Montana Books

On one level, this book is a crackup. It mercilessly skewers the worst places on earth, places that combine poverty, fear, and oppression. I dare you to read a single page without laughing.

On another level, this make really makes you think about the huge percentage of the world's population that doesn't have electricity, considers pain to be a second language, and considers a good day one in which you eat. It's incredible.

On the day I wrote this review, this edition is being offered for sale for one cent. An amazing bargain, in terms of entertainment per penny.

though now slightly dated, this is still a very useful book in terms of information about the less stable parts of the world. The political coverage is smart and honest. Nothing is dumbed down or put through the filters that newspapers/magazines apply. The analysis is also short and to the point. And its often better than the professional or governmental analysis. If your entering a "bad" country on short notice, there is nothing better than this book to give an overview of the situation, the players and the basics of whats going on. But it is getting rather dated from the lack of a new edition.

The tone of the writing makes the book interesting as a "read' as well.

However, as a "travel book" to dangerous places its not all that great. The advice he gives is usually generally applicable to any travel to any place. Anywhere can be dangerous and its possible to get into trouble in what seems like safe places.

This really consists of three books. The first, and the most obvious part, t is an actual, honest-to-goodness travel guide to dangerous places. I can easily imagine reporters, security consultants, and others pulling this book off their shelf before going to an unfamiliar place.

Inevitably, there are places left out. Pelton includes the United States here, half-seriously and half tongue-in-cheek. This is all to the good, and gives readers a sense of perspective. Still, its inclusion raises all sorts of questions. What makes the US dangerous is gun crime in some areas, which rates it one star (consistently with other countries such as India). But . . . the rates of gun crime are higher in most of Latin America, and kidnaping is much more common. In other words, if you're going to include the US, then Brazil and especially Mexico should have been in the book, along with many of their neighbors. Clearly his rating of the US reflects a pose more than a serious rating.

The second "book" here is a quick-and-dirty summary of the politics and society of these dangerous places. These summaries have information but tend to have rather more attitude. Pelton tries to be cool, tries to assign blame for conflicts in a non-standard way, and likes to review who-did-what-to-whom facts more than underlying causes.

The third "book" is a summary of issues that make places dangerous, such as the drug trade. This is more informative than the country summaries, but also displays a lot of attitude.

Much of the attitude in this book makes it quite funny. The book looks like an almanac or encyclopedia, but you can actually read in through straight. Over a long period.

It's a great read despite its length. Bring it to a dangerous place and throw it at your enemies.

Disclaimer: the US aside, the only "dangerous place" I've been is the Balkans, and I wasn't in the dangerous parts, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information on the ground.

You just do not know how lucky you have it until you read this book. I call it the places most likely not to be in my passport.

Great read. A must for the adventurer (armchair or real).

The expanse and effort they took to writing this book is awesome, especially if one is dumb enough to actually wanna go to these places.

I read Paul Hawken's book "The Ecology of Commerce" first. It was so good I decided to read this one too. It's just as good.

The name of the book describes what it is about very well. In a sense capitalism is unnatural because it is unsustainable. In contrast Natural Capitalism is when business interests work in concert with social interests and natural systems so that all three sustain each other.

Natural Capitalism is easy to read and is essentially optimistic. It discusses broad strategies for sustainability as it relates to the activities of businesses and their products and services. It also gives many examples of how these strategies can be implemented so we can see Natural Capitalism in action.

By and large this book is even more relevant now as when it was first published in 1999. I applaud the writers for saying some tough things that need to be said and for showing real, proven solutions instead of just talking about problems and theories. Very refreshing!

Although one might not completely agree with all of the ideas and concepts discussed in the book, it is a wonderful read for those who are both environmentally conscious and business world-savvy. As a treehugging bean-counter, I absolutely enjoyed "Natural Capitalism".

This book is required reading for people who want to reduce the amount of waste they generate and learn to be better consumers.

This is more than one book's worth of information. Years of research and innovation are woven together tightly and the result is an extremely informative book that is also a page turner.

The book includes enough technical detail to be of use to current experts in the field and the writing makes the data accessible to the newbie as well.

This would be a particularly good read for anyone in business who's looking to improve the bottom line while simultanteously lessoning the negative impact of operations on the planet. The authors show clearly how businesses can reduce costs by implementing eco-friendly practices.

Whew! Adam Smith, move over. NATURAL CAPITALISM is the bible which ought to unite environmentalists, socialists and free-market capitalists in a meaningful shift to sustainable systems. It offers a breathtaking overview of the technological and methodological fixes now available -- and in the authors' view, imminent -- together with ways to get there from here. (This one actually left me feeling cautiously optimistic.) The suggestion is that we should eliminate the filters in the smokestacks by installing better filters in our heads - working smarter, solving whole systems instead of piecemealing our way into the future. Separate chapters deal with automobiles, farming, heavy industry, construction, water pollution, climate change, markets and labor, but the overview is consistent: saving our planetary environment and continuing improvement in human well being do not require contradictory plans. Natural Capitalism provides the key. Eliminating waste, for example, satisfies both environmental and business goals. Using more labor and less material provides jobs and conserves resources. (The authors point out that the "labor-saving" goal of the first industrial revolution occured in a time of labor shortages and resource abundance, a situation which has now reversed.) To offer but one small example of the new thinking explored here: downstream solutions are often best. When an office decides to print all documents on two sides of each page instead of one, the apparent saving amounts to 50 percent of the original paper use. In fact, only 1/3 of the tree fiber harvested in the forest reaches our desks - the rest is wasted due to inefficiency in the pipeline. So a pound of paper saved in the office amounts to 3 pounds of pulp in the forest. Similar or greater savings accrue in every delivery system. It takes 100 units of energy to deliver 10 units of water energy at your tap. So 10 gallons conserved at home actually saves 100 gallons at the well-head. The information and ideas presented in NATURAL CAPITALISM are too sweeping to easily discuss in a short review. Amory Lovins was one of the seminal thinkers who launched my greening 30 years ago, when I joined the anti-nuclear movement and decoupled from the grid. His pithy, "Making electricity with atomic energy is like cutting butter with a chain saw," was "one of those songs that you think you forgot, but is one of those songs you cannot." He and Hunter, his wife and co-CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, have championed green engineering for years - including developing and patenting a schema for a hyper car and placing it in the public domain so that any manufacturer can use the plan. (They confidently predict it is THE car of the future.) Paul Hawken is a long-time developer of green businesses, president of the American Natural Step, and previously author of THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE (HarperBusiness, 1992), a narrower discussion of the ideas in this tome.

This is the quintessential non-fiction account of Mann Gulch. It creates the foundation of our study of wild fire behavior. I could not turn the pages fast enough. Many quotable descriptions and observations about the firefighting industry is timelessly captured in this book.

This is a book written about a fire that took place in Montana back in the 1940's during which a group of smoke jumpers lost their lives. It is so well written that I found it difficult to put down. This was the beginning of the study of "fire", and all it's elements, as a science. Fascinating. This particular book is being used as required reading in our local "California Department of Fire" CDF. I read it as an adjunct to the Search and Rescue Team to which I belong. I recommend this to anyone, especially those living in a possible fire danger area.

Any book that I spend a great deal of time checking maps and names, to see who survived, has hooked me. This did. The horror has caused much thought. Check out the song "Cold Missouri Water"

In 1949, sixteen "smokejumpers" were dropped in the remote Gates of the Mountains wilderness in Montana to fight what seemed to be a routine wildfire. Within an hour 13 of them were dead, consumed in a horrific conflagration. MacLean, a college professor and former firefighter himself, became obsessed with the case, and when he retired he spent every summer investigating the tragedy and piecing together what really happened that day in Mann Gulch.

MacLean says that the job of a storyteller is to transform catastrophe into tragedy -- to analyze the series of small screw-ups that lead to disaster and make sense of them. As you go on this journey into the fire with MacLean, you really can't wait to see what he learns next. And when he brings the survivors back to Mann Gulch, he and they discover the limits of what can really be learned and understood in the face of the implacable forces of nature.

MacLean never finished the book. When he died at age 87, his kids recognized the book's quality and had it edited and published. There are some overly literary metaphors from the pen of this former English professor that he might have left out if he had had the chance to look over his own work. This is a really petty matter in the face of the book's overall quality.

In the hands of an ordinary writer and thinker, you might say "Good if you want to know about firefighters," or disasters, or Montana. But this book is so thoughtful about the realities of man as part of nature that it transcends the Mann Gulch tragedy and becomes much more. I'd recommend it to any person of intelligence.

Reviewer: Liz Clare, co-author of "To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark"

I was fascinated by this riveting story. The second by second race for survival was amazingly documented. The confusion, physical strength, and wisdom displayed by the men involved was inspiring and yet insufficient to ensure their survival. Maclean brings the story to life. His interviews with the survivors shed facts and details that could not have otherwise been included in the book. As a FF who studies FF fatalities and near miss incidents, the book provided thought provoking information. Ultimately, it's a story of survival and death for a group of young men. Definetly worth the time and $.

This book was a great read, classic Garwood and a book you don't want to miss. I do have to give it 4 stars due to fact it took a while for me to get into the book. It just took a little longer to have the story set up- not a reason to miss out on this book. Once the story was set up, it was smooth sailing. What I love about Garwood is the depth she brings to a story, you don't just read it, she shows it to you in her writing.

This is the first "Frontier" book I have read and enjoyed greatly. I felt I was right along side the Claybourne family with their struggles. There are two books left in the trilogy, The Claybourne Brides (One white rose, One Pink Rose, One red rose) and Come the Spring. I am most looking forward to reading Cole's story in Come the Spring.

For The Roses starts out as one of the best of Ms. Garwood's novels. I found myself laughing out loud a number of times as the charachters were introduced. The fiery interaction between family members was easy to imagine and enjoy. However, about three-quarters of the way through I began to get frustrated with the main charachters. A change in setting brought such a significant alteration to their personalities that I found myself hurrying through to get back to the "good stuff". Overall I enjoyed this novel, though it doesn't follow the format of a typical romance. Readers should be prepared for absence of the expected societal scandal and heroine in distress scenarios that come with most novels of this genre.

I really enjoyed this book. I loved the detailed character development. I felt as if I could identify with each brother and their personalities. I loved Mary Rose and Harrison together. I loved their love!!! Just a really good book.

I usually love Julie Garwood's books but this one I'm having the hardest time finishing. It's just dragging on and on. I like it better when an author really focuses on the main characters story but this has all her brothers piping in and it just bugged me after about 50 pages.

Night Owl Romance Reviews: http://www.nightowlromance.com

For the Roses by Julie Garwood
Score: 4.5 / 5
Clayborne Series
Reviewer: Deidre Sine

Mary Rose is the beloved sister to the Clayborne's. The Clayborne men protect their family and friends with a vengeance and have become a force not to be reckoned with in Montana. Only this family is different than most, the men aren't a blood family but they have forged their family for Mary Rose. The men were a rough gang of street kids in New York, who fought together to stay alive. One night they saw a parcel discarded and in that parcel they found a beautiful baby girl. That girl was Mary Rose and they decided to move to Blue Belle, Montana and raise her as a lady. Well, Mary Rose is now a well-behaved, independent, beautiful young woman who has returned to Blue Belle after her schooling. All goes well until Mary Rose meets a stranger in town.

The stranger is Lord Harrison Stanford MacDonald. He is a gentleman through and through; however, he needs help to learn frontier survival. While the Clayborne's teach Harrison about survival he falls in love with the strong woman Mary Rose is. Harrison carries with him a secret, a secret that could destroy his newfound love with Mary Rose. Mary Rose must deal with the past before she can have a future.

For the Roses is a wonderfully written book by Ms. Garwood, which I have read, and reread. I find Ms. Garwood's ability to create such fantastic and real characters a tremendous gift to her readers. Readers who enjoyed the Clayborne family can read more in the rest of the Clayborne Bride series.

I first read this book shortly after it came out about 12 years ago. I was so angry and scared after realizing the real situation for global disease and treatments or lack thereof. I recently was sorting through books to sell and came across this again. I reread it and became even more angry and frustrated and scared. I think this should be a required text for high school history/science. I think the American public has become immune to any kind of "wake up call" as regards our environment and health issues. We are still living with the colossal failures and screw ups of the Reagan years, now compounded and magnified by the GWB years.

There is not room to detail the reasons one should read this book. We have already had plagues in this country, which have been basically hidden from the public. We allowed the CDC to be gutted by the Reagan administration and who knows were it currently stands. Ronald Reagan can take credit for millions of AID's related deaths because of his blissful and willful ignorance.

Reading this book is a necessity and will benefit you in many but scary ways.

In nearly 700 well researched pages, Laurie Garrett has managed to turn a usually dry subject into a gripping tale of disease-warriors combating humanity's oldest enemies. This is only the tip of the iceberg for any respectable medical professional, but for the lay-reader this book contains a wealth of information that is readable and easily digestible.

By turning topics like the Ebola virus, Genetic Engineering and Toxic Shock Syndrome into an easy read, Laurie Garrett transforms complex medical topics into fascinating chunks of information like a true wizard. A must read for anyone with the slightest interest in medicine and science.

This non-fiction book inspired my debut Political Thriller - Patient Zero - about the next avian flu pandemic, which the world is truly bracing for.

Patient Zero - Official ABNA Entrant

If you liked The Hot Zone, you will love this book. The Hot Zone told the scary story of a variant of Ebola that turned out to be harmless to humans. The Coming Plague narrates the history of little-known but lethal diseases such as Machupo, Ebola, Four-Corners Hantavirus, Lassa Fever, Marburg and others. In each of these cases, the list of victims was relatively small, but the onset and progress of these illnesses were frightful. Garrett examines how "disease cowboys" worked backward to patient zero, followed the course of the illness, discovered its means of transmission and identified each disease. In a few cases, the original vector could not be found, despite a careful search. How even medical professionals react when they find out that they too, have the disease is a fascinating psychological study. Often they go into a state of denial, like the researcher in New York who came down with Lassa after studying some samples. At the other extreme was one doctor, who, fearing he was exposed to Ebola, hit the bottle hoping that alcohol would kill the virus. To his relief it turned out to be measles.

A large amount of this book is devoted to AIDS. Garrett details its emergence in the early 80s. She is critical of the government's slow response, which she says was partly due to the insistence of some in the Reagan administration that since it affected only homosexual men it was beneath concern. On the other hand, she suggests that the rampant promiscuity of some members of the gay community didn't help matters either. While there was enough blame to go around, the real heroes were a handful of careful physicians who noted some bizarre symptoms among their gay patients and brought this medical condition to the CDC and the world's attention. While this book presents an excellent history of the emergence of AIDS in both America and Africa, Garrett's information on AIDS is now unfortunately out-of-date.

The author presents more chapters on antibiotic-resistant TB, Legionnaire's Disease, the problem with overdosing farm animals with antibiotics and even Toxic Shock Syndrome. At one point, I bogged down with information overload. But during Garrett's chapters on hemorrhagic and other exotic fevers, this book is difficult to put down.

This book, when it came out, pointed out the coming problems in our medical system like antibiotic resistance, long before it became common knowledge. But it also suggests that as we continue to transform our environment, new plagues and diseases will continue to threaten our existence.
My only criticism of the book is that it was a difficult read, because it is very densely packed with information. This book requires patience to read, but it is well worth it.

After finishing this book you will never read a newspaper the same way again. I am amazed, and a little scared, at how much of what Laurie Garrett wrote in 1995 has come to pass in 2007. Her story about the "disease cowboys" who track the causes of unexplained epidemics in the remote corners of the world is both absorbing and eye-opening. And it has helped me to see disturbing trends in current news stories that I would have missed had I not read The Coming Plague.

When it first appeared, I avoided this book because it seemed depressing and alarmist. In the years since I have had occasion to work on some international communications projects and in the process came to be interested in global public health. Once that happened, reading Garrett's book was essential. She is one of the most informed individuals writing on global public health in the US today.

Amazingly, although the material is sobering and sometimes truly scary, the book is not in the least depressing. It often reads like an adventure story. If you like detective puzzles, you'll be drawn into Garrett's tales of Ebola turning up in Reston, Virginia, and Marburg virus being unwittingly spread by do-gooder missionaries in the Congo.

Irony abounds. It turns out that much of the good we thought we were doing in the developing world was exactly the wrong thing. Garrett relates that many development projects and purported medical "advances" served to promote the evolution of drug resistant bacteria and viruses, while also raising wildly unrealistic expectations for the eradication of disease among the public and the medical establishment. The results are the return of diseases we thought were gone for good, such as TB and -- get this -- bubonic plague, and they are even harder to treat this time around because the microbes are resistent to many antibiotics and drug therapies.

