Bad Land: An American Romance (1996)

Account of early settlers drawn to the Dakotas by unreasonable brochures and the hardships they faced. ( )

Early 20th Century settlers were lured to the Montana area for free land for settlement.
Over the years, the harsh conditions were too much for the majority of them
The author has returned to the area with a comprehensive report from the people who remained to settle these remote areas. ( )

I really enjoyed parts of this book and thought that it dealt with some of the issues in South Africa really well but I felt that the sections on the character's adult life were over-analysed and a bit over the top. The childhood section was good but also a bit overly poetic and symbolic at times - I felt the characters were overly self aware which made it a bit unrealistic. I enjoyed it though.

This book has taught me more about the American past than all my studies taken together. Maybe several assumptions in the train of thought, but highly plausible and well-researched. As for the writing - I'm glad he hasn't decided to present his findings in scholarly prose, as Schama would. Makes it all the more readable and enjoyable without making it less scholarly!

Like Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," I still can't really tell you what this book "is" or why I liked it so much. I suppose its most proper generic category would be "cultural geography," which is really a short-hand way of saying travelogue/memoir/biography/political history.

What makes it so different from other histories is that the main character is a PLACE rather than a PERSON. And in an era of character-driven literature, such a focus makes this book both odd and oddly compelling.

It doesn't hurt anything that Raban writes with that remarkable verve and clarity peculiar to the British, though he's lived a good while in the USA. And it probably didn't hurt anything either that I also grew up on another patch of homestead territory, the south-central plains of Nebraska, once identified on maps as part of the "Great American Desert." If I replaced the name "Wollaston" with "Broeker" or "Bose," I'd be well-nigh telling stories of my grandfather's neighbors.

However, I think Raban's narrative is so compelling because he has uncovered here something essential to the American character...a kind of stubbornness both admirable and pitiable, a deep-set dreaminess that lives on after any particular manifestation of itself has gone bust. And, in that sense, the book becomes a crucial piece of "American" literature, destined, I believe, to a place of honor in the hall of American letters.

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