Gather Marking The Sparrow's Fall: The Making Of The American West By Wallace Stegner Readable In Version

read this of you grew up in the western arid US and now are transplanted elsewhere it will cause unbelievable homesickness.
Beautiful beautiful book. A collection of essays on conservation and the environment, the West, America, memory, place, nostalgia, and other related topics, “The Twilight of SelfReliance” and “At Home in the Fields of the Lord” are the cream of the crop, This is not actually a book with a story but a compilation of essays, I really struggled to read them and only did so because it was the book group read and I was determined, Wallace Stegner was a very knowledgeable man who led a very impressive life, I appreciated the book alot more once I learned about who he was, his passions and his life, The last section of this book is a story that I did enjoy reading, I know he has authored other books that are actual stories that others have really enjoyed, Someday I might look one up to read, It's all good. The story "Genesis" is especially good some say it's his finest, You say the life of a cowboy is romantic Read this story amp think again, This is a wonderful collection, essential reading for anyone who loves the Rocky Mountain West, It contains some of the best writing Ive ever read, gorgeous and rhythmic and keenly insightful, This passage from “The Rocky Mountain West” exemplifies the ecstatic nature of the prose, its musical beauty, and the way Stegners sentences are constructed to sing their own meanings:

“By such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old.
Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: It is purity absolute, Watch its racing current, its steady renewal of force: It is transient and eternal, Listen again to its sounds, get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath: a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of blown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks.
”

I was particularly taken with the novella that concludes the book, “Genesis,” a gripping ordeal story that captures the essence of extreme survival in a gorgeous but violent and pitiless landscape in early northern winter.
Here are just a few of the passages I highlighted as I read it:

“When he chopped through the rivers inch of ice and watched the water well up and overflow the hole it seemed like some dark force from the ancient heart of the earth that could at any time rise around them silently and obliterate their little human noises and restore the plain to its emptiness again.
”

“Nothing between them and the, nothing between them and the North Pole, nothing between them and the wolves, except a twelvebysixteen house of cloth so thin that every wind moved it and light showed through it and the shadows of men hulked angling along its slope, its roof so peppered with spark holes that lying in their beds they caught squinting glimpses of the.
”

“In the thudding hollows of the skull, deep under the layered blanket, the breathskimmed sheepskin, inside the stinging whiskered face and the bony globe that rode jolting on the end of the spine, deep in there as secret as the organs at the heart of a flower or a nut inside shell and husk, the brain plodded remotely at a hearts pace or a walking pace, saying words that had been found salutary for men or cattle on a brittle and lonesome night, words that not so much expressed as engendered what the mind felt: sullenness, fear, doubt.
”

“He watched it hypnotically, revolving slowly like the white waste of his mind where a spark of awareness as dim as the consciousness of an angleworm glimmered.
”

Beautiful, original, oneofakind stuff, “Genesis” alone is worth the purchase price but the essays are a wonderful bonus in that they can be returned to again and again.
Highly recommended! Winner of three O, Henry Awards, the Commonwealth Gold Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Wallace Stegner was a literary giant.
In Marking the Sparrow's Fall, the first collection of Stegner's work published since his death, Stegner's son Page has collected, annotated, and edited fifteen essays that have never before been published in any edition, as well as a littleknown novella and several of Stegner's bestknown essays on the American West.
Seventyfive percent of the contents of this body of work is published here for the first time, What a beautiful collection of essays and stories! I really enjoyed this book, One of my favorite chapters was entitled "Living Dry", A sample:

"The true West differs from the East in one great, pervasive, influential, and awesome way: space, Space is perceptible, and often palpable, especially when it appears empty, and it's that apparent emptiness which makes matter look alone, exiled, and unconnected.
. . But as space diminishes man and his constructions in a material fashion it also paradoxically makes them more noticeable, Things show up out here, . . And what

do you do about aridity, if you are a nation inured to plenty and impatient of restrictions and led westward by pillars of fire and cloud You may deny it for a while.
Then you must either adapt to it or try to engineer it out of existence, "

I was pleasantly surprised by the capturing style and story in the one piece of fiction included in this collection, a nouvelle entitled "Genesis".
Wow! Things I would have never considered about the life of an earlyth century cowboy,

Stegner's philosophical leanings about environment and duty to it need to be understood and considered more today than ever! Photographer and author Stephen Trimble recommended this as part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library's "A Reading List For the President Elect: A Western Primer for the Next Administration".
I picked this book up primarily for the short essay on Bernard Devoto, Stengner does a great job profiling the man, his works, and the political and social battles that man waged, I didn't look at the other essays in this book, though I'm sure some are good, "Backroads of the American West" and "That Great Falls Year" would usually interest me, and maybe I'll get to them one day.
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