William Kittredge Books

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.

In the upper Rockies movement south is pervasive. There is a yearning for nomadism. In the Southwest landforms are impossible to ignore. Human settlement runs up against aridity in the Southwest. The author first visited the Southwest in 1968 after attending writers' school at the University of Iowa. By 1976 Kittredge was saying that the American West was a manufactured story and it was in need of retelling. Kittredge writes that Edward Abbey wrote that the desert says nothing. Doug Peacock showed him that the Sonoran Desert ecology was as complex as that of a rain forest. It is an Arizona custom to seek wild flowers in the spring.

The most secure homeland is the coherent self. Homelands are emotional homes. Homelands may be vast or small, overlapping, defined in many ways. Native cultures are stoic, mystical, ironic, and practical. High cultures in the Southwest were on the frontier. The pueblos were built to support a ceremonial system. The growth of native cultures in the Southwest was interrupted by Spanish warriors and Catholic priests. The Spanish never converted the Navajo to Catholicism or exerted much political control.

Richard Wetherill and his brothers found the concentration of cliff dwellings in 1888, now the center piece of Mesa Verde National Park. Eventually they found 182 sites on Mesa Verde. They were the first to discover evidence of the Basketmakers who lived in the Southwest two thousand years before the Anasazi. Elaborate communal rituals sanctify vital relationships between communities and the natural world. The author was told by Gloria Emerson, a Navajo, to think of the mountains as books, instructing people. The Hopi believe in repetition and order, (not in contemporary man's belief in the need to reinvent one's self). The Hopi live in a one-to-one trade-off relationship with sacredness. The Hopi encourage rain to fall for the corn. Without rain, there is no corn. When the Hopi die they become benevolent beings known as Kachinas, becoming Cloud People. The Hopis are one of the few precontact cultures surviving in the United States. Everything in Hopi belief is dependent on rainfall. Hopi pueblos and Zuni pueblos are notable for their isolation. Ruth Benedict viewed Zuni culture as Apollonian.

A couple of hundred years ago the culture of Spanish New Mexico solidified into a caste system. Intellectuals and artists tried to carve out utopian communities at Carmel, Provincetown, Woodstock. Homelands are cemented by networks of story. The colony of the 1920's in Taos/Santa Fe was inspired and orchestrated by Mabel Dodge Luhan. In 1918 she built an adobe mansion near Taos Pueblo. She put up famous people including Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Aldous Huxley, Georgia O'Keefe, and D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, who was initially entranced, moved on, but his widow, Frieda, lived out her life in New Mexico. Georgia O'Keefe came to New Miexico in 1929. In 1940 she bought an adobe house at Ghost Ranch. After 1946 she moved to New Mexico to stay where she died in 1986 at age 98. Mabel Dodge Luhan visualized an oasis culture.

Robert Oppenheimer took a pack trip in the area in 1937. He proposed the site for a weapons laboratory in 1942. The New Mexico corridor now has the highest percentage of Ph.D.'s. Santa Fe style is a look. Obsessional people gravitate to deserts. The author has encountered enclaves based on class-distinction. Going to resorts is like going to another country. Kittredge believes a deeply anti-democratic culture is forming in the Southwest. Emotionally gridlocked communities are everywhere in the Southwest.

The real issue in negotiating with rural enclaves is respect. If killing off species to extinction is insanity, shouldn't killing rural communities be considered insanity? Maintaining responsible educated social coherency in rural America is needed. Unfortunately for ranchers, the range livestock industry is not understood as necessary. NAFTA has spawned maquiladoras at the Mexican border closing plants in the US and Canada. Kittredge maintains that drugs are a huge shadow economy in Mexico and that if the war on drugs succeeded, Mexico's economy would be shattered. Economic stimulus and social aid should be aimed at the disenfranchised in urban ghettos and backland villages. Charles Borden in JUAREZ has collected pictures by street phtotographers of horrific conditions.

Tucson began as a desert trading center. It is asserted that there has been almost no urban planning in Tucson. Tucson is a city in transit. More than 90% of the future world population will be located in metroplexes. An unintended consequence of the Interstate Highway Act is the explosion of expressway systems in cities. Integrated neighborhoods have withered.
There are three city planning models based on Paris, (classic), New York, (skyscraper), and Las Vegas with malls and strip development. Cities organized on a strip-mall model tend to lack stories.

