William Kittredge Books

I received this book yesterday, sat down to leaf through it, and scarcely budged from my chair except for meals until I had read the last word. The text simply grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. Yesterday was a day well invested.

The text is very accessible and yet some paragraphs reach the level of great literature.

This man is a wonderful author and gives an authentic depiction of life as it was in that time era and under those conditions. We were neighbors with the Beers when I was growing up and truly,life was hard but good at the same time. The sense of neighborliness has gone by the way of subdivisions but I believe the author managed to capture the dying spirit of what was good and wholesome about the life that was led from the original homestead on. I would recommend this book to anyone.

I got this book from a friend a while back and just never really picked it up, but boy am I glad I finally did. Ralph Beers' prose is beautiful, and his descriptions of a way of life that's passing away are fit to bring tears to my eyes.

If you have any interest in the West, especially the contemporary Western way of life, I recommend In These Hills very highly.

Ralph Beer is one of my favorite Montana writers. In both fiction and nonfiction, he's hard to beat. This collection of short essays describes his life as a rancher outside Helena, Montana. Many of them are humorous and rich with Western wit; some have a melancholy undertone; all are very finely crafted.

Working a ranch that has been in his family for four generations, Beer slowly comes to terms with the futility of maintaining a lifestyle that can no longer be justified as a way to make a living. As cattle prices fail to meet the rising costs of running a ranch, it is finally only humor, sentiment, self-respect and the well-worn romance of the rural West that keep him going. Beer's wonderful essays chart the gradual decline of ranching, even as he puts in new fences and throws himself into the yearly rounds of upkeep and improvements.

Meanwhile, many of Beer's essays use humor to deromanticize the Western mystique. A trip into town becomes an occasion to reveal himself as a fish out of water. The descriptions of ranch work often reveal him struggling with uncooperative equipment and stock, often in brutal weather. A tongue-in-cheek discourse on pickups explores the special kind of love affair between men and their trucks.

Other essays are rich with boyhood memories of his father and grandfather and the friendships of men who have been long-time neighbors and mentors. Some essays are celebrations of skills and craftsmanship no longer appreciated, the building of a log barn by his great-grandfather, the work of a hayfield irrigator, his own reconstruction of an old snowplow, the way a natural horseman rides a horse. In these, the essays become a balancing between a sense of people and times slipping into the irretrievable past and an embrace of what is still there to be cherished in moments of grace and pride.

Many thanks to the University of Nebraska Press for keeping this wonderful book in print. May it find the many readers it deserves. For a sample of Beer's excellent fiction, get a copy of his novel "The Blind Corral," which tells a story very similar to his own, about a Vietnam veteran inheriting a family ranch.

I am typically not a reader of anthologies. However, I am glad I picked up this one. From the opening section on "Ancient Stories" to the final chapter on "Brilliant Possibilities" I found myself constantly bending back page corners to return to particular passages and authors. In his introduction, William Kittredge wrote, "We name ourselves and our futures through narrative. These stories rest on the West in layers, and reach out and out." Not only do they "rest on the West" but they shake the West alive. Shine lights into dark corners. Through this anthology, the Western stage becomes visable and one can see the true characters milling about. The mythological characters (gun toting individualists/weak women) aren't represented. This anthology clearly forms a basis for putting "Westerns" in the fantasy section and Western Literature next to its Southern conterpart.

Editor William Kittredge has done a remarkable job of bringing together this great collection of Western writers representing a vast swath of American terrain, covering prairie, mountains, desert, and Pacific Rim. At 600 pages, his book is an introduction to over 70 writers from the journals of Lewis and Clark and the collectors of Native American chants and tales to the writers of late 20th century fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Some are well known and easily associated with the West: Wallace Stegner, A. B. Guthrie, Louise Erdrich, John Steinbeck, Edward Abbey, Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey. Many are lesser known and deserving of a wider audience, such as James Galvin, Sherman Alexie, and Linda Hogan. As someone less familiar with the poetry inspired by the region, I appreciated selections from a wide range of poets, including the influential Montana poet Richard Hugo.

Describing the experience of reading this book is like trying to sum up a year traveling in another country. There are several familiar works: Wallace Stegner's great story "Carrion Spring," set on the northern plains during the spring thaw after a horrific winter kill; the opening of Ivan Doig's wonderful Montana memoir "This House of Sky"; Terry Tempest Williams' chilling essay on the rising incidence of breast cancer in her family after above-ground nuclear testing in 1950s Nevada; childhood memories of homesteading in the Nebraska Panhandle, from Mari Sandoz' book about her father, "Old Jules"; a discourse on water from Gretel Ehrlich's essays about ranching in Wyoming, "The Silence of Open Spaces."

There's also Edward Abbey's account of summer work as a park ranger in Utah's Arches National Monument from "Desert Solitaire"; a poignant memory of fishing in Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It"; a brief scene featuring the joyous prankster McMurphy, later immortalized by Jack Nicholson, from Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"; a section about a man who stakes a claim on the Wyoming-Colorado border from James Galvin's brilliantly written memoir-novel, "The Meadow"; the evocation of a ghost town and the Nebraska prairie in the opening pages of Wright Morris' novel "Ceremony in Lone Tree"; and one of the many humorous recollections of frontier cowboy Teddy Blue Abbott, as he remembers his friendship with Calamity Jane.

And there are wonderful discoveries. I liked Rick Marinis' short story "Paraiso: An Elegy" about two couples from El Paso on a car trip; Richard Nelson's account of deer hunting in Alaska from "The Island Within"; Raymond Carver's memories of his alcoholic father in "My Father's Life"; Larry McMurtry's demythologizing memories of his cowboy-rancher uncles in "Take My Saddle From the Wall: A Valediction"; Mary Clearman Blew's harrowing memoir of marriage to a wildcat oilman with a terminal pulmonary illness, from "All But the Waltz"; David Long's story of a ranch family's disintegration, "Lightning"; and John Haines' description of nightfall in a remote Alaska cabin in "The Stars, The Snow, The Fire." Among the poets, I found the Hawaiian/LA voice of Garrett Hongo, the dark vision of Robert Wrigley, and the thoughtful ruminations of Montana poet Greg Pape.

Altogether there are voices of all kinds between the covers of this book. You get a sense of great diversity bound together by a vast landscape. There are a few themes that run through most of these selections, which are also common to literature about the West: freedom, loss, and isolation. The expansiveness of the West has traditionally permitted a kind of liberation from what is restrictive and claustrophobic in the settled East. The flip side of that freedom, of course, is the isolation that comes with living lives beyond the reach of other people. Meanwhile, expansion into the West has meant the loss of what was pristine and unexploited; it's meant the loss of Native American cultures; and as the West evolves, it has meant the loss of the frontier itself. Even as we have discovered the West, it is disappearing.

Kittredge's book has captured all that, as well as one can in 600 pages. I heartily recommend his book to anyone interested in the real West, what it was and what it is. As the editor of this anthology, Kittredge has graciously not included anything from his own pen; so I'll recommend his well-written memoir of growing up on a ranch in Oregon, "Hole in the Sky." Two other collections of Western writing I can recommend are "Northern Lights: A Selection of New Writing from the American West," edited by Deborah Clow (currently out of print) and "The Big Sky Reader," edited by Alan Jones (also currently out of print).

I'm only 66 pages into it, but I love this book. I would never have known some of these writers. My favorites so far are the Navajo night chant "House Made Of The Dawn" and the writings of Linda Hogan, John Graves and Louise Erdrich. Thank you for editing this book. What a pleasure to read such high-quality writing. Such a sense of the American West. Such voices. I like the John Graves story about the old buffalo almost as much as I like the writings of Cormac McCarthy. If anyone ever doubted it, this book shows that there is great literature from the West. I will use this as a guide to further reading. I can't wait to read more.

I highly recommend this book. I don't read anthologies usually, but a class that I am taking this semester, "The Western As America," required it. I sighed and picked it up with reservations. I have been won over by the variety and depth with which this anthology brings together. From a Navajo night chant, journalistic reportage by Stienback, "Legends, Heroes, Myth-Figures and other American Liars" by Thomas McGrath, and Alexie Sherman's "My heros have never been cowboys," (just a small example of the range in this book) the anthology questions our conceptions of literature and the essence of America. I couldn't bear to sell this book to anyone and I hope that you will give it a chance.

This is about the REAL Southwest, neither the Tex-Mexified version east of the Rockies, nor the touristy version of Santa Fe, nor the mythical version of the OK Corral.

Most of this book deals with the largest U.S. desert -- the Great Basin desert. A land of rugged climatic extremes and even more rugged geography, it has largely bent men to its will rather than the other way around.

