Owning it all : essays /

Kittredge's searingly elegiac essays about living in the West carefully dissect the great western myths of property and rugged individualism. Reading this richly detailed book is like listening to Hank Williams-its twangy, melancholic strains cut to the bone. (Je 15 87)

This is an illustrative and insightful collection of essays on the American West (originally appearing in various magazines) by a man who grew up on a ranch in Oregon and at the age of 33, disillusioned and dissatisfied, left agriculture and turned to writing. Autobiographical sketches describe his early years in the isolated community and are full of rodeo memories and ruminations on his buckaroo days. Other essays consider the boom-town phenomenon, the ``redneck,'' the grizzly bear, the renaissance in native American art. Most notably, the author offers a critique of the popular view of the Westwhich is, according to Kittredge, a disguised mythology of conquest and possession that historically has served as a rationale for violence but which seems to be losing its power. He also notes the deleterious affect of this mythology on agriculture, where the concept of conquest has resulted in a ``dream gone wrong'' and the destruction of the landscape in favor of the ``factory-land.'' Kittredge stands valiantly at the center of a fledgling regional literature emerging from shattered myths and discarded ideals. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kittredge is a Westerner, born and raised in southeastern Oregon; he now teaches at the University of Montana. In this collection of 14 essays, all previously published in various magazines, he explores the meaning of the Western myth and its effects on the land, people, and wildlife of America. In some of the most perceptive writing, Kittredge critiques the movie Western and shows how recent pictures have drawn on that genre for their plots. In another essay, he mourns the virtual destruction of the grizzly bear south of the Canadian border. Taken together, these pieces present a land slowly dying from the effects of plow and oil field. A dark vision to be sure, but one to be pondered. Randy Dykhuis, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, Mich. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.