Don't be daunted by the 700+ pages of this book. It is a great read and definitely worth the time you will invest in educating yourself about the the impact of human beings and our technological development on the ecology of microbial environments. I recommend The Coming Plague most highly.

Have you ever had one of those Blair moments when after weeks of being nice to everyone you have to finally make a decision which means that enemies are made as they see a must have dismissed? Well this is one of those moments. I have been struggling with Raymond Carver's "Where I'm Calling From" a collection of thirty-seven stories chosen from several previous collections published over 20 odd years which should therefore be an ideal introduction to his work. And... wait for it... I am going to abandon it unfinished half way despite him being seen As "the American Chekhov or the laureate of the dispossessed"

Let me say up front, that his prose, ear for dialogue and depiction of the ordinariness of every day life masking unexpressed pain and joy is the best. His stories are like photos that capture the moment frozen with no past or future with all the ambiguity that the unknown allows the reader/observer. The opposite of Norman Rockwell homeliness, more akin to the photos of Walker Evans of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But they have no plot, twists, surprises, or surface complexity of character. These are often blue collar workers in small-town or rural settings struggling with jobs, partners, children and booze and it's the unsaid that reveals more then the fractured words.

The stories reflect his own drink problems and failed jobs and marriage in his 20s so he turned to writing to escape and short stories could get something in quickly to pay the rent and get food on the table. His life did begin to turn around and his work started to get critical alarm in his 40's before he died of lung cancer. His accessible prose, realistic situations and comprehensible characters are seen as a counter to egghead experimentalism

But for me, I was left all too often thinking yes and what happens next even while the image created hung in my head. I also think that stories ripped from their original magazine context make the stories work harder then they needed to. I would have welcomed an edition that merged the stories with a set of photographs worthy of the writing. However, if you want to dip in and perhaps read a couple a stories a week or if you enjoy short stories then this is a book for you. As you say at the end of a failed relationship its not you it's me, and lets remain friends. Knowing it's really about the lack of passion. Yet the spurned has the chance of real love else where...will that be you?

Despite occasional accusations of obscurity or frustrating spareness, there's a reason Carver's work stands so highly in opinion: the author's ability to deliver through the written word that which lies at the center of what it means to be a human being, as in being in the world. Anyone who has lived a semblance of a life, and whose ability to form mental connections hasn't been cripplingly truncated, will see in Carver's work the essence of human existence, or at least of experienced existence. This is the art of the short story for adults, for those who've graduated from "just so" fairytales (not that there's anything wrong with fairytales) and have developed the ability to recognize and respond to the deep psychic fulfillment of a master storyteller and his deeply meaningful missives. I would go so far as to say that if Carver's work doesn't touch you in some fundamental fashion, then chances are pretty good you haven't lived much of a life. If a reader is looking to have someone hold his or her hand so as to be led down the aisle of bright and shiny distraction, then by all means go read some Wolfe. If, on the other hand, you are of a piece with the endless, sometimes grinding, and always gloriously contradictory cycle of life (and especially life as lived within human relationships) then Carver's work will resonate with your soul.

I am a hopeless lit. snob. I read only classics. When new books are presented to me, especially books with works published less than 40 years ago, I tend to be very cautious. Raymond Carver's collection may have just changed that. He's accessible to a wide array of readers, from hardcore English majors to "the working man" about whom he so often writes. Stories vary in length from a few pages to over ten, and while some seem to have impenetrable depth of thought, many are easily enjoyed without thinking TOO hard :)

Whether you aren't much of a reader or have books upon books that you've read and loved, this collection has something you can enjoy.

It's awfully hard to live up to praise - especially when said acknowledgments include "one of the great short story writers of our time - of any time" and comparisons to the great Hemingway himself (considered by many to be the all-time master of the form). Happily, Raymond Carver's estimable work stands up to the plaudits.

