Rating: 
Summary: The West seen through a filmmaker's eye
Review: In these essays about Wyoming, the imagery of mountain and plain and weather calls to mind the sweeping landscapes of John Ford movies. 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.
Her portrayal of the men who work in this environment is very different from the stereotypes we know from Marlboro ads, "Bonanza," and movie westerns. She finds cowboys often tender-hearted, quirky, and curiously courtly. Not to be outdone by the men in this world of extremes and hard work, the women she meets and befriends are tough-minded and independent. Completing her picture are the Native Americans, whom she portrays respectfully and with an ironic appreciation for incongruity, as they both recover and reinvent a 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.
Rating:
Summary: Complexity of modern western life
Review: Ms. Ehrlich has a fine sense of detail for the west of modern times. Those of us in the east tend to view "The West" as a continuous film festival at Aspen or Telluride, or the majestic mountain landscape of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. What we don't see is that 99% of the people live as they always have, with modern tinges: raising animals, surviving the elements, maintaining human relationships and doing it one day at a time. The only difference, is that the pickup truck is handy, and town and clean sheets is never too far away. A good book; makes me want to move there and shut the door behind me!
Rating:
Summary: Complexity of modern western life
Review: Ms. Ehrlich has a fine sense of detail for the west of modern times. Those of us in the east tend to view "The West" as a continuous film festival at Aspen or Telluride, or the majestic mountain landscape of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. What we don't see is that 99% of the people live as they always have, with modern tinges: raising animals, surviving the elements, maintaining human relationships and doing it one day at a time. The only difference, is that the pickup truck is handy, and town and clean sheets is never too far away. A good book; makes me want to move there and shut the door behind me!
Rating: 
Summary: An affirmation of life in a large landscape
Review: My first images of Wyoming were formed as a boy, watching "The Virginian" on TV. It was a landscape of gently rolling hills and a mild climate where you could go around in shirtsleeves pretty much all the time. Well, of course, Wyoming bears no resemblance to a Southern California back lot, as I learned when I finally went there as an adult. The climate is not benign, and the land has a scale that can make you and your problems seem very small indeed. Gretel Ehrlich writes about the true Wyoming of vast, lonely spaces, and brutal, bone chilling winters. In her book, it is a place to lose oneself and then find redemption in the rhythm of life lived in a hard place. She writes about the people that live in this place and their relationships.She writes of lonliness and endurance, friendship and new beginnings. The highlight of the book, for me, is "The Rules of the Game", an appreciative essay on Rodeo. I've not read anything like it. Ms Ehrlich's description finds the beauty in this celebration of both individual skill and achievement, and the power and grace of teamwork. It's a lovely piece in a wonderful book.
Rating:
Summary: An affirmation of life in a large landscape
Review: My first images of Wyoming were formed as a boy, watching "The Virginian" on TV. It was a landscape of gently rolling hills and a mild climate where you could go around in shirtsleeves pretty much all the time. Well, of course, Wyoming bears no resemblance to a Southern California back lot, as I learned when I finally went there as an adult. The climate is not benign, and the land has a scale that can make you and your problems seem very small indeed. Gretel Ehrlich writes about the true Wyoming of vast, lonely spaces, and brutal, bone chilling winters. In her book, it is a place to lose oneself and then find redemption in the rhythm of life lived in a hard place. She writes about the people that live in this place and their relationships.She writes of lonliness and endurance, friendship and new beginnings. The highlight of the book, for me, is "The Rules of the Game", an appreciative essay on Rodeo. I've not read anything like it. Ms Ehrlich's description finds the beauty in this celebration of both individual skill and achievement, and the power and grace of teamwork. It's a lovely piece in a wonderful book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but not groundbreaking
Review: This book offers a good description of what rural Wyoming life is like from the perspective of a newcomer. Unfortunately, it too often relies on the caricature of Wyoming rather than digging toward the truth of life in Wyoming. Of course, this is not surprising given the fact that Ehrlich wrote this book only having lived in Wyoming for a few years. You'll learn about Wyoming by reading this book. But realize that not every place is beautiful, that not every person is some quiet, semi-psychotic loner, and that Wyoming is much more complex than the cliches that Ehrlich presents.
