wahistorian's Reviews (506)

I have always enjoyed Jonathan Raban’s books—‘Coasting,’ ‘Old Glory,’ and others—but somehow I missed this one. It’s just as well because now I live in the West and ‘Bad Land’ is so much more meaningful to me. Raban explores the dreams and experiences of a few homesteading families who got off a train and landed on the plains of Montana in about 1906 or 1907, ready to apply their sweat equity into their dry farming plans. They lucked out for the first few years: they got more than the 15 inches of annual rain required to make a go of it on a Montana farm. But by WWI their luck had run out; the rain had stopped and their bank notes were coming due, only to be followed by the Great Depression. Raban has a knack for asking delicate questions and getting straight answers from strangers, and then applying his historical knowledge and geographical understanding to create a well-rounded explanation for what happened to these families’ western dreams. His book is sympathetic but not pitying. He shares the unblinking truth that these men and women were hoodwinked—unintentionally perhaps, but certainly carelessly—by railroad men and government and the promoters who worked for them. Campbell’s method of dryland farming comes in for special criticism, as the Bible that led these would-be farmers astray. No wonder westerners embrace conspiracy theories, Raban argues. “If one were looking for evidence to support the idea that the federal government was into scams of this magnitude, one only had to remember the dryland homestead scheme,” he writes of the 1990s rumor that the Moon landing was faked. “In 1909, the government *did* drop people on to an expanse of land which looked suspiciously like the surface of the moon” (276). A great companion to Lucas Bessire’s book about Kansas.

Really, I’d give this book 3 1/2 stars. Grace Olmstead has so much that’s important and fascinating to say about family farms, using her own great-grandfather’s farm in Emmett, ID as an example. Olmstead explores how her great-grandfather, “Grandpa Dad,” started his farm, his stewardship of the land, and the trials he faced; not incidentally, his role in the community served as a model of the “stickers,” people who put down roots and stay in a community. She contrasts these rooted people with the “boomers,” people admittedly like herself who move on once they come of age, in search of a different kind of life. Olmstead examines the many forces making it increasingly difficult for farming families to remain on the land: falling commodity prices and land development pressures, the lure of easier 9-5 lives, the trend toward global food markets. But she also finds numerous Emmett and Treasure Valley farmers who are bucking the trends by growing trendier crops or involving the community through CSA’s or u-pick farms. She describes seed crops, which I’d never read about before, but gives short shrift to problems of irrigation. The chapters on local farming and her family’s history were insightful and moving, but then in the last three chapters, she incorporates a politics of virtue that lost me, especially since her depiction of progressives was just wrongheaded: capitalists need to acknowledge the damage they’ve done to community institutions, but progressives need to reject individualism and come back to the community?! Odd.

Note to publisher: this book desperately needed at least one map—and I bet the author told you that—even if it’s just on the flyleaf. Don’t be cheap—add it to the paperback edition.

What a lovely inspiring book. Gayle uses the story of Hubert Bird, a Jamaican-born Londoner, to explore the limits of resiliency and ways in which we can find friends and family to sustain us when times are hard. I’m already missing Hubert and his friends.

I watched the BBC TV series of this in the 1980s, so the dour yet wise Roy Marsden will always be Adam Dalgleish to me. At first this book appears to promise more than it delivers, plot-wise, because we start with a serial killer and end with one murder under investigation. But there’s a surprise plot twist that no one could have seen coming and plenty of hidden motives to parse. P. D. James is a master of mood and setting, and I loved the gloomy North England coast with its quirky cottages and windmills and suspicious townspeople. Most important to the story here, however, is the environmental theme: how can people be trusted with nuclear power when they cannot even manage their own devices (in this case, motives or plots) and desires (love and sex)? The author skillfully put Larksoken Nuclear Power Plant ever-present in the background, threatening human endeavors with a potential Chernobyl and twisting and dwarfing their better natures. It’s very much a novel of its time, but also remains relevant to our climate-concerned lives.

