This is a deeply felt and highly informed essay collection about life in the American west by one of the finest writers ever to emerge from that region. As the Seattle Times has said of Owning It All: "You may never again see the American west in quite the same way if you take the time to view it through the eyes of William Kittredge. [This is a] stunning book." Having grown up on his family's cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, Kittredge directly confronts the contradictions and myths that lie at the heart of the Western experience: male freedom and female domesticity, the wild and the tame, self-interest and love of the land.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This is an illustrative and insightful collection of essays on the American West (originally appearing in various magazines) by a man who grew up on a ranch in Oregon and at the age of 33, disillusioned and dissatisfied, left agriculture and turned to writing. Autobiographical sketches describe his early years in the isolated community and are full of rodeo memories and ruminations on his buckaroo days. Other essays consider the boom-town phenomenon, the "redneck," the grizzly bear, the renaissance in native American art. Most notably, the author offers a critique of the popular view of the Westwhich is, according to Kittredge, a disguised mythology of conquest and possession that historically has served as a rationale for violence but which seems to be losing its power. He also notes the deleterious affect of this mythology on agriculture, where the concept of conquest has resulted in a "dream gone wrong" and the destruction of the landscape in favor of the "factory-land." Kittredge stands valiantly at the center of a fledgling regional literature emerging from shattered myths and discarded ideals.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Kittredge is a Westerner, born and raised in southeastern Oregon; he now teaches at the University of Montana. In this collection of 14 essays, all previously published in various magazines, he explores the meaning of the Western myth and its effects on the land, people, and wildlife of America. In some of the most perceptive writing, Kittredge critiques the movie Western and shows how recent pictures have drawn on that genre for their plots. In another essay, he mourns the virtual destruction of the grizzly bear south of the Canadian border. Taken together, these pieces present a land slowly dying from the effects of plow and oil field. A dark vision to be sure, but one to be pondered. Randy Dykhuis, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, Mich.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Book Ever Written About the Warner Valley!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Owning It All (Paperback)
The title says it all! If you've ever slept in the high country of Southeastern Oregon and been awakened by the brilliance of the moon, the mournful hooting of an owl or a coyote's howl at a time too late to remember but too early to get up, and while trying to get back to sleep on ground too hard and cold realized that we can never OWN the land, we only exist as part of it, you will appreciate Kittredge's eloquence in describing his own family's ultimately self-defeating attempts to do just that. This is Lake County as it was and is...a world apart from the Cool Green Vacationland of Western Oregon...where everything is connected to everything else, and Owning It All may be the only way to wrest a living from the land, but becomes an ephermeral concept that comes to no good end. History, geography, personal biography...an underappreciated book by a master whose prose is as tight as your puckered lips when it's 14 with a 45 mile an hour north wind on a late October morning in the Catlow Valley.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Probably one of the best books I've read...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Owning It All (Paperback)
A collection of essays that have appeared in various magazines & journals, Kittredge does a wonderful job painting a picture of Warner Valley and the American West. He makes it easy to understand how anyone could dream of traveling West in the hope of finding a new way of life. Easy to pick up but impossibe to put down!
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