"Where I'm calling from" is a collection of Carver's work from four of his previous story collections with seven all-new stories to round out the volume. Originally published in 1988, the same year as Carver's death, "Where I'm calling from" is a tribute to an astonishingly accomplished career in writing. Arranged in near-chronological order, the stories follow Carver's progress as an author, and in this reader's opinion it is possible to pinpoint the exact moment he tapped into greatness, and while "Gazebo" may be the collection's first truly revelatory story, it is actually "So Much Water So Close to Home" that was published first. Both stories are the high point of the collection, which is no small feat considering the power and the heft of the other offerings.

At the height of his powers, Carver's writing is nothing short of revelatory. Subtle nuances create powerful depth and Carver's keen acuity for his characters leaves behind not one single false step in his plotlines - and how many writers could honestly make that claim? Not a whole lot, rest assured of that. If his earlier writings are less profound they are still masterful examples of the short story form from a writer who was clearly only getting warmed up.

Literature lovers take heed; Carver's collection is the real deal.

Grade: A

This ought to be called the Greatest Hits of Raymond Carver--with Bonus Tracks*. All of my own personal favorites are here: "Cathedral", "Fever", "Why Don't You Dance?". A few which appeared in previous collections are here restored to Carver's original conception. They appear more fleshed out, the characters are more developed, and oftentimes the tone is entirely changed. Some of Carver's stories will no doubt confound expectations. "Why Don't You Dance?" is told in such a sparse and poetic language that it may not be so easily accepted as a story; it seems to be more like a dance of words and images that dares its way into the heart. Carver's stories are famous for their intimacy with everyday life and everyday folk. His characters' struggles are exalted rather than belittled by the rationality of their predicaments. In "So Much Water So Close to Home" a man's absent-minded choice not to let a floating corpse interrupt his fishing trip culminates in a cosmic battle of Good and Evil between him and his wife yet right in the middle of their kitchen.

I think that many readers who express a dislike of Carver's stories are in fact favoring one Carver style over another. I can't imagine any lover of fiction with a shred of sensitivity being able to brush off "A Small, Good Thing" as a banal tale of child tragedy; the character of the baker is such a perfectly fulfilling example of the duality of human nature. However I can imagine a reader who enjoyed "A Small, Good Thing" completing the last sentence of "Fat" feeling puzzled about where to draw the conclusion between a large man gorging himself in a restaurant and a waitress's off-handed confession of rape. One story doesn't necessarily inform or justify another, and in that sense perhaps that's why this is a selection and not a "collection".

My best advice to new readers of Carver is to give each one of these stories its own personal creative license and realize that Carver was a poet. Really. He published poems as well as stories, and sometimes the accessibility of his vocabulary and the accessibility of his themes aren't consistent. What is consistent is the pleasure of his craft which can be experienced throughout these stories albeit on shifting levels.

*referring to the seven previously unpublished (in book form) stories included at the end of the book

Judy Blunt blew me away with this wonderful memoir. Details so crisp and clean, almost too stark. She reminds me of Annie Dillard in her ability to look at nature dispassionately while allowing the reader to absorb the sometimes horrifying details that challenge you emotionally. She also looks at her own life in that same dispassionate manner, giving the reader the same kind of space to make emotional connections. I love this book so much I talk about it when I teach memoir writing. It deserves more attention than it's getting.

Amazingly raw biography of a life about which most US citizens have no understanding. Eloquent breathtaking descriptive writing.

Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean is a clear, concise picture we get from her life in northeastern Montana, a small town called Malta. She provides great detail with vivid memories and she uses the memories of others to connect with readers. The book was awarded thePen/Jeraud Fund Award for work in progress and the 2001 Whiting Writers' Award.

She begins with her home, and engages the reader into a trip down memory lane. And if you have never read or experienced what a Montana blizzard is like, you will gain tremendous insight into one, the Blizzard of 1964, and its massive impact on the ranch and livestock. Blunt goes into enough detail and information that keeps the reader fully informed without asking more questions. A chapter on fighting fire was another of nature's forces she experienced.

We learn about the school in a small town, horses, pets, teenage lifestyle, to marriage and harvesting and divorce. The sequence of stories is told well.

This is an insightful memoir, descriptive, and emotional....MzRizz

eloquent...evocative writing.With the mid-20th century as the setting Blunt brings her land, her emotions, her experiences alive with an honesty that is at once brutal and tender. This is an all absorbing story of self awareness and liberation; I read the book through twice without stopping.

