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Title: Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West (Vintage Departures) by Timothy Egan, Timothy P. Egan ISBN: 0-679-78182-X Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.46 (13 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Well done!
Comment: Timothy Egan has expanded his entertaining essays geographically from the Northwest (The Good Rain) to the "Real West" in Lasso the Wind. First of all, his definition of the West is dead on - it's not California, it's not Texas, and it's not Oregon or Washington (at least West of the Cascades). The snapshot stories gathered here give a caption on past and present life in this region. Very well written. Having visited many of the same places, I found myself agreeing with his view of the destruction and development of the West. Enjoy this book - Egan should now be regarded as one of the voices and defenders of the West. Let's hope more people listen.
Rating: 5
Summary: Who owns Western land ?
Comment: In general this book explores the character of the West and considers opinions about who owns it. For the most part, Egan writes about the mountain states. Much of the text consists of clear and gripping accounts of historical events that capture the forces motivating people to grab a piece of the west, e.g., money, personal freedom, love of wilderness. One brilliant aspect of the book is that Egan can simultaneously present facts, editorial comment and provide a lucid picture of what is valuable about Western lands.
I'll underline the thrust of one thread of Egan's book: Much of the West consists of federally owned lands that are the property of all americans, whether they live in urban areas or not, whether they are "latte-sipping weanies" or third-generation ranchers. This is no "liberal urbanite " bias this is a fact. The best evidence of political bias is found in the history of tax-payer-subsidized resource extraction on federal lands. This massive, decades-old rip-off has lined the pockets of conservative politicians and their mining, logging and ranching buddies, not liberal urbanites.
Rating: 5
Summary: A journalist's view of the West, both jaundiced and hopeful
Comment: I don't often read nonfiction books that make me laugh out loud, but this one did. Egan is something of a gonzo journalist, taking on the vast subject of the American West and finding in it cause for both wonder and humor. The book is a collection of 14 essays, in which the author travels to places in 11 different states, giving readers plenty of local history, descriptions of dramatic landscapes, and a portrayal of "custom and culture" that reels under colliding visions of what the West should be. At every turn, he has an eye for ironies that both reveal and entertain.
After an introduction that takes place at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he begins his journey in New Mexico and Arizona, then moves northward, swinging through Colorado, Montana, and the Great Basin states, ending in California. There is much about cowboys, cattlemen, and Native Americans. We also visit London Bridge at Lake Havasu, an ostrich ranch outside Denver, the pit left behind by the Anaconda copper mining company in Butte, the casinos of Las Vegas, and the site of an appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the back of a road sign in Sunnyside, Washington. There are accounts of fishing in the Bitterroots of Idaho, river rafting on the American River above Sacramento, and hunting for Anasazi petroglyphs in the canyons of the Escalante in Utah.
Meanwhile history comes alive from a colorful and sometimes jaundiced perspective in stories of the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate's conquest of the Indians at Acoma in New Mexico, the massacre of a wagon train of settlers by Mormons at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in the 1860s, and the California Gold Rush. There are historical figures who make vivid appearances, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Lewis and Clark, and Brigham Young. The most affecting story is the author's retelling of Chief Joseph and the fate of the Nez Perce.
Egan gives us a whirlwind trip across a vast area of the U.S. He touches on themes that are common in books about the west -- the follies and vanities of those who have defied the realities of its arid climate, laid waste to natural resources, decimated its wildlife, and attempted to eradicate its native populations. While there is much to lament in what it reveals of the devastation brought by settlement of the West, it also seeks earnestly for signs that the spirit of the West still survives and can eventually thrive.
I highly recommend this book as an addition to any bookshelf of Western nonfiction. As a companion volume, I also recommend Frank Clifford's "The Backbone of the World," which recounts a similar journey by a journalist across the states that lie along the Continental Divide.
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Title: The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Vintage Departures) by Timothy Egan ISBN: 0679734856 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 December, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan ISBN: 1570610606 Publisher: Sasquatch Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The American West: A Twentieth-Century History (Twentieth-Century American West) by Michael P. Malone, Richard W. Etulain ISBN: 0803281676 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1989 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Winemaker's Daughter by TIMOTHY EGAN ISBN: 140004099X Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 13 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner ISBN: 0140159940 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1992 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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