Beginning with his own childhood reading and first trips to this area, Turner paints a portrait of the Southwest's natural and social history while also describing how he, too, has been shaped by this land.

A wonderful new edition of this lovely book has recently been done by Fulcrum Publishing. The ISBN is 1-55591-486-1. It includes new essays, including one on Gerogia O'Keefe that looks at the west from an artist's perspective that I thought was particularly special.

As of this writing, this well written collection of essays seems to be out of print, and it shouldn't be. Turner has a sharp eye for detail and an ability to craft personal experience and an encyclopedic scale of information into engaging reading on subjects as varied as saguaro cactuses, chili con carne (with a recipe for Basic Texas Red), management of wild horse herds, Billy the Kid, Basque sheepherders in the Great Basin, and a Czech festival each autum in Deming, New Mexico.

Especially interesting for this reader is his essay on the lives of two early 20th-century writers who turned their own frontier experiences into best-sellers that shaped American awareness of the West: James Willard Schultz ("My Life as an Indian," 1907) and Will James ("Lone Cowboy," 1930). Based in Santa Fe, Turner roams over the southern arid states where inhabitants set their clocks to Mountain Time. And his essays are fine examples of travel writing that appreciates both landscape and centuries of human history. This is an excellent addition to any bookshelf of nonfiction Western literature.

This is a fine collection of stories set in the West by a man who grew up on a big family ranch in southern Oregon and eventually settled as a writer in western Montana. Kittredge is a promoter of other Western writers' talent, editing anthologies like "The Portable Western Reader" for Penguin and helping to bring to the screen a film version of Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It." In this collection of short stories, Kittredge reveals his own particular talents as a Western writer, drawing on his knowledge of rural and small town living in the Great Basin and Montana. His characters are genuine and deeply etched by the western code of individualism, self-sufficiency, and personal freedom. They are also haunted by the dark side of that code - isolation, loneliness, and restlessness.

The men in these stories are strong and independent, both physically and emotionally. But they are not infallible. The women in their lives typically reveal to them things about themselves they'd rather not know. A man who hires a crop-duster to spray his land discovers that the pilot's command of an airplane excites wanderlust in the wife he thought he knew. A 34-year-old man, taking a wife and fathering a child, discovers that she was once the lover of his married brother. A man goes in hunt of a grizzly after the killing of a young woman camper, and in a chilling temptation of fate, puts his life in the hands of another woman to whom he has given his high-powered rifle.

In other stories, a boy's idyllic life collapses into grief when his loving father dies while they are hunting geese in a frozen landscape. A combine operator harvests a field of wheat for a rancher and dies, his intestines perforated by a lifetime of hard work and hard knocks. A penniless cowboy works the ranch of a rich woman he has loved since she was a girl, knowing that "There is nothing to own but what you do." An old man's daughter is shot and killed, and the young man who first romanced her pays a call on her mourning father.

The stories often deal with death or are about the defiance of death, and these themes seem to emerge from the landscape itself - remote, sparsely populated, given to extremes of heat and cold. The characters Kittredge creates are sharply drawn, and their speech is colorful and unschooled. Emotion surges beneath taciturn surfaces. There is tension in their unspoken desires, and for that reason the relationships between men and women are rarely untroubled. I highly recommend this collection of stories for readers interested in the West and the psychological impact of wide-open spaces and unsentimental lives. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Ralph Beer's terrific Montana novel, "The Blind Corral."

Kittredge is best known, perhaps, for his essays on the American West, but some of us old timers have been reading (and loving) his short stories for thirty years now. Bill's prose reinforces the rumors that God sat in on his graduate fiction workshops at the University of Montana back in 1978; his characters take your breath away on their varius paths to self-discovery and self-destruction; and, always, there is the cruel force of the West itself, underlying each and every sentence.

In the last years of Hugo's life he taught writting at the University of Montana. His classes were popular, but not crowded. He loved sharing stories with his students, and he listened at least as well as he spoke. Richard's poetry is like this too: sounds come from reading these words of a lifetime, sounds that are passed to you by the gift of a great writer and great listener. These are poems about the fringes of boom-towns, failed mining hopes, loneliness, seattle, Missoula, drinking, lost love, found love, lost friends, found friends, life alone and together, and fishing. Hugo loved to fish for trout. Fish for what is great in this book, you wont be dissapointed.

Richard Hugo is one of the masters of the meter in American poetry, and no work better displays this than his collected poems. It is truly a life's work, as some poems seem also repetitive, but you can tell from the repetition that the source is something very dear to the poet. Perfect nature reading!

I first read this book back in the early 60's when I was stationed in Montana. I found it full of facts that you don't find in history books. The characters are real and believable; makes you wish you had a time machine to go back and witness the action. A must for history buffs.

If you want to know the story of Montana, this is where you start. It's written by the best journalist-writer who ever lived in the state (excluding Bud Guthrie, of course, who chose fiction instead). It must be understood that it is not a "definitive history" as Howard himself stated, but a personal narrative of what matters. In the past two decades, a cottage industry of Howard-bashing has emerged in Montana, by historians eager to establish their own reputations. Yes, some of what Howard wrote was incorrect. Other aspects of his writings now seem outmoded (the colonial economy thing). But to say modern history proves Joe Howard was wrong is like saying Lewis and Clark are disproven by Rand-McNally. Howard was the visionary who showed the way to what Montana should and could be. But 50 years later, this remains the best non-fiction book that will ever be written about Montana.

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!

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.

Of all the Western states, Montana surely has had more than its share of good writers. Here are short stories by 21 of them, each a well crafted and telling glimpse into the lives of modern day people living under that timeless Big Sky. Many of my favorites are here, especially Ralph Beer and Kim Zupan, neither of whom have written and published nearly enough fiction or nonfiction for my money. And there are many more: Jon Billman, Richard Ford, David Long, and the wonderful Maile Meloy whose poignantly conceived characters can break your heart. Tom McGuane is also here, with his bushwhacked perspective on just about everything.

Editors Kittredge and Jones happily include stories of their own. In both, as in several others, the melancholy shadow of Raymond Carver lurks in portrayals of lives lived on the ragged edge of lost hopes. But balanced against this is a redeeming (if sometimes misdirected) toughness that preserves a kind of integrity in the face of adversity. A gentle older man with a leg brace picks up a woman at a topless bar when his alcoholic girlfriend leaves him for a man from her past in Beer's "Big Spenders." An obsessive trout fisherman and aspiring participant in Little Bighorn reenactments takes a school teacher friend on a hilarious trip to Deadwood, South Dakota in Billman's "Custer on Mondays." The hapless narrator of John Canty's "Junk" gets a visit from his hard-as-nails ex-wife, and as an old Thunderbird figures into the story, the rest is literally a matter of waiting for an accident to happen.

A young rancher, living alone, becomes obsessed with a Hutterite girl he's never spoken to in Pete Fromm's "Hoot." In Jones' darkly angry "Jacob Dies," a down-on-his-luck cowboy goes on a desperate search for a runaway wife and buys a ranch of another kind. Relationships in most of the stories are tenuous and failing, though in Kittredge's "Do You Hear Your Mother Talking?" something hopeful materializes as a troubled man and a woman confront his failed nerve over a suitcase he is packing. Something similar happens for a middle-aged widow in Annick Smith's lovely autobiographical "It's Come to This."

There are two boxing stories, Neil McMahon's tender "Heart," about a boxer in bouts with two prison inmates, and Chris Offut's "Tough People," in which a gambler with designs on a young woman coaches her in a match with a much tougher woman. In Malanie Rae Thon's sorrowful "Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer," a father and wayward daughter live a lifetime of grief after a hit-and-run accident. Finally, there are "brokeback" undercurrents in Kim Zupan's "The Mourning of Ignacio Rosa," as a sheriff investigates the death of a gay ranch hand.

Not *all* of Montana's best by far, but a terrific sampling. For an introduction to many more writers from the American West, see Kittredge's anthology, "The Portable Western Reader."

I liked this book because it shows Doug worring about the world coming to an end by an astroid.. He tries to forget about it by hanging out with his friends, but they are all talking about it.. Doug imagins himself as Quailman tring to save the world from the astroid...

I thought that it was nice to see this book come out.. I have always liked the Quailman Character because it helps Doug resolve his problems withoutfighting or to calm his fears about things.. I am about 31 years old and I love this book...

Captain George Kittredge's book is named for only a small part of his incredibly exciting life in the world of submarines. He served in WWII in both surface combat, then the submarine force. His time spent with the diplomatic corps is exciting and very humorous at times. The later years he spent designing and building midget submarines bring to light a whole different aspect of his underwater adventures and round out his underwater career.