WOW. What a woman. I was especially curious to read this book since Jeff and his family are from Montana, and lived in Missoula for quite some time. It is too bad life still isn't like that in a sense. Seems more things have gotten in the way and it is falling apart. Kids don't know the meaning of "going to play".

I applaud her for not sticking with the marriage. The in-laws were a bit much. Knowing the land would never be her's was a bit much.

Good read but not one to be taken lightly and def not a beach read.

As usual Robertson Davies' narrative is absorbing and satisfying. If you've read others of his novels, the Deptford Trilogy is essential reading. If you haven't read any of his works, now is the time to indulge yourself. His English language usage is a constant pleasure and his literary references have set me to pursue other authors I have not enjoyed so far. Only complaint? At 800+ pages, it finished far too soon!

I enjoyed the book The Fifth Business very much. It is what I would call magical realism. Ramsay the main character of the book is not the most likable man in fiction but, he is very human. Davies characters are mythical while retaining their humanity. The study of saints that Ramsay involves himself in was my favorite part of the book. I would recommend this book to anyone.

I think that is a tragedy beyond measure that Robertson Davies was not chosen as one of the 100 Best Writers of the 20thC.

His writings are sui generis. And we will not see his like again.

This was a dissapointing book. The first part of the trilogy went well enough, Davies has a skill at making dowdy characters interesting enough to sustain his plot.Other reviewers found fault with the second part, the Jungian analysis. The conceit of advancing the story through the conversation of doctor and patient is handled a little amateurishly, but it is done well enough to sustain the flow, and all in all it seemed the best of the trilogy to me. It would have been a better book to end after two. The final part is so forced that the plot and characters are reduced to a thin skeleton for hanging some tired and simplistic pseudo-speculations on the nature of religion and myth. The setup of a "scandanavian" film maker and his camera man is a pathetic little device if you've read the Bergman its nipped from. So it was that two-thirds of the way through the final part, I gave up and closed the thing. It reminded me of the Frankenstein monster, cobbled together out of stolen members. But unlike that great work of fantasy, there is no mad genius behind it.

If you ask me to rank each part of this trilogy seperately, i would give the Fifth Business a 5 Star, The Manticore a 2 star and World of Wonders simply one star. Davies' obsession with Jung makes Manticore rather pretencious and unbearably monotonous to read. For the case of World of Wonders, its creation and value, in my opinion, might only rest on the romantic idea of the completion of a triology, which is a thing that Davies loves to do but failes to do well.

Fools Crow is an historical novel of the European invasion from a Native perspective. This tragedy is told through prose so hauntingly beautiful, it will stay with you for a long time to come. An exceptional book.

I finished this book, put it down, picked it up, and read it again. The historically inevitable ending (for those who know history) does nothing to detract from Welch's ability to keep you hanging on every word, right up to the the end. The seamless integration of the physical and spiritual planes provides a refreshing view into not just Native American life, but life in general.

I just can't believe I didn't discover this book sooner.

I've read a wide range of books on native americans but none have struck me, or stuck with me, like Fools Crow. This is a masterwork. It gives one the sense of living life on the high plains of what is now Montana in the years just before and then during the westward expansion of the Europeans. The gift of Welsh is his ability to transport you there, make you feel it, live and breathe it, through the glorious days before, the uncertain days leading up to, and the demoralizing days following the near obliteration of the Blackfoot culture. The use of native place names and language in the book serve to draw you in effortlessly. This is a beautiful book, powerful, heartbreaking, and memorable.

Being an enrolled Native-American myself, and having a good understanding of the history of Native/Anglo encounters, I recommend this book highly as an accurate description of life on the plains during the last days of the Blackfeet... brilliant!

The expansion and plunder of the American West permanently altered and almost eradicated the rich civilization of the Plains nations. This deliberate cultural destruction and genocide is shown with great sensitivity and detail in James Welch's novel "Fools Crow", a beautiful and accurate portrayal of a time of dramatic change (1860's - 1870's) in the American West. As is illustrated in the novel, the Pikuni; Kainahs; Siksikas (geographical-linguistic groups known as Blackfeet), and other Native American societies, rich with culture and tradition, were detrimentally impacted by white greed, ignorance, and the influx of disease. Despite the odds, the novel also conveys a sense of muted hope - the potential for a future where some aspects of native people's collective history, stories, and traditions continue.

