Rating: 
Summary: Good, but could be more focused
Review: "Badlands" is a captivating account of the great con perpetrated by the USA government and big business, working in cahoots, primarily against emigrants from Britain and Europe who were deceived by the prospect held out to them of a new life in eastern Montana as homesteaders farming free, fertile land. The reality was that the new railways running through the dry prairies of eastern Montana depended on passengers and freight for survival and this required the land to be populated and worked. The stark truth was that the promised land was dry and dusty, with little rainfall - totally unsuitable as farming land. Unbeknown to the emigrants, they would end up owning "all the dust, rock and parched grass you could see, and more." Thousands of attractive, glossy brochures were distributed far and wide across the USA and Europe promoting the golden dream of riches and prosperity as being there for the taking, just waiting to be snapped up. James J. Hill, the notorious railway magnate, lauded the homesteader scheme as "opening the vaults of a treasury and bidding each man help himself." People were so taken in by the prospect of riches in the new world dangled before them in glossy "golden" presentations and pictures that they were prepared to uproot their lives and their families and risk their lot on "a landscape in a book." They had no conception of what they were letting themselves in for.Raban is at his best re-creating the great adventure west to eastern Montana, his imagery of that vast, forbidding terrain capturing the landscape in all its moods. He recaptures the arrival of the emigrants by train, taking us into their lives as they try to live out their dream, building their homesteads, fencing their land, borrowing to fund the buying of stock, seed and gasoline tractors and struggling to farm their barren land. Raban brings to life the difficult years that followed the early optimism, reliving how the homesteaders - against the odds of the raking northwind, the cold of Montana "like a boot in the face", the dust, the dry land, the drought years, the dying cattle, the swarms of grasshoppers ("For every hopper killed it seemed like an entire family came to the funeral") - battled in vain to build a fragile, ordered world only to see it crumble rapidly around them within the space of a decade or so. Defeated, most homesteaders quit in the period 1917-1928 and headed further west. It was like coming out of a bad dream. Their bible, "Campbell's soil culture manual", the bestselling guide to husbanding dry land had proved to be a piece of absolute twaddle but too late, did the truth finally dawn that it was the "half-baked theory of a pseudo-scientific crank." By the 90's, when Raban visited eastern Montana, the homesteads were reverting back to nature: odd fenceposts, rusty harrows and derelict houses the only visible remnants of the homesteaders' hopes and dreams. "Bad Land" could, and should have been, a pure, undiluted five star classic account of the homesteader's tragic experience and for the most part it is but it occasionally, irritatingly, strays into unnecessary technical detail and lengthy digressions on, for example, "Campbell's Soil Culture Manual", Photography, and Ismay's attempt to re-invent itself under the new name of "Joe" (Montana), rather than remaining firmly yoked to the central theme of the homesteader's tragic experience - the last part of the book is a further illustration of this kind of distraction. Still recommended though!
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: As someone who is interested in the history and development of rural areas as well as a devoted lover of rural life, Johnathan Rabin's "Bad Lands" provides a unique historical and cultural look at Montana. Rabin starts off with the extension of the homestead act in 1909 which lured thousands of immigrants out west. Tracing the colorful histories of many of these families that settled Montana, Rabin makes the characters in his study come alive through personal and historical ancedotes. As a writer, Rabin is excellent. Taking a refreshingly non-political stance which is much different from some of his contemporaries (i.e., Terry Tempest Williams), Rabin has a knack for colorful description which is the hallmark of every good nature writer. His lament of the homesteaders, particulary in the "dirty thirties," is subtle and nuanced. The end of the book, which looks at present day Montana culture, speaks volumes to the sociological and cultural trends which the homesteaders founded. The inherent conservatism and pragmatism of rural culture is shown in its own words. Rabin, being a truly objective writer, lets the interviewees speak for themselves and their land.
