Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg
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Book Reviews of Where Rivers Change Direction
Book Review: Good writing but I don't "get" where the author's coming from
Summary: 4 Stars
The author writes excellent prose with innumerable well turned phrases and descriptions. The subject matter is primarily his adolescence on a Wyoming dude ranch and hunting guide service that his family, Pennsylvania expatriates, operated in the 1960s, some vignettes from his adult life and descriptions of friends and conditions in windswept Wyoming. The chapters are actually a series of essays rather than a progressive narrative with the ones about life and work on and around his father's ranch, where he essentially lived as a hired hand in the bunkhouse with hardened wranglers from about the age of fourteen, being the most interesting.
I enjoyed the book principally due to the excellent writing and colorful recounting of the author's experiences as a real "cowboy" in an era when most of us male baby boomers only experienced the same thing through ubiquitous western TV shows and movies of the 50s and 60s. It was a life in another era when so many of us grew up in boring suburbia. I recommend it for these reasons.
But maybe I missed something because I never came across any explanation for the author's seeming sense of hurt, isolation, melancholy and general unhappiness that begins, for unstated reasons, during his college years.
Book Review: The first eleven chapters were superb.......
Summary: 4 Stars
One of the most interesting and captivating non-fiction books I've ever read. Being an Easterner this book made me just fall in love with the mountains of Wyoming and feel as though I've actually been there. In fact felt as though I had actually walked amongst the people who live there. So for the most part loved the book.
Where I feel it fell down was in the last three chapters. Spragg has a unique gift for balancing harsh reality and sensitivity to beauty at the same time. I think he went a bit over the sensitivity line and into the boringly ephemeral in the third from last chapter "Wind".
His last two chapters, where he intermingles his mother's cigarette smoking induced death by lung cancer with that of innocent creatures, whose plight was far from being self-induced, near death experiences made a reader like me end the book with a feeling of annoyance.
Book Review: where rivers change direction
Summary: 4 Stars
great book, as a mother, it gave me another view of boyhood to manhood. Written very well