Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Seduced by the government's offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of this century. Raban's stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader's dream strips away the myth--while preserving the romance--that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. • "As good a book as I have read about rural America in a very long time." —The New York Times Book Review 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.Editorials
Dwight Garner
There's a fine moment early in Bad Land, Jonathan Raban's new memoir/travelogue about the American West, that goes a long way toward explaining why this British-born writer (he now lives in Seattle) is among the most compelling and worthwhile travel writers alive. Poking around in the ruins of an abandoned Montana farmhouse, Raban stumbles upon a decades-old ledger that unwittingly tells the story of one farm family's demise. Listing the ledger's grim figures would have been dry history in another writer's hands, but Raban brings the moment home. He pores over these figures, and he's clearly moved: "By the last page, the handwriting was all over the place and the figures were standing, or leaning, an inch high on the paper. How do you turn $2.54 into $5688.90 [the farm's debt]? I've made my own pages of calculations in the same distraught writing; seen the numbers gang up on me and breed. What the bottom line always says is the old 2 a.m. cry, We can't go on living like this."
Like so many great travel and history books, Bad Land is as much about its author as it is about the territory it covers. You can feel Raban's compulsive interest in the West expand as the book progresses ("An emigrant myself, [I was] trying to find my own place in the landscape and history"), and there are some wonderful moments when he tries to communicate his excitement to others, who look at Montana's vast, flat, grassy surfaces and are reminded only of "badly maintained golf courses." Raban is gruffly comic, too, on his inability to find anything to eat besides microwave burritos on his travels, and on the way contemporary Western women tend to dress for the 1990s while "nearly all the men appeared to have stepped off the set of a period Western."
Yet Bad Land is more than a roadmap of Raban's own neuroses and travails. His book is primarily about the European emigrants who were drawn to the West early in this century by the lure of cheap land, and by false promises - made by bankers, railroad companies, and the government - that they could succeed at "dry farming" in this arid landscape. Raban crafts this sad tale magnificently, contrasting the emigrant's hope and determination with the bad faith of those who led them blindly into this forbidding landscape. It's a bitter, compellingly-told tale. -- Salon
Library Journal
Hunting Mister Heartbreak (LJ 4/15/91) told of British-born Raban's last journey through the United States. Bad Land, emanating from his latest travels, might have been titled "Finding Mister Heartbreak," as he examines the 1910-20 diaspora of homesteaders to the badlands of southeastern Montana. Attracted by free land and glowing promotional pamphlets distributed by the railroads, settlers flocked to this semi-arid region to try their hand at dry-land farming. Their dreams too often turned to nightmares featuring drought, cold, grasshoppers, and isolation, and by the end of the "Dirty Thirties" many were gone. Raban shows a travel writer's eye and a social critic's sensibilities while probing the land, homesteaders' journals and letters, and the reminiscences of their descendants. Recommended. [Portions of this book were excerpted in the May 20, 1996, issue of the New Yorker.Ed.]Jim Burns, Ottumwa P.L., IowaVerlyn Klinkenborg
As good a book as I have read about rural America in a very long time.—The New York Times Book Review