BUCKING THE SUN: A NOVEL CASSETTE

Rating:
Summary: Not what I had hoped, but I'll try again...
Review: "Bucking the Sun" starts with the discovery of two bodies and the promise of a mystery to be solved. I was hooked after reading the first chapter. However, the mystery reappeared once in the next 350 pages or so. In the meantime, I learned about dam building, New Deal projects , and Comunist politics of the era.

On the plus side, Mr. Doig certainly knows his subjects well. He develops interesting characters and relationships and weaves it all into a complex novel.

I was left feeling like I'd been teased with the mystery which turned out to be little more than a footnote. Also, I'd have to say I didn't find the author's style all that easy.

On whole, though, the book was worthwhile and I'll try another of his works.

Rating:
Summary: Sum of its Parts
Review: A fine novel worth your time, but definitely not a mystery book. Sure the first 10 pages describe a murder scene, but there's nothing to solve. Actually, it doesn't get solved, it's lived with, and really that can be said for much of what the Duff family experiences.

All members of the family Duff are unique, as are their relationships. All are enjoyable with only the Scottish Uncle seeming a little too polished; his dialogue a little too precise. But that's a quibble because overall, Doig does very well with his characters. Throw in the dam as another major character and Montana itself, and you have a book worth your time; a great tableau of the 1930s Depression in America.

And if you know what the cover of the first Life Magazine looks like, you know Fort Peck. Doig weaves many real events into his fiction including a visit by FDR, a major dam mishap, and a visit from a Life photographer.

Rating:
Summary: Sum of its Parts
Review: A fine novel worth your time, but definitely not a mystery book. Sure the first 10 pages describe a murder scene, but there's nothing to solve. Actually, it doesn't get solved, it's lived with, and really that can be said for much of what the Duff family experiences.

All members of the family Duff are unique, as are their relationships. All are enjoyable with only the Scottish Uncle seeming a little too polished; his dialogue a little too precise. But that's a quibble because overall, Doig does very well with his characters. Throw in the dam as another major character and Montana itself, and you have a book worth your time; a great tableau of the 1930s Depression in America.

And if you know what the cover of the first Life Magazine looks like, you know Fort Peck. Doig weaves many real events into his fiction including a visit by FDR, a major dam mishap, and a visit from a Life photographer.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful writing, okay plot
Review: I just did not like this book as much as I had hoped to. Doig writes wonderfully and he has a terrific sense of character and setting, but all too often the story lacked a sense of direction. The murder subplot seemed hardly more than an afterthought and I thought the book would have been much improved had it been more fully incorporated. I find the construction of dams very interesting, so I was really looking forward to learning about them while enjoying the story, but it did not work. I think the problem others have with the focus on the dam is that Doig never actually explains its construction in clear, understandable detail, a la Crichton. Its always just bits and pieces that never fit with a coherent whole. In sum, good, definitely not great.

Rating:
Summary: Bucking The Sun, A GoodRead
Review: I read this because my parents were at Ft Peck in 1933 where my dad worked as an engineer. My parents were "very proper" city people. My mother talked about living in a 24' X 24' construction shack, bathing in a wash tub in water heated from the stove, and hanging clothes to dry where they froze and the ice evaporated in the dry Montana air.

This story brought their experiences to light in a unique way. The Ft Peck area in 1933 Montana was Wild West beyond my imagination. The author brings it to life, weaving a family life, the dynamics of the area, the happenings of the 1930 and a mystery into a wonderful vivid novel.

I highly recommend Bucking the Sun to anyone interested in spending a few hours in such a story.

Andy

Rating:
Summary: Bucking The Sun, A GoodRead
Review: I read this because my parents were at Ft Peck in 1933 where my dad worked as an engineer. My parents were "very proper" city people. My mother talked about living in a 24' X 24' construction shack, bathing in a wash tub in water heated from the stove, and hanging clothes to dry where they froze and the ice evaporated in the dry Montana air.

This story brought their experiences to light in a unique way. The Ft Peck area in 1933 Montana was Wild West beyond my imagination. The author brings it to life, weaving a family life, the dynamics of the area, the happenings of the 1930 and a mystery into a wonderful vivid novel.

I highly recommend Bucking the Sun to anyone interested in spending a few hours in such a story.

