Bad Land: An American Romance - Couverture rigide

Raban, Jonathan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0679442545 ISBN 13 : 9780679442547

Editeur : Pantheon Books, 1996

Synopsis

"When Dad came out here, he had twenty-five dollars, a wagon, and a mule." So begins the stories of countless homesteaders who, in the first decades of this century, seized an astounding government offer: three hundred and twenty free acres in the stark, dry Plains of Montana and the Dakotas. Seduced by the promises from railroad companies, by liberal credit from bankers, and by scientific claims about dry-land farming; seduced, above all, by the prospect of a new life in the New World, Americans and Europeans came determined to put down roots and prosper.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

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

Biographie de l'auteur

Jonathan Raban is the author of Soft City, Arabia, Old Glory, Foreign Land, For Love and Money, Coasting, and Hunting Mr. Heartbreak. He won the W.H. Heinemann Award for Literature in 1982 and the Thomas Cook Award in 1981 and 1991. He has also edited the Oxford Book of the Sea. He lives in Seattle.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Pantheon Books
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0679442545
• ISBN 13: 9780679442547
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 324
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible