Western United States - History - General & Miscellaneous, Ghosts & Haunted Places, Peoples & Cultural Interests - Travel Guides, American Literature - Regional Literature - Literary Criticism, Natural History - United States, Trivia, Historic Preservatio
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Overview
Our sense of place today is permeated by ghosts from the past. In GhostWest, Ann Ronald takes the reader to actual historical sites where something once happened. Using the metaphor of hauntings, she reflects on how western history, literature, and lore continue to shape our visceral impressions of these sites. Some of the locations might be characterized as tourist points; others are far more obscure, often deserted and forlorn. Many of the people involved had no sense of history as such. As Ronald writes, "They saw before them a territory with a future, not a past. That they were writing themselves into history as well never occurred to them." In chapters both lyrical and thoughtful, passionate and humorous, GhostWest covers sites in seventeen western states, including the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana, Willa Cather's Nebraska prairies, and the Murrah Building bombing site in Oklahoma. Through these settings and their phantoms, the author mulls questions about why we find such ambience and artifacts so compelling.Editorials
Library Journal
Ronald (English, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) has combined a personal travelog with a literary review and produced a wonderfully imaginative narrative of the states west of the Missouri River. In each of the 17 chapters, she describes a particular area she visited and the "ghosts" that seem to emanate from it. From the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana south to a Texas horse auction in cowboy country, and from Oregon's misty graveyard-of-the-Pacific shore east to the Kansas plains, where the buffalo were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, Ronald intertwines firsthand accounts of those who made the places famous or infamous with her views of the places today. Mount Rushmore, mining country in Colorado, Death Valley, Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico, prewar and modern Tucson all are sites with "ghosts" that stimulate rich literary and artistic insights, geological and biological wonders, and historical significance. A skilled writer with many interests, Ronald has produced a wide-ranging work that is recommended for all libraries, especially those in the Western states. Jim Thorsen, Central North Carolina Regional Lib. Syst., Burlington Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.Book Details
Published
December 31, 2002
Publisher
Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, c2002.
Pages
256
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780806133904