Rating: 
Summary: creative history
Review: It was this style of story telling that tuned me into history books rather than away from them. I really enjoyed the way this story was told through conceptual chapters--not chronologically--and through the people who lived there. I did find some chapters more interesting than others, particularly the "pictures" one since photography is one of my passions.
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: 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: Bad Land: Good Book
Review: Oh me, oh my, what a fine book. Rather than waxing rhapsodic, let me pay tribute to this spare and beautiful book in an appropriately spare way. Raban's "Bad Land" is clear-eyed, direct, honest, personal, and winsomely funny. In writing down the bones of the American West, Jonathan Raban has created an American classic.
Rating:
Summary: Mr. Raban made me want to visit the Bad Lands!
Review: On page one Mr. Raban writes: Brown cows nibbled at their shadows on the open range. I spent a great deal of time thinking about that...not wasting time, but enjoying time. The plains area of our great country has always interested me--not so much for the climate but for the appearance. The plains are continual, uninterrupted and meditative. Mr. Raban used words to describe the area in a way that paints a perfect image and makes one want to go there. He writes "it was so empty that two strangers could feel thay had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon." Just imagine!
I needed to reference my Webster's dictionary often. I highlighted all the new words Mr. Raban taught me. Words like: "polyglot" when describing the crowd on a emigrant train car.
For anyone longing to know about the Bad Land (Montana and North Dakota), how is was settled, the people and culture I recommend reading Bad Land. Mr. Raban listed several publications that helped him complete his book. I ordered one called Photographing Montana 1894 - 1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron by Donna M. Lucey because I was intrigued by his description of her artistry and cannot wait to see it.
Thank you Mr. Raban for taking the time to research and write Bad Land: An American Romance
Rating: 
Summary: A thoughtful and reflective insight of homesteading.
Review: Raban captured my interest in his first paragraphs. His insights and thoughtful musings on homesteading life and the politics and national dynamics at the turn of the century shed new light on a section of the west I had previously thought of merely as desolate. Excellent reading through the first 3/4 of the book. In the last portion, however, Raban lost my interest with his stereotyping of conservatives and categorizing conservatives of all types with right-wing militants. The book was otherwise too well written to deserve this bit of inappropriate commentary. Editing this portion of ill-fitting bias out would have saved the day.
Rating:
Summary: Comparable to the best of John McPhee. A great book.
Review: Raban captures the stories of the people who settled Montana as well as the nature of the land. A few years agon, it was this land that prompted me to ride my bicycle 400 miles in 4 days. While the scenery doesn't change too quickly, Raban writes a fine appreciation of the territory and its people. (He also discusses the brilliant scientific theory that the rain will follow the plow.)
Rating:
Summary: Missed the Bigger story
Review: Raban does not comment on the collapse of commodity prices after 1917, which is really what crushed these homesteaders. Further, the Milwaukee Road did not mislead anyone, as Raban seems to suggest, the land was, for a generation, lush; Montana produced nearly twice as much wheat per acre as Iowa, for instance, and it was considered a higher quality. This productivity lasted from the Milwaukee's entry in 1905 through 1917. But, even if there had not been a drought beginning in 1917, the crisis would have happened when wheat prices dropped from over $2 a bushel to less than a $1.00, even as low as 63 cents, during a period of 100% inflation in farming expenses. Abundant rain would not have changed what happened to the Honyockers in Eastern Montana, and Raban, unfairly, did not point this important fact out. The collapse in commodity prices crushed the farmers more surely than anything else. Raban fails to note that during wet years that followed, in the early 20's, the banks kept right on failing, the remaining homesteaders continued to give up. All regions of American agriculture have had wet years followed by dry; the statistical record does not suggest that it was unusual that agriculture, anywhere, was affected periodically by unfavorable weather conditions such as drought; although Raban seems surprised, and blames the Milwaukee Railroad for this event. Raban tells an interesting story, and tells it well, but misread what actually was happening. And he didn't understand that transcontinental railroads such as the Milwaukee were looking for long haul freight. Hauling bulky, low value commodities was not the reason it built through eastern Montana. Good land, bad land, the Milwaukee built to Butte, Montana and to the North Pacific Coast to get long haul, high tariff traffic. Overall: very good writing, interesting story; bad research, faulty premise.
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.
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