Bad Land: An American Romance
by Jonathan Raban
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan RabanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1997-10-07
ISBN: 0679759069
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780679759065
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of Bad Land: An American Romance
Book Review: This is a great book
Summary: 5 Stars
I drove through Montana in June when my friend and I took a cross country trip so my friend could settle in Seattle. The most unusual landscape we came across was the badlands. I really fell in love with Western Montana and intend to visit again, but Eastern Montana was an alien enviornment. I never realized it existed in the United States. When you are out there, you can get only one radio station, and you rarely, if ever, see another vehicle on the road.
I then saw this book in the bookstore, and picked it up, lost it, and purchased it again from here. I found the book well written, and very insightful travel log into a very unique area of the country. This book is about the mostly unsuccessful attempt to settle this portion of America and illustrates what happens when the best of America ambition meets with an alien enviornment that refuses to bend to American farming or productive development methods.
The author, an English man that has relocated to Seattle, has a keen eye and subtle insight into America and the people that settled Montana 100 years ago. I think he describes the landscape accurately and with great artistry, and humanizes, in a powerful way, a people and the place they created with strong succinct prose. I definitely found myself nodding my head about many of his descriptions, and amazed that he did it.
The author describes that the few hardy folks left out there are like sailors on the sea of the prairie. I am in midst of reading the book, but it paints an incredible picture of the failure of mass settlement in this land, and those few hardy souls who are sticking it out to this day. It truly is an American Romance in every sense of the words.
Summary of Bad Land: An American Romance
A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award
"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. "
--Washington Post Book World
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive.
In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West.
"Exceptional. . . . A beautifully told historical meditation. "
--Time
"Championship prose. . . . In fifty years don't be surprised if Bad Land is a landmark."
--Los Angeles Times
Jonathan Raban ambles and picks his way across the Montana prairie, called "The Great American Desert" until Congress offered 320-acre tracts of barren land to immigrants with stardust in their eyes. Raban's prose makes love to the waves of land, red dirt roads, and skeletons of homesteads that couldn't survive the Dirty Thirties. As poignant as any romance novel, there's heartbreak in the failed dreams of the homesteaders, a pang of destiny in the arbitrary way railroad towns were thrown into existence, and inspiration in the heroism of people who've fashioned lives for themselves by cobbling together homes from the ruined houses of those who couldn't make it. Through it all, Raban's voice examines and honors the vast open expanses of land and pays homage to the histories of families who eked out an existence.
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