The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays

by William Kittredge

Book Overview

William Kittredge's relationship to the spare, often unforgiving Western landscape is fraught with contradictions. Having grown up on a cattle ranch in Oregon, he has an intimate connection to the vast landscape that was once vital to his family's trade. He has also witnessed, over many decades, the depletion of the West's natural resources due to overuse. In The Next Rodeo, the author's luminous essays move effortlessly from the personal...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555974791
• ISBN13: 9781555974794
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 4.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Living in the Past and Embracing the Future

Who better to describe the Westerner condition than William Kittredge. Not only is he one of the West's most celebrated writers but is the son of a rancher from southeastern Oregon. Kittredge inherited his father's ranch and stuck it out until he hit 33 when headed off to study and teach creative writing first in Iowa and then Montana. Kittredge's homeland is not the kind of place where most family car loads whizzing through the vast expanses stop to take in the scenery. Such perspectives make it difficult to garner public sentiment in favor of, not only protecting desert ecosystems, but also convincing the public that such places are an important part of our western tradition. A good writer, however, has the ability to consistently re-evaluate his circumstances. Kittredge makes no bones about what's been lost, in part, due to his own father who "got his hands on a paradise of waterbirds and fertility, and ... remade it into what he understood as useful, a sprawling system of irrigation and drainage canals and agribusiness fields." While he is driving along the Salmon River on a cold solitary night thinking about the paradigm between the loss of salmon and grizzly bears and our inertia to do anything about it he says: "[i]n wintertime moonlight, the icy Sawtooth Range was aglow under a swirling sky. I contemplated the serious, classical, fool-making mysteries. How to proceed? Can it be true we suffer from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy on earth?" Kittredge's genius lies in his ability, in a few short sentences, to, not only put you right inside of the writer's mind when they reflect on their experience, but allow you to visualize just what he is seeing, almost as if you where there. Most of all, he brings home the inherent conflict experienced by all of us who are deciding whether to hang on to the past or to embrace the new west. Harold Shepherd is the Author of Compromising Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Second Conquest of Western Rangelands