Bad Land: An American Romance - Softcover

Raban, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679759069 ISBN 13: 9780679759065

Publisher: Vintage, 1997

Synopsis

A New York Times Editors' 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 don't be surprised if Bad Land is a landmark."
--Los Angeles Times

About this title

Review:

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. Raban's prose makes love to the waves of land, red dirt roads, and skeletons of homesteads that couldn't survive the Dirty Thirties. As poignant as any romance novel, there's heartbreak in the failed dreams of the homesteaders, a pang of destiny in the arbitrary way railroad towns were thrown into existence, and inspiration in the heroism of people who've fashioned lives for themselves by cobbling together homes from the ruined houses of those who couldn't make it. Through it all, Raban's voice examines and honors the vast open expanses of land and pays homage to the histories of families who eked out an existence.

From the Publisher:

What other writers are saying about Bad Land:

Paul Theroux, author of My Other Life, calls it a "...masterpiece in which we clearly see the vivid paradoxes of America's history and Raban on his own personal journey, as one of our wisest and most articulate travellers.

"Because Mr. Raban is both English and a marvelous observer, he sees aspects of the plains invisible to the native-born. At once expansive and intimate, Bad Land is a valuable addition to the literature of the West."
-Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains

"Bad Land is uncommon in its conception and its exquisite perceptiveness...Raban is searching and compassionate, even mirthful, as captivated by his story as an African explorer. And he is at all times eloquent. His writer's zeal is the zeal of a convert to America, but his vision of those who wished to win the West but mostly lost it is unimpaired and true."
-Richard Ford, author of Independence Day

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679759069
• ISBN 13: 9780679759065
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384