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Title: The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich ISBN: 0-14-008113-5 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: December, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.27 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The West seen through a filmmaker's eye
Comment: In these essays about Wyoming, the imagery of mountain and plain and weather calls to mind the sweeping landscapes of John Ford movies. Ehrlich, born and raised in California, retains her outsider's eye for detail, and is able to translate the perspective of someone trained in documentary filmmaking very effectively into the medium of words.
Her portrayal of the men who work in this environment is very different from the stereotypes we know from Marlboro ads, "Bonanza," and movie westerns. She finds cowboys often tender-hearted, quirky, and curiously courtly. Not to be outdone by the men in this world of extremes and hard work, the women she meets and befriends are tough-minded and independent. Completing her picture are the Native Americans, whom she portrays respectfully and with an ironic appreciation for incongruity, as they both recover and reinvent a lost heritage.
Hers is also a personal story. Beginning with the wrenching death of a close male friend, it recounts in her growing love for Wyoming and its people the discovery of a new life. And while her book is no heart-on-the-sleeve display of pain and recovery, one senses at almost every step the healing process that underlies the words. As slender as a book of poems, this volume of essays calls out to be read slowly and savored, word for word.
Rating: 3
Summary: A woman in Wyoming
Comment: Gretel Ehrlich does for the state of Wyoming what other writers have done for other states: Terry Tempest Williams for Utah, Robert Michael Pyle for Washington, Bernd Heinrich for Maine, Jennifer Price for California, Scott Russell Sanders for Indiana. She has given it a space on the literary map. In this book she makes no really brilliant discoveries, which isn't surprising given that she is a relative newcomer to the ranch life she attempts to describe. She can be faulted, I think, for her idealized depiction of the lifestyle and landscape on a Wyoming ranch, and she never addresses some of the hard issues, such as reconciling the ranchers' alleged intimacy with the land with their pillage of that same land. But the prose is beautiful, and her insights about people and landscape are sound. I would tentatively recommend this book, but if you haven't read anything by Terry Tempest Williams, read her books first.
Rating: 5
Summary: A love affair with Wyoming
Comment: Gretel Erlich was a poet and filmmaker when she first came to Wyoming in 1976. She was so taken with everything about the place that she became a cowherd, which gave her time to write about the American West. Reading her books, however, is very much like seeing a film, for her filmmaker's eye and awareness of nuance and gesture is evident in the way she chooses her words.
In The Solace of Open Spaces, Erlich presents us with an eclectic bunch of frontier characters that she met while working as a ranch hand. Almost unaware of what's been accomplished, we readers find ourselves shedding former stereotypes of these people in exchange for seeing them for what they are: unique, quirky, interesting, inexplicable men and women. The Weather (and the word deserves that capital letter, as you'll see upon reading the book) plays as large a role as the people in Ehrlich's book.
About the title: When she arrived in Wyoming, Erlich was grieving the death of someone important to her. As she works hard at physical labor, meets new people, falls in love with the land, and sheds her past like sweat running down her back, healing from grief occurs - although she doesn't exactly say this.
Altogether, a beautiful book and a wonderful read.
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Title: This Cold Heaven : Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich ISBN: 0679758526 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg ISBN: 1573228257 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 08 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Match to the Heart/One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning by Gretel Ehrlich ISBN: 0140179372 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Islands, the Universe, Home by Gretel Ehrlich ISBN: 0140109072 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1992 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist by Gretel Ehrlich ISBN: 0807073113 Publisher: Beacon Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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