Rating:
Summary: Surprises
Review: This little collection of prose is surprising. A reviewer who didn't care for this book mentioned that it didn't do much to develop or push its theme forward. I think that description is accurate, but misses the point: the book, like its subject matter (Wyoming, mostly, NOT Montana), defies being pushed in any direction. It has a way of imposing itself upon the reader. The vividness of phrase dominates the imagination, but the place it brings you to is an open space, where you're only supposed to linger, discovering and uncovering little surprises of detail as they arrive. It is a wonderful experience and highly recommended, though with a warning: you must be prepared to wander a bit and fall into a different rythm, with different rules, for at least a little while.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent lore of west, one woman's wyoming
Review: This memoir was assigned reading in a creative writing class I took entitled: The Art of Regionalism at University of California, Irvine. Ehrlich's poetic writing brings the reader the hardknocks life of ranchhands, sheep herders and fenced lands. The flavor of the West is resonant throughout, the feel of winter, the parch for water, the wide sky with its eye on everything below. The rodeo of characters, those ranchhands, who mostly have trouble with women and drink come to life as truly as they did to the author. This slim volume roots one into the West and I have a great urge to bring my children to Wyoming to breathe that fresh air and rejoice in that solitary life. This book, at my recommendation, has been selected by our book club for April, 1998. This review was written by Jacquelyn Beauregard Dillman, Newport Beach Public Library Foundation, Newport Beach, CA
Rating:
Summary: lovely
Review: to the above I would only add: and what Diana Muir does for New England in REFLECTIONS IN BULLOUGH'S POND.
Rating:
Summary: Renewal in open spaces.
Review: Written between the years 1979 and 1989 (p. ix), Gretel Ehrlich's twelve-essay collection opens with her arrival in Wyoming, when "the ground had just thawed" (p. 34) in the spring of 1976 (p. 3). For Ehrlich, the "emptiness of the West" became the "geography of possibility" (p. 9) and renewal. She originally moved to Wyoming from California to lose herself in its "new and unpopulated territory" (p. 3), but ended up finding herself instead. Wyoming woke her up (p. 4). "Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us" (p. 14). Ehrlich's writing is panoramic, breathtaking, and filled with local color. Her prose captures Wyoming not only as a place, but also as a state of mind, and as a metaphor of spiritual growth. Wyoming "blizzards, cold fronts, droughts, heat and wind" create "a ceremonial feel to life on a ranch. It's raw and impulsive, but the narrative thread of birth, death, chores, and seasons keeps tugging us until we find ourselves braided inextricably into the strand" (p. 103). "Winter is smooth-skulled," Ehrlich writes, "and all our skids on the black ice are cerebral" (p. 74). Ehrlich's essays contain moments of pure poetry. About being struck by lightning, she writes: "There was a white flash. It felt as though sequins had been poured down my legs, then an electrical charge thumped me at the back of my skull as if I'd been mugged" (p. 88). She describes a meteor shower as a "hot dance over our heads in sprays of little suns that looked like white orchids" (p. 104). About nude sunbathing, Ehrlich recalls: "I fell asleep and woke just in time to see the grim, flat head of a snake angling toward me" (p. 69). Ehrlich's book ends in the fall. "When leaves are totally corrupted by frost, they rain down into themselves until the tree, discovering itself, goes bald" (p. 126). Autumn in Wyoming reminds Ehrlich that under skin "lie the bones, waiting to reveal themselves" (p. 127). "Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons" (p. 130). Ehrlich knows Wyoming. Although a few essays here are stonger than the others, overall this is a seamless collection revealing the solace of Wyoming's open spaces. G. Merritt
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