This unblessèd plot, this unearthly realm, this English king, this twisted man, this teeming den of royal murders, this land of ancient villainy, this land of contradictions, this dear land of the Bard, this dear, dear land of incomparable writing. Who can explain it? Try, not. You need only to harp on this one string: No work of literature even comes close. Richard III is in a class to itself.
No villain was ever more despicable. Cheat. Lie. Murder. Murder, you say! Why, before breakfast, Richard manages to kill two babies and his own new wife, Anne, whom, incidentally he took only yesterday immediately after killing her father and first husband with his own hand. Now that is Baaad with a capital B! No wonder his own mother would declare him Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end. Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend.
No villain is more human. Like Shylock, If you prick him, does he not bleed? If you tickle him does he not laugh? If you poison him does he not die? And if you wrong him shall he not revenge? But unlike the wretched merchant, our man Rick has a bloody conscience. O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
No villain is more eloquent. This is our boy wooing Anne: Look how my ring encompassth thy finger; even so thy [...] encloseth my heart. Wear both of them, for both are thine. And if thy poor devoted servant may beg one favor at thy gracious hand, thou dost confirm his happiness forever. Now, how are you going to hate a guy who can turn a phrase like that?
Long live the King.

I'm from England and I'm studying this play for A level (as a mature student - normally taken when aged 17) but although the UK is the home of 'The Bard' this item is not available in the UK! I'm very impressed with Amazon.com who delivered it quickly and cheaply!

The CD itself is great. It really helps to hear the play, as the intonation is correct, which is sometimes difficult to do when reading it yourself.

The actors' voices are clear and suit their parts perfectly. I'd definitely recommend it - and I will look out for more titles in this series when I've finished studying this one!

Although this play is not one of Shakespeare's better known plays, it is one of his very best. It is a tragicomedy suffused by gentle melancholy. Unreasonable and cruel jealousy are also portrayed. We also have two endearing young lovers to liven up the story. These characters are very well-drawn, and the story is quite beautiful.

I have always favoured the Oxford Shakespeare series over others (Folger, etc), and the Winter's Tale is no exception. It's translation notes and lexigraphical assistance makes reading a joy and brings out the true heart and soul of one of Shakespeare's commonly overlooked tragi-comedies.

As usual in Shakespearean plays, the language here is very prettily written. As usual in Shakespearean comedies, there are plot holes that one could easily drive a tank squadron through. But since this is not just a comedy, but a tragicomedy, in which the first part is a tragedy and the second a comedy, not everything comes out well in the end: some worthy characters die. Also, as is usual for Shakespeare, we have a morality play on the evils of jealousy and closed-mindedness. Really, though, other than the pretty Shakespearean turns of phrase, there isn't much to recommend this book.

Early compilers of Shakespeare's plays classified this a comedy, but there is much tragedy in it. Later it was called a romance. Through irrational jealousy a king is apparently responsible for the deaths of his entire family -- wife, son and daughter -- by mid-play. Time is a character in the play and at his one appearance summarizes the passage of sixteen years. If you have an overy high regard for realism, you may not much enjoy this play, but that will be true of more of Shakespeare than just this one tale. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I look forward to seeing it. I've ordered the BBC DVD and it's being performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2006. These Cambridge School editions have the play's text on right-hand pages; they have summary, commentary and exercises, and vocabulary on the facing left-hand pages. As I read through the play, I'd read the summary, read the play text paying attention to vocabulary, and then read the commentary and exercises. Some additional, unusual vocabulary was only explained in the commentary. I felt I got a deeper understanding of the play than if I had just read the play proper.mmary, commentary and exercises, and vocabulary on the facing left-hand pages. As I read through the play, I'd read the summary, read the play text paying attention to vocabulary, and then read the commentary and exercises. Some additional, unusual vocabulary was only explained in the commentary. I felt I got a deeper understanding of the play than if I had just read the play proper.

I bought this book because I live in Eastern Oregon and was eager to read a memoir of someone with literary skills and a regional ranching background. What I got was very satisfying writing, and an insight into agri-business. What I didn't like was the anxiety ridden, self-deprecating, mostly negative tone and typical alcoholic blaming of everyone else for one's shortcomings. In his defense, he was born into an era when male writers were influenced by others who were romanticized as self-obsessed and notorious drunks. Their literary license was seen as more important than the welfare of their loved ones. I kept waiting for him to "get it." He never did.

