Rating: 
Summary: Superb!
Review: I read Spragg's Fruit Of Stone and was disappointed with the silly plot. The writing, however, convinced me to try Where Rivers Change Direction. It is a magnificent book in all respects. Buy this book!
Rating:
Summary: As Good as They Say
Review: I read Spragg's novel, "Fruit of Stone," first, and was left rather cold. I'm glad I ventured forth with "Where Rivers Change Direction" because it is truly brilliant.This is a writer who can burnish a sentence the way a saddlemaker polishes leather--the love of craft is obvious, and the end result is a quiet elegance that is breathtaking. He loves the passive verbs...so do I. The stately passivity take the wildness of ranch life from the hands of "action packed" Hemingway types and snares it in amber. Posterity over posturing? Sure, I'll take that! He's capable of being thoughtful, brash, graphic, elegiac, and, at times, pretty funny. I adored "Wapiti School," wherein he nails Candy Dohse, his first true love, right on the forehead with a snowball during recess. He even put a pebble in the snowball first. Ah, young love! There's no riders in purple sage, crazy saloon whores, shootouts, chuckwagons, or wacky Western shenanigans, and the "New West, worse than the Old West" place dysphoria/post-mod malaise is absent, as well. What you have instead is Spragg's life--from youth to maturity--carved away from the bone as if by a hunter's skilled hand. Okay, that was a (poor) attempt at a Spraggy sentence. So, don't read me...read him!
Rating:
Summary: WHAT IS IT ABOUT WYOMING?
Review: I too grew up in Wyoming spending brittle springs on horseback for my family. If ever you have wondered what it feels like to connect with the silence and spirit of the wilderness Mark is your surefooted guide. Not only does he whisper the secrets of humanity, but he also makes you achingly aware that you probably have never searched the world or your soul like you should have. Yet, after you have closed his book, your spirit stirs as if it finally understands all of those profound moments of your life that passed by before you got the chance to understand the meaning of them. This book stays with you. It leaves you feeling slightly exposed and makes you want to understand more about yourself. I read it and became homesick for the plains and even that Wyoming wind. Bravo Mark, I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end.
Rating:
Summary: For lovers of cowboy stories everywhere
Review: I was recommended this book by a friend and it was stunning. Great prose and a natural ability to tell a story. Mark Spragg has written a fine book that I could easily read again. To think the West is still lived this way so recently was an eye-opener. Well done
Rating:
Summary: For lovers of cowboy stories everywhere
Review: I was recommended this book by a friend and it was stunning. Great prose and a natural ability to tell a story. Mark Spragg has written a fine book that I could easily read again. To think the West is still lived this way so recently was an eye-opener. Well done
Rating:
Summary: Spraggs book has something for everyone.
Review: I will reccomend the book "Where rivers change direction" to all my friends. It is easy to read and at the same time extremely powerful. If he comes to your town for a book reading, go see him. Mark Spragg stories come to life when he reads them. I can hardly wait for November to see him at Aunties in Spokane.
Rating:
Summary: Spraggs book has something for everyone.
Review: I will reccomend the book "Where rivers change direction" to all my friends. It is easy to read and at the same time extremely powerful. If he comes to your town for a book reading, go see him. Mark Spragg stories come to life when he reads them. I can hardly wait for November to see him at Aunties in Spokane.
Rating:
Summary: Life as we know it in Wyoming
Review: In the farthest reaches of the Mountain West, where there are still unnamed streams, water is not just necessary to life, it *is* life, full of melody and mystery, the only stuff from which the Earth can conceal nothing. Water is so vital to these vast spaces once called The Big Empty that it flows through our dreams, our industry and our very literature as both the real and symbolic essence of life. So it is with Mark Spragg's "Where Rivers Change Direction," a collection of essays about Spragg's adolescence as the son of a dude rancher in a half-tamed part of Wyoming where men have christened streams with names such as Sunlight, Mist and Cloudburst. Spragg's collection isn't about water, but about growing up, not only as the son of a wilderness dude-ranch operator, but also as a working-hand in the family business. From the one-room school in Wapiti, Wyo., to the Crossed Sabers Ranch bunkhouse where he sleeps with the other hired hands, Spragg paints a vivid portrait of life in the American Outback. A new, lyric literature of the West is beginning to trickle out of the high places toward the flatland, and Spragg's finely wrought essays are easily equal to much of the beautiful fiction that is beginning to define the region's connections between the living land and the ever-changing self. In this book, a river runs through a heart. For men and water, one stream becomes another and a little more about our Earth is revealed.
Rating:
Summary: Fine writing by an excellent Wyoming essayist
Review: Many fine things have been said here already about this collection of essays by a gifted and thoughtful writer. Spragg's memories of his boyhood are vivid and precise, and the narratives around which many of his essays are constructed are compelling and suspenseful, their resolutions often breathtaking. As just one example, the dangerous hunt for a wounded bear evolves into an evocation of a search-and-destroy mission in Vietnam. There are many ways to read these essays -- as nature writing, coming of age memoir, record of a vanishing way of life. For me, the essays are most absorbing when Spragg tells of his teenage years, working in the all-male world of his father and the cowboys who work for him. They capture the awkwardness of learning to take on a man's responsibilities when they require a fearlessness and stoic toughness more common to pioneers and the Wild West than the urban environment of most of his contemporaries.
There's a poignance that comes a bit clearer in the final essays, which skip forward in time to the author's middle years. Here you pick up a sense of something gone awry, a disillusionment and a good deal of personal anguish. There is a winter spent alone in a snowbound house as he recovers from a personal malaise identified by no more than the reference to severe leg pains. In the final chapters, he walks the back roads and irrigation ditches of Powell, Wyoming, in search of some measure of equanimity while his mother slowly dies of emphysema. The title, "Where Rivers Change Direction," seems to be a reference to the Continental Divide, and maybe also to the watersheds that emerge in all our lives and pull us with a gravitational force we don't recognize at the time and come to know only long afterward. I recommend this book to anyone interested in western literature, personal memoirs, gender studies, and finely crafted writing.
Rating:
Summary: It grabs your senses and doesn't let go.
Review: Mark Spragg does such an amazing job of pulling the reader into his enviroment that I could taste the dust, smell the horses, feel the bitter bite of the cold and visualize scenes that I sometimes wished I couldn't see so clearly. This is one I will read again and again.
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