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
Book Reviews of Bad Land: An American Romance
Book Review: A Local Habitation And A Name
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a great admirer of Jonathan Raban, so don't expect a disinterested review here! But let me have a shot at reflecting on what many other reviewers, of all stripes, find lacking here. Raban is a very idiosyncratic writer, and Bad Land, like his other works, is a splendid literary hippogriff. Nobody is going to find exactly what he or she expected when they picked the book up. They will certainly find accounts of the homesteading movement and of the hopes and tragedies of the families who moved to eastern Montana in the early Twentieth Century. But they will come across many different things as they move from chapter to chapter: history, landscape, weather. But they will only find one thing here with continuity, Jonathan Raban: Raban digging into the history of the soil and the implements used to plough it, Raban bewildered by the landscape as if he is standing in a Dali painting, Raban nearly incapacitated as he tries to ambulate over a few city blocks in the sub-zero weather in imitation of those early homesteaders. And, as always, Raban, the quintessential outsider amidst outsiders, garnering not a few odd looks as he button-holds Montanans in pursuit of his quest.
But, really, it's not Jonathan Raban, per se, that holds this book together and makes it an amazing read. Rather, it's his always literate and splendid writing. Readers familiar with Shakespeare will notice how many times, consciously or subconsciously, Raban interjects parts of the lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream about the poet's "giving to airy nothings a local habitation and a name" and employs them to describe the homesteaders. I almost missed "earth standing hard as iron, water like a stone" as being from Christina Rossetti's poem (posthumously turned into an English hymn) "In The Bleak Mid-Winter." I'm sure I did miss many other subtleties in the reading of the work. But the point here is that you are reading just as much about the plucky -at times, eccentric- quest of a man who views the world through the eyes of great literature as you are about the plight of the homesteaders and their eastern Montana descendents.
If this mix appeals to you, you will love this book. If not, rest assured. You will find many textbook and academic histories on the subject in your local library.
Summary of Bad Land: An American Romance
A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the YearWinner 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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