William Kittredge is a worthy successor to Thomas Hardy and Aldo Leopold. "Hole in the Sky" is both a personal memoir and a portrait of a vanished way of life in the remote Warner Valley in eastern Oregon. The author witnessed the end of farming with horse teams when diesel tractors came to the valley after WW II and changed the rural economy forever. Thomas Hardy's novels ("Far from the Madding Crowd" and others) tell a comparable story of the English countryside in the 19th Century, when the agrarian society that had existed for 400 years was disappearing. Mr. Kittredge also tells how the tractors meant the end of wild birds and mammals that had been part of his life in Warner Valley. He writes with an ecologist's eye for the land, reminiscent of Aldo Leopold in his "Sand County Almanac," a book that introduced so many of us to ecology and the concept of saving wild places.

Readers may be inspired to visit Warner Valley for themselves, and it is a worthwhile trip for lovers of the wild. I first went there 50 years ago, when it was still 36 miles from the nearest paved road. Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge protects the high fault-block mountain looming above Mr. Kittredge's valley. Its marshy lakes harbor many species of ducks and waterbirds. My brother-in-law just returned from a visit in September 2005, and he reports: "pronghorn antelope on the hillsides all 'round, glorious views in all directions, grand sweeping vistas." That's where William Kittredge comes from.

William Kittridge's autobiography, A HOLE IN THE SKY begins in the wilderness around the foothills of southeastern Oregon and retells, in lucid detail, the events of his childhood leading up to his time in the Air Force, to his many marriages, to his emergence as a writer who writes in a prophetic voice with a great sense of prose.
Looking back to his childhood years, Kittridge aims to return to that innocent age and allow the reader to engage in his coming of age...to the point where your feet are engulfed in the wet grass of early morning dew, and you imagine the grandeur of taking care of 8,000 acres of open territory.

In the end, he claims that: "We are a part of what is sacred. That is our main defense against craziness, our solace, the source of our best policies, and our only chance at paradise." Thus, we are open to the realities that life, growing up on the western plains, was not an American historical fairy tale, but rather a true test of ones self-worth and distinction.
A wonderful read...I highly recommend!

Kittredge's excellent, thoughtful, and well-written book is a memoir of growing up on a ranch in southeastern Oregon. This is arid country where spring runoff from the mountains gathers in lakes and swamps used for millennia as a stopover by migrating waterbirds. Enter the enterprising Kittredge family, and during the 20th century thousands of acres here were transformed into a vast irrigated ranch, its chief output evolving from cattle to grain to hay to feed milling and feedlots. More to the point, they built an agricultural empire and became wealthy.

The author, born into this world in the 1930s, looks back from the vantage point of 1992, long after leaving the ranch behind and settling in Montana. What he sees is the wreckage of three generations blighted by ambition, greed, arrogance, and no small amount of alcohol. Kittredge talks often about how personal stories illuminate and ground people's lives, yet he and so many of the people around him are directionless and unmoored. His book is a story in which words like "reckless," "hapless," and "heedless" are often used to describe actions.

It is a painful book because there is so much heartache in it, so much confusion, shame, isolation, and fear. There are betrayals, infidelities, friendships and marriages ended, deaths from accidents and mishaps. In all of it, from earliest memories to those of a man on the verge of middle-age, the author describes a deep uncertainty about his own worth and his purpose in life. For many years, it seems to be only the grueling hard work of the ranch, which he only half understands, that keeps him distracted from a sense that nothing is real. (Steady consumption of alcohol and extramarital sex also figure into the mix.)

The book is something of a coming-of-age story about a young man whose manhood continually seems to elude him, well into his thirties. He can go through the motions in the hardworking environment of seasoned cowboys and field hands (an episode in which he takes the place of an injured hay stacker is an example), but he remains unsure of himself, wanting the security of the family ranch, while hating himself for not pursuing the writing career he believes is his real vocation. It's a wonderfully (and frustratingly) complex picture of a young man self-destructing. And in his seeming indifference to his own children, you sense a repetition of the same indifferent parenting that has led him into this emotional cul-de-sac. Significantly, he remarks often about the lack of a guiding hand to show him the way to be a man.

As a kind of confessional, it is a compelling book, and the impact of the story is underscored by the vast Western landscape against which it plays out. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the West and ranch life, cowboys, family sagas, and coming-of-age memoirs. As a companion volume, I'd also suggest Judy Blunt's ranch memoir "Breaking Clean" for its similar themes of emotional dislocation.

I read this book to gain a better understanding of my cowboy neighbors in Eastern Oregon, but I gained so much more. Anyone with a passion for southeastern Oregon will love this book. At times, Kittredge's descriptions of the land are poetic. I found myself driving through Kittredge's Oregon recently, and so much of what he wrote kept leaping to the forefront of my consciousness, stimulating my own fresh perspective of this open country and those who call it home.

"The Nature of Generosity" continues the personal story William Kittredge began in "Hole in the Sky" (1993), a sobering but eloquent anti-myth about growing up and growing away from his family roots.

Like Ivan Doig's magnum opus, "This House of Sky," this resumed memoir explores Kittredge's youth in the West and the influences of family, landscape, and a dismayingly complex "outside" world on personal values. In the end, he seeks a world that is less dismaying and less complex, one where the "endless project" of generosity breeds peace and plenty. Man's primitively selfish and combative behavior, he says, is not only bad for the human race, it will ultimately destroy the Earth if unchecked. Kittredge's premise: Man has a moral and spiritual obligation to his planet and his memories to be kinder and gentler.

His poetic petition is both personal and panoramic. Its genesis is a 60-something writer's memory of childhood, of travels in diverse landscapes (and mindscapes) such as Montana, Venice, New York City, the heartbroken Andalusian hills of Federico Garcia Lorca , and the French village of Les Crottes, where Nazis executed the entire population -- 17 souls -- in the desperate fury of defeat near the end of World War II. In the end, "The Nature of Generosity" is an eloquent philosophical treatise, a sublime travelogue and a visceral memoir of an Oregon boyhood that straddled the Depression and World War II, and it all grows from the taproot of sensual, but fleeting, images long lost.

On this journey through time and space, the reader is accompanied by eclectic companions: Pablo Neruda, Piet Mondrian, Joseph Brodsky, Niccolo Machiavelli, Walt Whitman, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Aristotle and Annie Dillard, among others. Others flash past like ghostly hitchhikers on dusky roadsides: Vance Valorida, a cowboy's cowboy who dies alone, or Oscar and Jo Kittredge, the author's own parents, whom he describes as "secret radicals" who simply forgot how to talk to each other.

Kittredge is at his lyrical best when exploring the place of storytelling and the storytelling of place. To him, the future is mapped by stories.

Ambrose Bierce, a devilish writer who haunted the American West even before he disappeared into thin air, once said philosophy was a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. But "The Nature of Generosity" is a book of graceful rhythms, from one of America's most elegant writers in a place of extraordinary beauty. It aims toward a noble, if elusive, *something.* Kittredge has helped define a whole school of literature from the Interior West, but in this volume his place is clearly at the center of a world where the boundaries are not geographical, but emotional.

William Kittredge's Nature of Generosity blends a memoir of the author's early life on his family's ranch with a travel account of his search for diversity around the world. With a definite philosophical twist, this provides an observation of cultural diversity and human nature which is filled with interesting insights.

I'm glad to see this book in paperback, and I hope it is successful. Kittredge deserves readers, and my particular hope is that the success of this book will bring his masterpiece, "A Hole In the Sky" back into print.

But my own reading of this book is complicated. I felt a bit misled by the title, which makes the book sound like a treatise, or at least meditations on a single theme. Generosity figures in the book, of course, but this is not a theme that obviously holds this book together. It is also being billed as the sequel or perhaps second volume of his memoir/meditation, "A Hole in the Sky," which it is in a sense, but for me it lacks the autobiographical and emotional tension that made that prior work so powerful. I found this book looser, and its autobiographical exposition or reportage is less interesting that the thoughts and historical information he weaves into it. In short, for me this book is brilliant in parts, combined with sections that are pretty mundane and not all that well connected. So in my own perhaps odd system of values, I couldn't reccommend buying this book in hardback, but I can reccommend buying the paperback. I find myself returning to various parts of the book, but I doubt if I will read it front to back again. That's fine, of course--we use books in all kinds of ways, and a few lines can be just as precious as a thousand pages, and a reader like me can be just as grateful to Kittredge for writing and publishing it.

kittredge's collection evades perfection only through inclusion of a number of less than outstanding tales and essays. these are pretty much identifiable by their first or second paragraphs though; it takes no great effort to just page forward to the next outstanding offering. the dream of montana is well woven here. the reality of montana, remarkably enough, is even better than the dream. my only real reservation about this book is that it is apt to draw a crowd: i would wish montana to remain as it is.

The Last Best Place is an anthology with incredible breadth and scope. It was put together over a three year period by a group of dedicated editors and researchers headed up by Annick Smith and William Kittredge. The goal was to identify and preserve Montanna's rich literary heritage ranging from the earliest Native American inhabitants and explorers to contemporary authors such as Rick Newby and Bill Hoagland.

The size of the anthology is proof that it was a daunting if rewarding task. Over 1,000 pages long, it cannot be considered "light" reading, and yet the writing shines. There are sections from Lewis and Clark, Osborne Russell and James Audubon, (all early visitors to Montana), side by side with Native American stories and myths by the like of Jerome Fourstar, James White Calf and Pete Beaverhead( don't miss "Chickadees" as told to Frank Linderman by Pretty-shield, Medicine Woman). Here too you will find cowboys, settlers and wild west characters such as Mary MacLane who declared from a very early age, "I want Fame...Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm." There are essays, legends, journals, tall tales and poetry; tales of stunning beauty, adventure, disaster, brutality and vision. This is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who understands the importance of place and is fascinated by the literature that has evolved out of it.

THIS IS NOT A BAMBI ANIMAL STORY AND SHOULD ONLY BE READ BY PEOPLE WITH REALITY BASED VALUE SYSTEMS LEST THEY OR THEIR CHILDREN GET HUNGUP ON THE BRUTALITY OF THE COMANCHE'S "HARVEST" OF THEIR LAST BUFFALO.BUT...FOR THOSE OF US LIVING CLOSE TO THE EARTH THAT KNOW HOW PROTEIN GETS IN THOSE CELOPHANE WRAPPERS;THIS SHORT STORY SET ON THE HIGH PLAINS OF NORTH TEXAS BRINGS HOME THE HUMAN REALITY THAT --LOVING THE LAND--BRINGS PEOPLE ON ANY RACE TOGETHER NO MATTER WHAT THEIR INTERPERSONAL HISTORY.

Who better to describe the Westerner condition than William Kittredge. Not only is he one of the West's most celebrated writers but is the son of a rancher from southeastern Oregon. Kittredge inherited his father's ranch and stuck it out until he hit 33 when headed off to study and teach creative writing first in Iowa and then Montana.

Kittredge's homeland is not the kind of place where most family car loads whizzing through the vast expanses stop to take in the scenery. Such perspectives make it difficult to garner public sentiment in favor of, not only protecting desert ecosystems, but also convincing the public that such places are an important part of our western tradition.

A good writer, however, has the ability to consistently re-evaluate his circumstances. Kittredge makes no bones about what's been lost, in part, due to his own father who "got his hands on a paradise of waterbirds and fertility, and ... remade it into what he understood as useful, a sprawling system of irrigation and drainage canals and agribusiness fields." While he is driving along the Salmon River on a cold solitary night thinking about the paradigm between the loss of salmon and grizzly bears and our inertia to do anything about it he says: "[i]n wintertime moonlight, the icy Sawtooth Range was aglow under a swirling sky. I contemplated the serious, classical, fool-making mysteries. How to proceed? Can it be true we suffer from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy on earth?"

Kittredge's genius lies in his ability, in a few short sentences, to, not only put you right inside of the writer's mind when they reflect on their experience, but allow you to visualize just what he is seeing, almost as if you where there. Most of all, he brings home the inherent conflict experienced by all of us who are deciding whether to hang on to the past or to embrace the new west.

Harold Shepherd is the Author of Compromising Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Second Conquest of Western Rangelands

Raymond Carver wrote the introduction to this book, which is fitting, because Carver is the only writer I've read that is as Western as Kittredge.

Still, Kittredge is no Carver. Or maybe he just too young yet. His style is a little too over the top, a little too in love with the cowboy image of the west, of Idaho and Montana. He does not succeed, as Carver does, to bring that rugged and self-sufficient mentality of the Old West fully into the modern era.

The title story and one called "Soap Bear" are heads and shoulders above the rest, and one can hope for more work like this. Reading this work leaves me more than anything hoping that Kittredge will keep working, keep writing short stories, and keep honing this gift.

questions, comments, etc.? williekrischke@hotmail.com