Product Details
- Author: Rick Bass
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- Binding: Hardcover
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- Dewey Decimal Number: 333.782092
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- EAN: 9780618596751
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- ISBN: 0618596755
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- Label: Houghton Mifflin
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- Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
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- Number of Items: 1
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- Number of Pages: 256
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- Product Group: Book
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- Publication Date: 2008-07-03
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- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
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- Studio: Houghton Mifflin
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- Title: Why I Came West: A Memoir
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Avg Customer Rating: 
Product Description: In this poignant look at the thirty-year journey of one of our country's great naturalist writers, Rick Bass describes how he fell in love with the mystique of the West--as a dramatic landscape, as an idea, and as a way of life. Bass grew up in the suburban sprawl of Houston, and after attending college in Utah he spent eight years working in Mississippi as a geologist, until one day he packed up and went in search of something visceral, true, and real. He found it in the remote Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, where despite extensive logging not a single species has gone extinct since the last Ice Age.
Bass has lived in "the Yaak" ever since, and in Why I Came West he chronicles his transformation into the writer, hunter, and environmental activist that he is today. He explains how the rugged, wild landscape smoothed out his own rough edges; attempts to define the appeal of the West that so transfixed him as a boy, a place of mountains and outlaws and continual rebirth; and tells of his own role as a reluctant activist—sometimes at odds with his own neighbors—unwilling to stand idly by and watch this treasured place disappear.
Rick Bass is the author of many acclaimed books of nonfiction and fiction, including The Lives of Rocks, The Diezmo, and Winter.
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Customer Reviews
bass at his worst
I'll keep this short, Rick Bass is one of my favorite authors, but this book is his worst. I have no Idea why he bothered to write it, but it is a waste of a great talent. I gave up after 60 pages.
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Good old Yaak - but same old Yaak
I have been a big Rick Bass fan for many years. I enjoy his non-fiction and I revere his efforts to preserve the wilderness areas of his adopted corner of Montana. However, I simply take issue with this book about how misleading the title and liner notes are about its major content. Why I Came West? There is a little about that. And there is some solid thought and writing here. Good writing. But the vast majority of this book is an update (and revision) of his efforts to obtain Wilderness designation for the Yaak since he moved West. It could more correctly be titled Book of Yaak II, or better yet, Book of Yaak Revised. There are large portions of this book that seem to be a letter to his neighbors correcting or updating his true views on Wilderness and logging and even a weak attempt to discourage outsiders from wanting to see the Yaak as a destination, as if he has drawn ire from fellow Yaakians for the notoriety he has brought the area. But his love for the area easily diminishes any intended effect.
As a reader, I want a fair chance to choose what I am reading. I couldn't help feel throughout most of this read, that I was erroneously lured into the prospect of some new and different writing by Mr. Bass - but instead was being given the same whine in a different bottle.
Having said that, I will still look forward to his new efforts both in regard to conservation as well as writing.
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