Bad Land
Click to look inside
World of Books
The feel-good place to buy books
Bad Land by Jonathan Raban
A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the YearWinner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror.
--Washington Post Book World In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive. In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. Exceptional. . . . A beautifully told historical meditation.
--Time Championship prose. . . . In fifty years don't be surprised if Bad Land is a landmark.
--Los Angeles Times
Jonathan Raban is the author of Soft City, Arabia, Foreign Land, Old Glory, For Love and Money, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, and Passage to Juneau; he has also edited The Oxford Book of the Sea. Raban has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (for Bad Land), the Heinemann Award for Literature, the Thomas Cook Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Governor's Award of the State of Washington, and the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, among others. Raban lives in Seattle, with his daughter.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780679442547 |
| ISBN 10 | 0679442545 |
| Title | Bad Land |
| Author | Jonathan Raban |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Pantheon Books |
| Year published | 1996-11-05 |
| Number of pages | 324 |
| Prizes | Winner of ALA Notable Books (Nonfiction) 1998 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |