Rating: 
Summary: Could not put it down, touching, irritating
Review: Raban has done a great job of researching the story behind these tragic ghost towns. I have hunted and hiked in this area for 25 years and always was curious about the lonely homestead homes in the middle of a windy nowhere. There are some irritations. The Shumachers did not, in fact, move away and there are other, albeit minor, errors. More distracting is Raban's insistance on injecting his big-city leftist political superiority complex as he describes these brave survivors as rednecks that don't even know that they are really welfare mothers nutured by American socialism. Do not let these pimples stop you from reading the book. You will learn a lot.
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: Good, but could be more focused
Review: Raban is a talented writer and his history of the homesteading movement in eastern Montana is compelling and poignant. But like some other writers of popular western history (especially Ian Frazier), he frequently shifts back and forth between historical narrative and anecdotes about his own travels through the region. The families' stories were severe and dramatic enough to be told on their own (especially those of the heartbreakingly inept Worsells). Raban's own misadventures in eastern Montana seem trivial and irrelevant by comparasion.
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.
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.
Rating: 
Summary: A land where humans tried to advance and are in retreat
Review: Raban writes about Montana, and the settlers who came happy but soon left, destitute and disillusioned at the harsh conditions. His comments can apply to the north of the state I live in (South Australia): the mountains and rangelands of the Flinders Ranges. This country was settled in the second half of the last century, on the hope of farming grain and sheep. There were a few years of plenty, then drought forced humans to re-think and retreat. Today the area is renowned for its natural beauty, but has the feel of an empty landscape, and the visitor wonders why. Plenty of local books describe the Flinders today, but it was not until I had read "Bad Land" that I had some understanding of the hopes of settlers, the intense persuasion to go, the reality, and why they decided to leave. Why is "Bad Land" an important book? Much is written about progress, and to-day people think that anything can be done. It is good to be reminded occasionally that there are places where enthusiasm, hard work, the latest technology, abundant finance, and even large amounts of land are not enough to make a go of it, and that humans are still for all their ideas about themselves subject to the forces of the natural world. The book reminds me of "Into thin air", which described a disastrous expedition to climb MtEverest, with many climbers killed by a storm near the summit. The mountaineers placed hope and faith in their technology and expeience, but forgot or were blind to their own frailty. It is interesting that the two books both came out at around the same time.
Rating:
Summary: An exhilirating read
Review: Raban's latest book is an affectionate and respectful telling of life as it was lived by homesteaders in Eastern Montana in the first quarter of this century. His 2-year fixation with the subject matter led to a deeper understanding and acceptance for his new life in Seattle (Raban's originally from England)..which is why, in part, it is subtitled An American Romance. Raban's loving tribute to the hardy souls who staked their fortunes on hand-drawn colored pamphlets luring worn city-dwellers to the dry plains of Montana is one of his best books.
Rating:
Summary: One reason no one likes JP Hill
Review: Raban's such a good writer, I suppose I'd like any book he wrote (I'm going to find out shortly by getting hold of another). And that is the only reason I liked this book since the subject matter -- settlement of the Northern Plains around 1911 - 1920 -- does not, in itself, compel me. But then again, I didn't know much about it, and Raban very nicely introduced us. So many interesting things . . . how the drawing of the North Dakota / Montana state line around the 104th meridian split these otherwise similarly-sited people and diluted their political power; how the initial "wet years" of 1911 - 1914 gave such false hope, leading to such disillusionment, and eventually further emmigration west, as the "dry years" ensued and blew away their topsoil with their dreams; how they didn't wander into the area, but rather, were seduced into it by the railroads' (read JP Hill's) misrepresentation of the climate and land, the ease of "firming up" one's rather large homestead claim (hundreds of acres for a song), and the new "scientific" method of "dry farming" which promised to re-create the arcadia these settlers remembered from Europe. And I never thought much about hard it would be to build miles of barbed-wire-and-wood-post fences in a land without trees.Raban argues that this suckering of the little people by the railroads/federal government accounts for the fierce anti-federalism of the seemingly-many up in that area today; that the memory has passed through the generations. So many other memories and ways of life have perservered there on the ranches and such, he may be right. As to Paul Theroux, Raban says they have been friends for "decades." Raban's writing here is similar to Theroux's in the ironic and honest observations that help propel the narrative. But Raban never says anything like, "I felt like throwing the little old lady off the train."
Rating:
Summary: The old and the new West revealed.
Review: The world, it seems, is replete with images of the American West. In the age of film and television you don't have to have been born in the United States to recognise the iconography of long, stretched shadows from sunsets slipping through the buttes and prairieland of Montana or Wyoming or Utah. The book Bad Land by British-born Jonathan Raban, therefore presents nothing new, until, as it does, it scratches at a little of that image, through the dry high-plains dirt and grime to reveal the people behind the landscape; the flesh and lives and stories of individuals who endured the cold, the wind, the loneliness. Raban's exquisite descriptions of the Montana terrane of the late 1800s reflect the almost fruitless attempts of immigrants to tame those wilds. Having lived and worked in Montana I found the portrayal of this region disturbing; not because of its inaccuracies (they fit almost exactly with my memories) but with how little the landscape was really changed by those honyockers (homesteaders). It is evident that the book was not just researched, it has been lived. Raban over many years travelled from his home in Seattle, Washington to those sand washed prairie beaches of central and eastern Montana. One feels his ghost intermingling with the spirits of last century as he slips in and out of roofless, sundried timber cabins set in the tall, mostly snake filled grasses of abandoned ranches. If there is fault in this book, it is that it sometimes slips too far into the minutiae of the lost lives of people, who we somehow feel, we never or could never have known; these are people so unlike most of us - willing to rush headlong into something we can not fathom. We travel with Raban not only eastward from Seattle but backward in time to view the west through such players as Evelyn Cameron and her amateur, but surprisingly surreal, photographs of the infant west. We walk in the shoes of the displaced and lonely; immigrants who were wooed by flashy railroad pamphlets that were spread all over Europe like so many modern day get-rich schemes. Some things, like the landscape, seem never to change. Ultimately, bad land is a book about people. And the details of their lives are bought to life by Raban. Perhaps it takes a non-American to see a specialness in seemingly dreary, worn and weather-beaten people and land. For those wanting to know what the American West was and is now like, this book will be more than just a pleasurable read, it will beckon you to travel there and seek yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: This book was as dry as the Montana plains...
Review: This book is ideal for the rugged history major who loved reading required college history books. Raban has put a lot of hard work and research into this tale of the Northwest plains, but his interpretation of that research leaves much to be desired. I had to keep telling myself that this is a history book, not a novel. But even then, with the poor introductions and follow-throughs, the shifts in thought, and writing that reads as if no editor touched it, this is a book you'll want to read when there is nothing else around to read.
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