Who Owns the West? - Softcover

Kittredge, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1562790781 ISBN 13: 9781562790783

Publisher: Mercury House, 1996

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. "WHO OWNS THE WEST? asks the important question that is at the heart of the change transforming the region, and no one is better prepared to lead this discussion than William Kittredge"—The Bloomsbury Review.

About this title

Review:

The once-remote interior of the American West is changing, noted author William Kittredge writes, filling with tourists and new settlers, yielding "a time of profound transition, which can be thought of as a second colonization." The West of myth, the place of Shanelike loners such as Kittredge's father who carved out a farm from a pocket of southeast Oregon bottomland, must, he argues, give way to a new generation of Westerners who love the land and its possibilities. Kittredge populates his pages with fellow dreamers, writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Hugo, old neighbors, and newcomers, all of whom contribute to Westerners' "working to locate ourselves amid the clutter." This is a striking, constantly interesting attempt at envisioning one's home country in the midst of change.

From the Back Cover:

Who owns the West? "All of us, of course", says William Kittredge, but this "simple answer... is sort of beside the point when we get down to considering questions of fairness. Stay joyous under the sun and moon, in the rain and out; that's another halfway answer". Kittredge gives us not easy answers but a sustained meditation on what it means to be a Westerner today. The three essays in Who Owns the West? compose both a celebration of the new West and an elegy for an old West that is fading. Noting that "our ideas of paradise originate in childhood", Kittredge describes, in "Heaven on Earth", growing up in the highland desert country of east Oregon, "an ancient horseback world that is mostly gone". Next, in "Lost Cowboys and Other Westerners", he gives us a series of portraits of inhabitants of the region. Finally, in "Departures", Kittredge turns his eye to the West today, the "new heartland nation" that is being born from the pain and the glory of the past and the struggles and anger of the present.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercury House
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1562790781
• ISBN 13: 9781562790783
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176