Jonathan Raban ambles and picks
his way across the Montana prairie, called "The Great American
Desert" until Congress offered 320-acre tracts of barren land to
immigrants with stardust in their eyes. Rabanapos;s prose
makes love to the waves of land, red dirt roads, and skeletons of
homesteads that couldnapos;t survive the Dirty Thirties. As
poignant as any romance novel, thereapos;s heartbreak in the
failed dreams of the homesteaders, a pang of destiny in the
arbitrary way railroad town
內容簡介:
A New York Times Editorsapos; Choice for Book of the
Year
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award
"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and
sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. "
--Washington Post Book World
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great
American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by
railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold
or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly
inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them
immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad
Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that
was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story
come miraculously alive.
In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay which changed its name
to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans, and in the
landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American
history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own
hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed,
beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the
American West.
"Exceptional. . . . A beautifully told historical meditation.
"
--Time
"Championship prose. . . . In fifty years donapos;t be
surprised if Bad Land is a landmark."
--Los Angeles Times