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Summary: a hymn to healing and the outdoors
Review: a gorgeous book. The prose is exquisite and, as another reviewer notes, poetic. This is a lot like Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but more readable, less mannered.
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Summary: Wonderful and evocative
Review: Erlich brings Wyoming to life in powerful, luminous, unvarnished prose. She conjurs a rich world of survival beyond the pampered Jackson Hole Tetons. Quiet and powerful, a beautiful work of natural and self exploration.
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Summary: A woman in Wyoming
Review: Gretel Ehrlich does for the state of Wyoming what other writers have done for other states: Terry Tempest Williams for Utah, Robert Michael Pyle for Washington, Bernd Heinrich for Maine, Jennifer Price for California, Scott Russell Sanders for Indiana. She has given it a space on the literary map. In this book she makes no really brilliant discoveries, which isn't surprising given that she is a relative newcomer to the ranch life she attempts to describe. She can be faulted, I think, for her idealized depiction of the lifestyle and landscape on a Wyoming ranch, and she never addresses some of the hard issues, such as reconciling the ranchers' alleged intimacy with the land with their pillage of that same land. But the prose is beautiful, and her insights about people and landscape are sound. I would tentatively recommend this book, but if you haven't read anything by Terry Tempest Williams, read her books first.
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Summary: A love affair with Wyoming
Review: Gretel Erlich was a poet and filmmaker when she first came to Wyoming in 1976. She was so taken with everything about the place that she became a cowherd, which gave her time to write about the American West. Reading her books, however, is very much like seeing a film, for her filmmaker's eye and awareness of nuance and gesture is evident in the way she chooses her words.
In The Solace of Open Spaces, Erlich presents us with an eclectic bunch of frontier characters that she met while working as a ranch hand. Almost unaware of what's been accomplished, we readers find ourselves shedding former stereotypes of these people in exchange for seeing them for what they are: unique, quirky, interesting, inexplicable men and women. The Weather (and the word deserves that capital letter, as you'll see upon reading the book) plays as large a role as the people in Ehrlich's book.
About the title: When she arrived in Wyoming, Erlich was grieving the death of someone important to her. As she works hard at physical labor, meets new people, falls in love with the land, and sheds her past like sweat running down her back, healing from grief occurs - although she doesn't exactly say this.
Altogether, a beautiful book and a wonderful read.
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Summary: An exceptional writer's close-up observations of ranch life
Review: I discovered this book while working as a tour guide in Wyoming, and found that it captured the spirit of the place beautifully. Ehrlich is an outsider-turned-insider, which I learned from her writing and from accounts of Wyoming natives who knew her and indeed respect her. Her accounts take you to shepherding and into a Native American sun dance ritual; fascinating stuff and there's much more. Her prose is highly poetic. My wife and I have recommended this book to many people over the years, and each person has thanked us profusely for the advice. That includes a New York native who moved to Montana, and he, too feels that this book captures the heart of the region.
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Summary: The Beauty of Harsh Country
Review: I first learned of this book from a wizened sheep rancher and shearer discussed in one of Ehrlich's vignettes, and expected a trite outsider's view of this area. (I live not too many miles from where she lived during most of the book). As I feasted on the author's prose, though, I was thrilled to find that I was wrong.This is a spirited, moving, and perceptive portrait of a land that can be both hostile and nurturing, and those people who have become a part of the country. The author relates her responses to the land, tying these reactions to emotional transformations she experienced as she learned the territory and its ways. Yes, the book is good as a travelogue. However, it really excels in its analysis of a land and its people. Ehrlich's book both confirmed and sharpened the impressions I had developed as I learned about my new home. Wherever you live, this is an excellent book for you to read.
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Summary: Well Written
Review: I first read this book when i was a junior in college. It was my last block of the year. When i first though of Nature Writing i think of Transcendentalism with Thoreau and Emerson. Though this book among others changed my mind.
