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William Kittredge, the distinguished writer of the American West, revisits the ranch life of his youth, set in the remote Warner Valley, "a hidden world" in which "landlocked waters flow from snowy mountains to the west but don't find a way out to the sea." In that rugged landscape, won by violence against both humankind and nature, Kittredge's family constructed myths, stories of how they came to be in that faraway place. Through those stories, he learned that accepted notions of patriotism and loyalty were less important than the values of community and generosity, and that, as Emerson observed, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
Kittredge turns from personal memoir to a consideration of a subject to which he has devoted much time since the 1960s: the reigning myths of the American West, myths of rugged individualism in a land governed by corporations, myths of wide-open spaces in a region ravaged by the economy of extraction. Against those myths he poses the West's realities, and what he finds is not comforting: Kittredge offers an antitextbook history, a narrative in which "endless ruination was visited on the land, indigenous people were left to lives of impossible poverty, and the money and power went off to the East."
Kittredge's essay seamlessly joins environmental polemic, history, literature, and autobiography to offer an ultimately hopeful view of a troubled region in search of itself. Editor Scott Slovic, a scholar of Western American and environmental literature, adds to it a bibliography of Kittredge's published work. --Gregory McNamee
From Library Journal
Edited by Scott Slovic (director, Ctr. for Environmental Arts and Humanities, Univ. of Nevada, Reno), the "Credo" series presents a writer's opinions, beliefs, and philosophy of writing and includes a biographical profile and complete bibliography of the author's published works. In this latest entry, Kittredge conveys the importance of both his family and the American West in developing his values and convictions, moving from his early days in a one-room schoolhouse building playtime ditches and levee banks with his cousins to teaching at the University of Montana to lecturing at conferences on Western geography. Throughout, he stresses the need for stories to "encourage us to understand that we are part of everything." Stories direct our actions, he argues, serving as a connector to disparate parts of our lives. They are essential for the survival of our society. The bibliography includes short stories, Western novels, and literary essays. Recommended for public and academic libraries, particularly where Western literature is popular.ACynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
paper 1-57131-232-3 Kittredge (Who Owns the West?, 1995, etc.) explores what makes his pen flow in this third contribution to Milkweed's Credo series. In picking up the series themehow the dance of the human community with the natural world has influenced writersKittredge details the ways his essays, memoirs, and meditations on the American West have been shaped by his youth in Oregon's Warner Valley, where strawberries ripened in the dark peat soil of his family's ranch, meadows sported wild hay, and lilacs bloomed under a sky racing with clouds. For Kittredge, the valley was sanctuary, paradise, an embrace of place he still yearns for: ``To be welcome in the world as I think I was when I was a child. . . . I wanted the world to be that good. Still do.'' Kittredge ruined his land as a young farmerturned his soil saline from over-irrigation, poisoned it with pesticides, eradicated the coyotes and badgers in even nastier waysbut stopped upon realizing he was killing one of the ``small settlements, many rough-edged and isolated, held together by hard-handed self-respect, and not much money.'' Both his life and writing came to reflect his sense that ``exploration and rethinking were the point of things.'' And this is clear from his books, which, while whiskery and often sentimental, are earnest, attentive, and ruminative. For Kittredge, our storiesfrom cultural hallmarks to everyday utterancesbespeak our system of values, and our conduct toward the land is the measure of our decency: ``We all know a lot of stories and we're in trouble when we don't know which one is ours. Or when the one we inhabit doesn't work anymore.'' Kittredge's hope is to add his voice to a coherent myth our society can inhabit. His writings embody his sincerity. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
In Taking Care, William Kittredge relates his coming of age on a property his family transformed from a farm dependent on horses to a modern agribusiness. Painfully reflecting on the abandonment of old ways, Kittredge calls for new, radical stories about the West that will foster compassion and caretaking.
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