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摘要
摘要
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.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
This account of the author's travels through homesteaded Montana won the NBCC nonfiction prize. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
As seen in the punning title, travel writer Raban (Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America, 1991, etc.) adds a second, more sinister meaning to the legendary Montana-Dakota stretch of the Great Plains. Raban focuses on the town of Ismay, Mont., and its role in a seldom-discussed chapter of the modern American West. Ismay's settlers were lured by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, by misleading advertising by railroad companies, and by pseudoscientific claims about the benefits of dry-land farming. Before long, however, this inhospitable land had wrecked the hopes of these latter-day homesteaders. Instead of the American Eden they were promised, they encountered something more akin to the Egyptian plagues: subzero winter temperatures, dust, dying cattle, large grasshoppers, and above all, scant rainfall. Raban skillfully evokes the landscape's stark immensity, which defeated the attempts of photographers who tried to transform it into a romantic panorama. As settlers gradually deserted Ismay, they left behind signs of their failure, so that when Raban passed through, ``for every surviving ranch, I passed a dozen ruined houses.'' Yet Ismay, conceived by advertising, still could not resist making a bundle off a promotion, as seen in a hilarious recounting of its attempt to recast itself as a tourist trap by renaming itself Joe, Montana, after the quarterback (who is neither native son nor resident). Ultimately, Raban produces a startling revision of traditional Western myth: not the hopeful cowboys and farmers so often found in children's school primers, but solitaries, religious zealots, and even sociopaths. In Randy Weaver, Theodore Kaczynski, and Timothy McVeigh, Raban discovers spiritual descendants of the homesteaders in ``their resentment of government, their notion of property rights, their harping on self-sufficiency, and self-defence, [and] in their sense of enraged Scriptural entitlement.'' A powerful, grim new slant on those who took the way west--and of the terrible consequences when their dreams curdled and died. (First serial to the New Yorker)
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Raban, a Briton who offered an outsider's view of the U.S. in Old Glory (1981) and Hunting Mr. Heartbreak (1991), moved to Seattle six years ago, but his survey of life in eastern Montana's "bad land" in this century still benefits from his knowledge of the places European settlers who came to Montana's Prairie and Custer Counties had left. They (and Americans coming from the East and Midwest) were drawn to the "Great American Desert" by the 320 acres of land promised by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909; by pamphlets and ads from the Milwaukee Road Railroad, new to the territory and anxious to build up its market; and by the pseudoscience of "dry land farming." In 1915, after a few lush years, Montana's erratic rain stopped; two years later--and again in the "Dirty Thirties" --failed homesteaders moved on: to the Rockies, Washington state, and California. Bad Land is history sans footnotes, geography sans maps: Raban wallowed in eastern Montana, talking to homesteaders' descendants, reading memoirs and schoolbooks, exploring abandoned buildings, living through gulleywashers, lightning storms, and bitterly cold winters, and examining complex links between the region's past and present. --Mary Carroll
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
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., Iowa (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
目录
1 The Open Door | p. 3 |
2 Fictions | p. 20 |
3 Pictures | p. 57 |
4 Fences | p. 96 |
5 Plain Sailing | p. 147 |
6 Heavy Weather | p. 189 |
7 Clinging to the Wreckage | p. 243 |
8 Off the Map | p. 270 |
9 Woods and Water | p. 300 |
10 Home | p. 354 |
Acknowledgments | p. 361 |