Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 256 pages
- Published by: Houghton Mifflin
- Edition: 1st Edition July 3, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0618596755
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0618596751
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Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 14.4 ounces
Product Description
A passionate memoir about the great divides in Rick Bass's beloved Yaak Valley, the West as a whole, and himself.
A poignant look at the thirty-year journey of one of our country's great naturalist writers,Why I Came West explores how Rick Bass 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 headed west in search of something visceral, true, and real. He found it in the remote Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, a unique place, neither national park nor government- sanctioned wilderness, 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 a series of moving chapters describes his own transformation into the writer, hunter, and environmental activist that he is today. He profiles 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, just beyond whatever was near it; and he describes his role as a reluctant environmental activist—sometimes at odds with his own neighbors—unable and unwilling to stand idly by and watch this treasured place disappear.
About The Author
RICK BASS is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and his 2002 collection, The Hermit's Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass's stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.
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