Andy

Rating:
Summary: Will It Ever End ?
Review: Ivan Doig, as usual, writes great sentences and very good paragraphs. However, once he gets beyond 200 pages, the whole story drags. I liked his shorter books very much, and waited until I had several weeks of free time to tackle this longer work, knowing it would be slow going. It turned out to be even slower reading than I expected. Doig obviously learned a lot from Stegner about constructing long, complex sentences out of unfamiliar words ( or non-words on all too many occasions ) that have to be parsed carefully to suck out all the nuances of meaning, which works well for a short book of poetry but fails in a work of this length. After a while, the reader just wants the torture to end, but there is no way to hurry through Doig's convoluted poetry/prose. Doig's characters are at once totally unbelievable and exactly like my Scotch-Irish relatives, who are also unbelievable, or at least highly improbable in their actions and reasoning processes. In short, a book half as long would have been better.
Charlie A Allen

Rating:
Summary: Make room in the pantheon....
Review: Make room in the pantheon of great western American novels for Bucking The Sun. Doig's novel deserves to be included with the other master works: Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose, Guterson's Snow Falling On Cedars and Ferber's Giant.

Doig begins with a mystery and a scandel, but masterfully, he does not over-emphasize the real story, the story of the Duff family. I found his mystery pacing something like a catch-and-release effect--once he caught me and had me reading, he released me to explore the family story.

And the story has several layers that make for an enjoyable novel that will satisfy on many levels: The era of the 1930s, the inner-actions of the family, politics of the era, rich dialogue (Doig has a marvelous ear for language!) and of course, the mystery/scandel.

Final advice: read it when you have extended time periods. This is for the readers who loves a grand-scale novel.

Rating:
Summary: Overview of "Bucking the Sun"
Review: The Great Depression caused nearly every family in the U. S. to loose their money and possessions. Most of America was poverty stricken, having to beg for food and money from others who were barley scraping by. The president during this dark time in our nation's history was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He knew reform was needed so he started handing out government money creating jobs for the American people. One such example of Roosevelt's reform was the Fort Peck dam in Montana. Here Ivan Doig's Bucking the Sun sets the stage for the Duff family, and focuses on the relationships of the family with the dam and each other. The theme of nature, the personified dam and the symbols created by the family members becomes evident as Doig uses fragments of his personal history to create this epic novel which is often compared to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The stream of consciousness, described by Doig himself as "poetry under prose", lets us know each character better so that we can clearly understand their actions. The novel opens with the makeshift town of Wheeler , finding a truck in the water with two dead and naked Duffs inside. From there the novel flashes back to before the dam was built and the government moving everyone off the land, including the headstrong and ornery Hugh Duff. Hugh does not like the idea of the dam especially because his oldest son Owen is the fillmaster on the project. For the first time the dam emerges as a person which influences and effects everyone's life that it comes near. Owen is obsessed with the project of the Fort Peck dam. He is so involved in it that he is willing to leave his new wife Charlene in order to work on it. This dam is the only thing Owen Duff really loves. When the Duff family, like millions of other, comes to work on the dam, Owen emerges as the voice of reason, seemingly the only stable person in the family. The river is a theme that ties everyone in the novel together and pulls the people towards the dam. This whimsical water is loved by some such as Owen and his younger brother Bruce, and hated by others. The Missouri River is what pulls the Duff family back together and even brings about new additions. Bruce and his twin Neil both find love on the river. The prospect of new jobs inspires Hugh's brother Darius to travel from Scotland to work on the bridge. Darius' politically troubled past also follows him to America at a time when workers were trying to gain a place for themselves and their unions, sometimes even through communism. This novel correctly depicts the essence of the Depression Era by following the colorful lives of the people who lived in it. It describes every type of people from ranch-hand, to prostitute, and even to left-winged communists. Bucking the Sun was very long and detailed with technical jargon. I felt that many of the characters were not as developed as they could have been. For instance, Rosellen's attachment to her writing was never fully explained. It seemed to me that she merely wrote because there was interesting things to write about, and she was never that hurt when her stories were turned down. The passages written about the family history were a burden to read because it rarely served a purpose, I know I could have gotten by without the excerpts. All in all the book was well written and it did provide an insight to the minds of the people who lived in America during the Great Depression. I would recommend this book to historians that want to get a mindset of the people of this era, but beware readers, this book is definitely uncensored.

Rating:
Summary: Epic Tale- Not A Mystery
Review: This book is the story of the Duff family and its experiences building the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, a public works project in the 1930s. The Duffs are a family of three grown brothers, their parents, their Scottish uncle, and the women who marry into the Duff family over the course of the book. Everyone in the extended family works in some role at the Dam, one as an engineer and the rest as laborers. Doig interweaves details about the mechanics of building of a dam into the story. The book starts with a murder that gets solved at the end of the book, but that turns out to be incidental to the story.

I had a lot of trouble getting through this book, even though I usually find books with complex family relationships interesting, and even though I was somewhat interested in how a dam gets built. I'm not sure what it was missing, but I found that I never really got an understanding of the characters and what motivated them. I was completely uninterested in the resolution of the murder, and upon finding out who had done it, I found it under-motivated through the book. The book focused on the men in the family, and never really developed the women characters, which was especially disappointing for me. Maybe men who like things to be unspoken will like this book better than I did.