Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief [Hardcover]

William Kittredge (Author)

Book Description

Series: Credo | Publication Date: October 11, 1999

In Taking Care, William Kittredge relates his coming of age on a property his family transformed from a farm dependent on horses to a modern agribusiness. Painfully reflecting on the abandonment of old ways, Kittredge calls for new, radical stories about the West that will foster compassion and caretaking.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

William Kittredge, the distinguished writer of the American West, revisits the ranch life of his youth, set in the remote Warner Valley, "a hidden world" in which "landlocked waters flow from snowy mountains to the west but don't find a way out to the sea." In that rugged landscape, won by violence against both humankind and nature, Kittredge's family constructed myths, stories of how they came to be in that faraway place. Through those stories, he learned that accepted notions of patriotism and loyalty were less important than the values of community and generosity, and that, as Emerson observed, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

Kittredge turns from personal memoir to a consideration of a subject to which he has devoted much time since the 1960s: the reigning myths of the American West, myths of rugged individualism in a land governed by corporations, myths of wide-open spaces in a region ravaged by the economy of extraction. Against those myths he poses the West's realities, and what he finds is not comforting: Kittredge offers an antitextbook history, a narrative in which "endless ruination was visited on the land, indigenous people were left to lives of impossible poverty, and the money and power went off to the East."

Kittredge's essay seamlessly joins environmental polemic, history, literature, and autobiography to offer an ultimately hopeful view of a troubled region in search of itself. Editor Scott Slovic, a scholar of Western American and environmental literature, adds to it a bibliography of Kittredge's published work. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Edited by Scott Slovic (director, Ctr. for Environmental Arts and Humanities, Univ. of Nevada, Reno), the "Credo" series presents a writer's opinions, beliefs, and philosophy of writing and includes a biographical profile and complete bibliography of the author's published works. In this latest entry, Kittredge conveys the importance of both his family and the American West in developing his values and convictions, moving from his early days in a one-room schoolhouse building playtime ditches and levee banks with his cousins to teaching at the University of Montana to lecturing at conferences on Western geography. Throughout, he stresses the need for stories to "encourage us to understand that we are part of everything." Stories direct our actions, he argues, serving as a connector to disparate parts of our lives. They are essential for the survival of our society. The bibliography includes short stories, Western novels, and literary essays. Recommended for public and academic libraries, particularly where Western literature is popular.ACynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 162 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions; 1st edition (October 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571312315
• ISBN-13: 978-1571312310
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,736,809 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More Kitteredge, please, May 16, 2000

By 

william woolum - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief (Credo) (Paperback)

I love Bill Kitteredge as a storyteller, thinker, and even as a prophet. His vision of how story informs ethics is among the most sane approaches I've read, both to the art and role of storytelling and to ethics itself. His applicaton of his ethos to life in the West is sage. I've read Kitteredge's previous books and this book, *Taking Care* is a well-wrought distillation of Kittredge's former books with some fine tuning.

I rate this book as I do because just over half the book is Kittredge's writing. The rest is an essay by Scott Slovic which reviews Kittredge and covers too much of the same ground I just read in Kittredge's own writing, followed by a helpful and comprehensive bibliography. Slovic does good work. But, I wanted more Kittredge.

I have one last complaint: the book is published as a *Credo* book, apparently part of a series. But, I'm not sure. Nowhere does this book say anything about other writers contributing to the series, whether in the past or the future. I would be excited to read other writers' credos, especially if they were writers I was unfamiliar with. But, if I were familiar with the writer and if the Credo book were like this one, a revisit to previously published stories and ideas, then I wouldn't buy it.