a mythical sheen on an otherwise skillful and sincere assessment of the alternately challenging and comforting place he calls home. In pieces such as "How to Love This World," "Lost Cowboys" and "The Next Rodeo," for example, he speaks of the joys of wandering slow and easy; elsewhere, he worries over a present in which the "devastation of the interwoven system of life" is already under way. The reclamation of hope, responsibility and wisdom-the ongoing process of "redefining what we take to be sacred"-is the driving force behind these effective, at times profound reflections.
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From Booklist

All but the title piece in this collection of Kittredge’s essays have appeared previously, several of them in his earlier nonfiction books, including A Hole in the Sky (1994) and Who Owns the West? (1996); but the volume should still be an automatic purchase for all public libraries. Kittredge’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, is so vital to our understanding of the American West that every scrap of it needs to be collected. Throughout his oeuvre, personal and political concerns vie for center stage, though the selections here lean a bit toward the political. In the title essay, though, personal and political come together, as Kittredge offers a restatement of one of his recurring themes—the need to reimagine a future in which the West’s central conflict, conquering the landscape versus preserving it, is resolved. But here he goes further, finding a tangible symbol of that reimagining in a wedding he attends in Montana, a “new rodeo” in which the celebrants share a sense of generosity absent in Kittredge’s land-baron ancestors. Meditative, eloquent prose from a modern master. --Bill Ott

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (November 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974791
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974794
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,398,789 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Living in the Past and Embracing the Future, December 23, 2007

By 

Harold Shepherd - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays (Paperback)

Who better to describe the Westerner condition than William Kittredge. Not only is he one of the West's most celebrated writers but is the son of a rancher from southeastern Oregon. Kittredge inherited his father's ranch and stuck it out until he hit 33 when headed off to study and teach creative writing first in Iowa and then Montana.

Kittredge's homeland is not the kind of place where most family car loads whizzing through the vast expanses stop to take in the scenery. Such perspectives make it difficult to garner public sentiment in favor of, not only protecting desert ecosystems, but also convincing the public that such places are an important part of our western tradition.

A good writer, however, has the ability to consistently re-evaluate his circumstances. Kittredge makes no bones about what's been lost, in part, due to his own father who "got his hands on a paradise of waterbirds and fertility, and ... remade it into what he understood as useful, a sprawling system of irrigation and drainage canals and agribusiness fields." While he is driving along the Salmon River on a cold solitary night thinking about the paradigm between the loss of salmon and grizzly bears and our inertia to do anything about it he says: "[i]n wintertime moonlight, the icy Sawtooth Range was aglow under a swirling sky. I contemplated the serious, classical, fool-making mysteries. How to proceed? Can it be true we suffer from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy on earth?"

Kittredge's genius lies in his ability, in a few short sentences, to, not only put you right inside of the writer's mind when they reflect on their experience, but allow you to visualize just what he is seeing, almost as if you where there. Most of all, he brings home the inherent conflict experienced by all of us who are deciding whether to hang on to the past or to embrace the new west.

Harold Shepherd is the Author of Compromising Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Second Conquest of Western Rangelands