Rating:
Summary: A stark yet romantic vision of America...haunting
Review: Bad Land: An American Romance, by Jonathan Raban, is at once informative and poetic, starkly beautiful and bleak, sympathetic yet harsh, heartbreaking yet enjoyable, historic yet immediately relevant, personal yet broadly relevant, regional yet universal, factual yet romantic (even surrealistic). In sum, this book is a masterpiece, and richly deserving of its many awards. If you want to understand the landscape and life of the American west (particularly the Montana/Dakotas area), you should read this book. In fact, if you want to gain a better understanding not just of the west, but of AMERICA (particularly rural America, but also many of the prevailing myths and values which have permeated or at least influenced ALL of America) itself, you should read this book. Bad Land first and foremost is a book about land. Specifically, BAD land, in many ways. Harsh, unforgiving, stark, cold, lonely, dry. Never enough rain. Or too much at once. An at-best marginal ("semi-arid") land for farming that greedy people (mainly the railroads) used to lure naïve (or desperate, or bored, or restless, or ambitious, or crazy, or idealistic) immigrants to with printed glossy brochures, distributed all over the United States and Europe, translated into German, Russian, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish,etc., and filled with romantic pictures of "free, rich farmland" with such "attractive details, that readers would commit their families and their life savings, sight unseen." And come they did, by the thousands, homesteaders ("honyockers") lured also by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 (passed "after a great deal of lobbying by the railroad companies"), out to make their fortune in what was touted as practically a land flowing with milk and honey. Of course, since this was patently not true, the vast majority of "honyockers" failed, and Raban is a master of describing people's romantic dreams, efforts, and - for most -their ultimate, heartbreaking failure. But even more than a history, this book is a meditation on humans and their attempt to subdue (or at least coexist with) an uncaring, unforgiving, fickle nature. In a way, this book isn't even really about the American west per se; rather, it is about man - sometimes noble, sometimes greedy, sometimes clever, sometimes stupid, sometimes a loner or misfit, etc. And it is about hopes, dreams, individual lives, ghost towns, ghosts, aesthetics (largely of the vast prairie landscape, dirt, shadows, sunsets, and barbed-wire fences), fantasy, reality, myth-making, faith (blind and otherwise), technology, water, soil, and weather (among many other things). Incredible that Jonathan Raban is able to capture so much in one 358-page book; this was obviously a labor of love, one that Raban immersed himself in, and which you will find yourself immersed in as well!
Rating: 
Summary: Worth reading if you know the area
Review: I enjoyed reading this book as I have hunted in the area for 30 years and have often stumbled across the decaying homesteads. I always wondered about the stories behind those graveyards of dreams and Raban has finally told the story. Parts of the story are very well told. I cannot get the image of the mother crying and praying for rain out of my mind. For this I am very grateful and I have purchased and recommended this book for many friends. The reason that I give it only a 3 rating is that there are loose ends regarding the families, some errors on the family histories, and a highly distracting leftist arrogance that runs through the writing. This is consistent with Raban making the evil railroads the great satan of the whole story and it also pops up in totally irrelevant ways. Residents of Ismay have told me that they refused to buy the book because they found Raban to be such a pretentious jerk. That may explain why he did not really finish the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not up to usual Raban standards
Review: Let me say first that I love Jonathan Raban's writing. I devoured Hunting Mister Heartbreak. Passage to Juneau was a great companion to my (rather pedestrian) cruise to Alaska. And I am currently in a vicarious voyage down the Great Mississippi via Old Glory. But Bad Land was a disappointment like the promises made by the railroads to those eastern European settlers. It was dry like the farming techniques meant to coax crops out of the half-sections. I just did not enjoy this to the extent that I have with other Raban books.
Rating: 
Summary: Stream of Consciousness!
Review: My earlier acquaintance with Jonathon Raban's work lead me into this book with the hope that it would offer a well written and compelling discussion of his chosen subject. I'm dissappointed. It is a rambling stream of consciousness, discursive, lacking structure and focus. The reviews inside the front cover, from the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times Spectator, and Scotland on Sunday - all suffer from the same quality of dubious veracity, that tainted the efforts of the railroad companies and the US Federal Government, to attract settlers to the featureless and infertile plains of Montana.
I rate this book a waste of reading time.
Rating:
Summary: Stream of Consciousness!
Review: My earlier acquaintance with Jonathon Raban's work lead me into this book with the hope that it would offer a well written and compelling discussion of his chosen subject. I'm dissappointed. It is a rambling stream of consciousness, discursive, lacking structure and focus. The reviews inside the front cover, from the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times Spectator, and Scotland on Sunday - all suffer from the same quality of dubious veracity, that tainted the efforts of the railroad companies and the US Federal Government, to attract settlers to the featureless and infertile plains of Montana.
I rate this book a waste of reading time.
Rating:
Summary: Terry, MT. 1921
Review: Raban has crafted a book very much like "PrairyErth"; what William Least-Heat Moon has done for Chase County, Kansas, Jonathan Raban has mimicked for Southeastern Montana. It is a "deep map" of a region long ignored by the rest of the country. At the turn of the century the railroads and the Expanded Homestead Act filled the northern prairie with immigrants and urban refugees. Raban has made it his business to return to the area and visit with the survivors of the economics and politics of dry farming. The descendants of the homesteaders through two generations were sculpted by the land into a new people. This is their story. Put this book up on your shelf next to your collection of John McPhee.
Rating:
Summary: A fine essay but a so-so book
Review: Raban is a beautiful writer and he has captured the eastern Montana badlands spectacularly but there's not enough here to justify the book; his thesis, to the extent he has one just can't bear the weight and the last 60 pages are just plain irritating. It would have made a better essay and personally, I was disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Homesteaders Were Tough!
Review: Raban tells a great story of how homesteaders were lured from eastern cities to the Great Plains by the railroad interests. They promised arable land and a scientific method of farming that would produce plenty from marginal ground. My favorite anecdote is how the "section farmers" would use the wire of their boundary fences as crude telephone conductor so they could ring each other and make dinner invitations. This is a great book that reads like a novel. Everytime I drive through the plains and see abandoned farms I think of this book and the people who once lived there.
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