Rural Sociology - United States, Midwestern States - Regional Biography, Regional Studies - Midwest U.S., Women's Biography - General & Miscellaneous, Cowboys & Ranchers - Biography

Feels Like Far Pa

Name: Feels Like Far Pa
Author: Hasselstrom
ISBN: 9780618124954

by Hasselstrom

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Overview

In Feels Like Far, award-winning author Linda Hasselstrom paints an intimate portrait of family, love, work, nature, and survival against the backdrop of the far-flung South Dakota prairie. Sixteen linked stories tell of the joy of training a first horse, the heartbreak of finding a fatally injured cow, the beauty of cavorting nighthawks, the stubbornness of her father, a rigid old rancher who bucks at old age, the deep, almost spiritual bond she shares with a friend who is diagnosed with AIDS.
“In deliciously direct and unsentimental style” (Kathleen Norris), Hasselstrom maps the landscape of her life, demarcating the same beauties and brutalities that intermingle on the Great Plains she calls home.

Synopsis

Award-winning author Linda Hasselstrom paints an intimate portrait of family, love, work, nature, and survival against the backdrop of the far-flung South Dakota prairie.

Library Journal

The city mouse/country mouse scenario is played out before the reader's eyes in this collection of essays by award-winning author Hasselstrom (Windbreak). Transported as a girl from Rapid City, SD, to a ranch on the broad Western plain of Dakota Territory when her mother remarried, Hasselstrom became enraptured with her new lifestyle and her adoptive father's willingness to have her help him on the ranch. The essays follow Hasselstrom's growth into adulthood, as she struggles with her love of the hard work, the culture of male leadership, and change in herself and her relationships. Brief stints as a writer in the city allow her to draw contrasts with life on the Great Plains. With finely descriptive language, Hasselstrom brings the reader to the Dakota ranch to visualize its vastness and beauty, all the while reinforcing the personal dedication of the family that lives so closely to the land. Recommended for secondary schools and public and academic libraries.--Joyce Sparrow, Oldsmar Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

About the Author, Hasselstrom

LINDA HASSELSTROM is the author of many highly acclaimed books of nonfiction and poetry and the coeditor of Leaning into the Wind and Woven on the Wind. She divides her time between Wyoming and South Dakota.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

A soulful memoir of prairie life. Name the heartbreak, and Linda Hasselstrom (Leaning Into The Wind, 1997, etc.) has faced it. Early on, her father, a taciturn and practical-minded Wyoming rancher, ordered her either to abandon her writing and take a $300-a-month job as a ranch hand, or get off the family spread and try her luck in the big city. Hasselstrom took the latter course, relocating to the prairie metropolis of Cheyenne and, as it turned out, eventually producing a distinguished body of essays and poems. In this memoir, Hasselstrom revisits her life on the ranch, a hard and unforgiving place where issues of life and death are never far away. In one chapter, she writes, for instance, of her pride at receiving a fine .22 rifle as a gift on her twelfth birthday, a gift that immediately had to be put to use against a sick steer and a family of barn-invading raccoons. "One by one, they put their paws over their eyes," she writes. "I groaned, but I shot them anyway." The epiphanies come fast and furious, as Hasselstrom faces the death of her second husband to cancer and the loss of her father, who, she discovers, had kept a memoir of his own, an archive apparently fated to have only one reader—his daughter. Having inherited the ranch from which she had been exiled, she closes her book by pondering whether she has any moral right to the land, inasmuch as she will have no children, has no intention of working the ranch, and has no real connection to it, for "everyone who ties me to this place is subsiding into the land." Hasselstrom is a careful writer who reveals just enough of herself without falling into sentimentality, and her book is a healthy corrective for anyone whoimagines that there's anything romantic about the cowboy way of life.