Research Catalog

Title

Why I came West / Rick Bass.

Author

Bass, Rick, 1958-

Publication

Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

238 pages; 22 cm

Summary

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• Bass, Rick, 1958-
• Authorship
• Authors, American > 20th century > Biography
• Bass, Rick, 1958- > Homes and haunts > Montana > Yaak Valley

Contents

1. Why I Came West -- 2. Landscape and Imagination -- 3. Meat -- 4. The Question -- 5. The Community of Glaciers -- 6. Wood -- 7. Oil -- 8. The Poison of Language -- 9. Fourteen Gardens -- 10. Who We Are, What We Do -- 11. Bear Spray Stories -- 12. Rebecca's "My Hair Is on Fire" Lobster Soup -- 13. Threshold -- How You Can Help.

ISBN

• 9780618596751
• 0618596755

LCCN

• 2007030660
• 40015606551

OCLC

• ocn159919447
• 159919447
• SCSB-5415102

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries