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: 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: 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.
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.
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