Wow, what an enlightening book about contemporary issues plaguing the U.S.: the exploding increase in wildfires driven by climate change; the phenomenon of female incarceration; inmate firefighting and its continuity with slavery and indentured servitude; the problem of rehabilitation; American racism; and drug addiction. Without inmate firefighters, California would be unable to cope with the exponential increase in number and ferocity of wildfires in the past decade, particularly wildfire threatening populated areas. And the training and experience of performing invaluable work changes the lives of the incarcerated women who qualify for the program. But Lowe also grapples with the ethical problems with coercing inmates to put their lives at risk for dollars a day in service to the state of California—is firefighting really a choice when the alternative is the boredom, sexual and physical danger, pervasive drugs and alcohol, and utter waste of human potential in prison? The author follows inmate firefighters after parole to demonstrate the difficulty of pursuing a career in forestry or firefighting and wraps up with the appalling statistics on Coronavirus in prison. I will never forget the vision of a 40,000-foot firenado—everyone should read this book.

‘The Great Mistake’ traces the life and career of early 20th-century city builder Andrew Haswell Green in lyrical language that just did not suit my patience level in a pandemic—my fault, not the author’s. The book begins with Green’s murder (no spoiler) and works backward to explain his death and his life. But his interior life is what’s important here and the titanic changes happening in New York City at the turn of the century seem unreal and almost beside the point. I missed the dynamism of this historical period, which I’m sure was Lee’s point, but just didn’t work for me.

My first time with Ursula K. Leguin. This is a beautifully written collection of stories revolving around a fictional coastal Oregon town, peopled with seasonal and full-time residents who cannot quite connect with one another: the promiscuous bookseller, a lonely potter, the motel-owner striving to keep her business going. Quietly sad, the stories have a bit of a sameness to them that is maybe not the best fit for a pandemic.

‘My Cousin Rachel’ is so skillfully written that sometimes you cannot be quite sure what you’re reading: is it a gothic romance? A comedy of manners? A slow-burning thriller? Only the grisly opening, with the hanged man at Four Corners an object lesson, stands as an object lesson of the rough justice that prevails in Philip Ashley’s Cornish world. His devotion for his guardian, uncle Ambrose Ashley, is the center of his life; both men are confirmed bachelors, which makes Ambrose’s sudden infatuation with “my cousin Rachel” in Italy all the more confounding. When Ambrose abruptly marries her and settles in her villa in Florence, young Philip is shocked. Not eighteenth months later, uncle Ambrose is dead, of a presumed brain tumor, and cousin Rachel is on her way to Cornwall to return his things to his grieving nephew. Philip’s life is upended by the beautiful middle-aged Rachel, and her cosmopolitan ways, but something is not quite right about her. There are tantalizing hints in a few unsent letters from Ambrose and oddities in her behavior; with Philip, we must puzzle out her motives. No one writes about longing like DuMaurier—Philip’s desire is painful, as is his slowly dawning realization that Rachel may not be what she seems. Interestingly, DuMaurier also conveys the tenuousness of Rachel’s existence, helping the reader really feel what lengths a life of dependence might push a woman to. Fascinating.

A collection of stories that demonstrates Du Maurier’s creativity and vision. ‘Don’t Look Now’ includes ‘The Birds’ on which Alfred Hitchcock’s film was based; apparently the author hated Hitchcock’s interpretation, and he did change the location from the straitened postwar circumstances of Cornwall to trendy Monterrey in the 1960s. Many of these stories explore cognitive dissonance: a woman returns from a walk to find strangers living comfortably in her house and, in another story, a patient wakes up after eye surgery to a world where people’s hidden traits are made plain on their faces. These unwelcome surprises seem to point to a world in which women’s roles in particular are in flux and they’re not sure themselves how to make sense of the changes. I enjoyed the surreality of some of these, so different from all the other Du Maurier novels I’ve read.