Ehrlich writes of living in Montana and during cattle drives. The details of life in the far west are great. The descriptions of what cow hands do with a years worth of money still, by blowing it on booze and fun it great. The book can be slow at times, yet I feel that this is deliberate in that cattle herding can be slow. In some ways the books is evenly paced. When she talks about the reasons for going to Montana to live there for a time one has to wonder if you, yourself, could do that. I know that for me the answer would be no.
This book is for anyone who likes reading about American Nature Writers.
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Summary: Wyoming ranchlife seen with a poetic filmmaker's eye
Review: I found "The Solace of Open Spaces" while searching amazon.com for books about living on the Great Plains. Cowboys, ranchlife, the turn of the seasons, and a poetic sensibility in describing all of them were what I was looking for, and this book delivers on all of that very nicely. Ehrlich, born and raised in California, retains her outsider's eye for detail, and is able to translate the perspective of someone trained in documentary filmmaking very effectively into the medium of words. In these essays about Wyoming, the imagery of mountain and plain and weather calls to mind the sweeping landscapes of John Ford movies. I especially enjoyed Ehrlich's portrayal of cowboys and sheep herders, all very different from the stereotypes we know from Marlboro ads, "Bonanza," and movie westerns. She finds cowboys often tender-hearted, quirky, and curiously chivalrous. Not to be outdone by the men, the women she meets and befriends are tough-minded and inde! pendent. Completing the picture are the native Americans, whom she portrays respectfully and with an ironic appreciation for incongruity, as they both recover and reinvent their lost heritage. Hers is also a personal story. Beginning with the wrenching death of a close male friend, it recounts in her growing love for Wyoming and its people the discovery of a new life. And while her book is no heart-on-the-sleeve display of pain and recovery, one senses at almost every step the healing process that underlies the words. As slender as a book of poems, this volume of essays calls out to be read slowly and savored, word for word. I am pleased to recommend it.
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Summary: Better Has Been Written
Review: I'm going to catch flak for this, if only because looking at others' reviews I realized that this is the lowest the book has gotten. This is mainly because the people who read it are a self-selected group, and so they like it, unless they're from Montana, in which case they like it but call it too one-dimensional.
The major problem with this book is that it takes a single theme and doesn't go anywhere with it. There is no progression or movement in its somewhat flimsy premise. To quote the opinion of a man I respect: "The book is in bits and pieces--some of these bits and pieces are good, others are just...bits and pieces. It feels all of her friends told her to write this book, she wrote some bits, showed them around, had somebody read and like them, and then a publisher gave her a check and said 'finish the book'."
The insight provided by this book is debatable, given that she approaches the reality of Wyoming with a desire to reshape this in literary form to fit her notions of theme. There is some good imagery. There is also some wasted space, some disjointed incompleteness, and a sense that the book, as thin as it is, is itself wasting space by refusing to allow for more complex and varied explorations.
Rating:
Summary: Better Has Been Written
Review: I'm going to catch flak for this, if only because looking at others' reviews I realized that this is the lowest the book has gotten. This is mainly because the people who read it are the people who want to read it, and so they like it, unless they're from Montana, in which case they like it but call it too one-dimensional. The major problem with this book is that it takes a single theme and doesn't go anywhere with it. There is no progression or movement in its somewhat flimsy premise--to quote the opinion of a man I respect: "The book is in bits and pieces--some of these bits and pieces are good, others are just...bits and pieces. It feels all of her friends told her to write this book, she wrote some bits, showed them around, had somebody read and like them, and then a publisher gave her a check and said 'finish the book'." The insight provided by this book is debatable, given that she approaches the reality of Wyoming with a desire to reshape this in literary form to fit her notions of theme. There is some good imagery. There is also some wasted space, some disjointed incompleteness, and a sense that the book, as thin as it is, is wasting space by refusing to allow for more complex and varied explorations. -SLiGH
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