Customer Reviews

Owning It All: Essays

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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.

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!