Homestead (The World As Home) - Softcover

Smith, Annick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571312137 ISBN 13: 9781571312136

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1996

Synopsis

Describes how the author and her family built a wilderness homestead in 1959 Montana that grew into a flourishing ranch and recounts the many adventures that found their roots in early American western and pioneering traditions. IP.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In 1964 Annick Smith came to Montana with her husband Dave and their boys. In a fertile valley where meadows tip downward toward the Big Blackfoot River, they found what they had dreamed of: 163 acres of ranch land with a view of creek, hills, and the Rattlesnake Mountains. The Montana of which Annick Smith writes in this spirited and generous book is the not-so-distant West of outlaws and pioneers, Indians and soldiers, range inspectors and cattle thieves. Smith writes of her friendship with Norman Maclean, who memorialized the Big Blackfoot in A River Runs Through It, and she eloquently makes the case for preserving the fragile wild environments that are our sacred places.

From Booklist:

Smith came to Montana by way of Paris and Chicago, taking up the trek west her parents began when they left Hungary; but it was only years later, after establishing her Montana homestead and becoming thoroughly meshed with Big Sky Country, that Smith realized that, like her parents, she had immigrated to a "land of greater freedom." This is the sort of subtle pattern Smith contemplates in her thoughtful and involving essays. She shares some evocative memories of her culturally stimulating childhood along Lake Michigan, remembering her self-effacing mother and her father, Stephen Deutch, an "almost famous" photographer. Smith married young and ended up in Montana in 1970 with her incurably ill husband and their four sons. They purchased 163 acres of land, built a home out of a recycled log house, and worked hard at living, writing, filmmaking, and loving until Dave's expected but nevertheless jolting death. Smith writes tenderly about these experiences, then rapturously about hiking, skiing, fishing the Big Blackfoot River, dancing, enjoying the company of literary friends Bill Kittredge and Norman Maclean, and working on the film version of A River Runs through It. A low-key yet forceful writer, Smith gives us much to ponder and admire. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1571312137
• ISBN 13: 9781571312136
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224