When I first read In Open Spaces, I thought there was too much monologue, but on reflection, it was one of the best books I've read in a long time. Rowland's characters come to life in three dimensional form and I found it very difficult to put it down.

"In Open Spaces" is a lovely read and reminded me somewhat of the tales my parents told me about their own trials and tribulations in the Canadian Prairies during the depression years.

The story is told in the first person viewpoint of Blake Arbuckle as he lyrically explains his families' struggle to keep their Montana Ranch afloat through the difficult years of WWI and the "dirty thirties." The setting and the ranch are characters just as clearly defined as the members of this emotionally charged family. The story tends to be character-driven and you can't help but love some and hate others as is appropriate. At the end of the book you are ready for more about this complicated family and Blake's own tantalizing romance.

This novel hits the mark in several respects. It's a convincing coming-of-age book, a Montana Bildungsroman; it's also a wonderful evocation of a landscape and the human connection to it, and of an era. It's also a solid family saga.
The pacing is unhurried and the writing restrained---these are virtues in a book of this sort. Rowland succeeds in holding your attention from the beginning, however, not so much through a plot hook as through the creation of a sympathetic and interesting protagonist.
Anyone who's interested in well-crafted character-driven fiction should enjoy this book. It's a great beginning to what I hope will be a productive and successful career.

There are so many really good authors out there --- try one of them. Like Ian McEwan, or Alice Munro, or, well....the list goes on and on and this book, and
author, isn't among them.

We enter the scene with young Blake Arbuckle getting his head bumped. Repetitively. The driver of the Model-T mail truck, Alice, is chattering away, but he is trying to sleep, his head bobbing against the hard door as he bums a ride home. The road is leading them from South Dakota to Montana, where the Arbuckle family has lived and become a part of the land and the time (1916 through 1946), in a way that most transitory contemporaries never do. For this reason alone, I found it mesmerizing to join the Arbuckle family for a few "reading" years, vicariously experiencing the sense of being rooted in the soil of a ranch that has passed from generation to generation, as much a member of the family as its human members, imbued with history and family tradition.

Living rooted to land, however, does not prevent dysfunction from entering family dynamics. Indeed, it is the reason why much of the dysfunction enters: a rivalry, an ongoing and evolving competition for who will get the ranch. How does land and home get passed on? Which child gets it and which must find another home? These are the challenges that sometimes obsess and sometimes divide the Arbuckle family. Division lines occur when one son drowns, and no one can quite explain how or why, occasional suspicions pointing to another brother; that other brother becomes a womanizer, self-centered and cruel one moment, warm the next, like a Jekyll and Hyde, veering between lies, pretending a heroism he does not embody; a third, the narrator, is something of a lifelong bachelor, looking in on the relationships of others and sometimes craving to be on the inside, but mostly content to be but an observer from a safe distance, a baseball star one moment (some of Rowland's finer descriptions happen on the baseball field), but an avowed rancher most of the next. The patriarch of the family looks on and patiently keeps his hand on the reins, retaining control in gentle and unobtrusive manner. Mother has her ways, too, nurturing relationships, watching over her brood. Sons bring home wives, and some are good women, strong and soft simultaneously, while others seduce their way into the family, manipulating and lying without conscience and keeping their eye on the prize. Love happens, not along the straight and narrow, but too often proving to be less than originally hoped. Not the least of the love stories is the one between the Arbuckles and Montana. In fact, it is the love story that rules all the others.

Rowland's debut novel is a worthy one (it was published in 2002, and has since had a continuation in the just published "The Watershed Years"). He writes with that prairie peace that conveys distress in a critical scene without melodrama, sensuality without resorting to cheap graphic descriptions, emotional exchanges without bleeding into sappiness, all the while building tension with a keen sense of balance. Like the patriarch of the Arbuckle family, the author, too, holds a gentle rein on the family and unfolding scenes, maintaining literary skill in an array of scenes that would expose a lesser writer as beginner. Rowland is not that.

A pleasing read, and one that invites the reader to anticipate Rowland's next work. The closing scene of the novel is worth the entire read - a meaningful moment between man and land, the intimate connection between the two, poetically rendered, tender, satisfying to both mind and heart.

~ Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet