The "West": Still Alive in the 20th Century

books:

	• High Country (Literature of the American West) Willard Wyman University of Oklahoma Press, 2008 - 362 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Magnificent Achievement - T. Weck

I admire a spellbinding story where the characters are real, their choices and dilemmas have a grab that keeps you absorbed by their story. Then you add to this a complete understaning of the settings, the profession, the way people behave in the wilderness West, and it becomes an insight into a vanishing breed as an extra bonus beyond being a great story. The prose is as good as it gets - it often has a poetic quality. This book should be a best-seller: that is the bottom line, plain and simple.

High Praise and A Higher Recommendation

Read this. It will stay with you. And it will probably lead you to check internet sites for pack trips into the mountains of western Montana and the Sierras of California so that you can experience what the novel describes and visit with the characters even more closely.

I loved this. One of my favorite reads of the last year. It communicates a life ethic that is 180 degrees from the culturally promoted one of contemporary American life. The persons you meet within its pages will awaken memories of folks from the margins of your life.

I can't say enough good things. It deserves to reach a wide audience. Make sure you've got plenty of time to give to this novel because you'll find you want to keep going and going till you've reached camp.

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High Country

Great book, hard read, must find a place that has no noise, then you will get through, you will enjoy it. Sound like a prop from a college wrote it.
Over all I enjoyed it.

The "West": Still Alive in the 20th Century

At last out in paperback, this unusual novel finally gets a foothold. It's not a "Western" at all. There are no blazing guns, sheriffs, or bad guys. There is just the beauty of the western high country bringing sustenance to a kid farmed out from a depression defeated Montana ranch to a find life packing mules and horses into the mountains. . . . We see the mountains grow into Ty Hardin as he grows into them, even when yanked from them to fight a war he is obliged to fight and which wounds him physically as his mentor, Fenton Pardee, knows it will, somehow. . . . Hardin returns to his high country to repair, and subsequently suffer the failure of a love that cannot be. He soon finds the deeper love of the woman he marries. But that too goes awry, his love dying with their child in a botched delivery. . . . That sadness takes him from the Montana mountains where he found life into the High Sierra, the west's highest range, where he knows life. He becomes a legend and dies there, trying to rescue a drug addled boy who should never have tested a country so high. . . . The book is a startling testament to something we have cherished but have never quite resolved in our literature -- the perennial allure and majesty of the American west.

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High Country a winner

Great book if you love the mountains and enjoy escaping into a great story line with wonderful descriptions of the life of a packer in the mountains. I could not put the book down!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

During the Great Depression, young Ty Hardin is sent from his family's failing Montana ranch to learn from the last of the great packers, Fenton Pardee, a legend in the Montana Rockies. High Country follows Ty through his packing apprenticeship and into World War II. Wounded and shipped home, Ty recovers by packing into the Montana mountains he loves, even as he watches human traffic through them take its ecological toll. After his mentor dies, Ty leaves Montana for the Sierra Nevada--the highest country of all--where he becomes a legend in his own right.

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