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Summary: Only stories this strong could match the powerful setting
Review: Mark Spragg's stories, like Jim Harrison's, feature larger-than-life characters, heroic actions, and spectacular landscape. They read like myths. But these are the true stories of Spragg's own childhood in a wondrous place. The exotic adventures are rendered so clearly that we feel ourselves in the middle of them, and see them as windows not only to Wyoming, but the human spirit. With descriptions so lyrical, dialog so trenchant, and passion so deeply felt, surely it is Spragg himself who turns rivers, with the power of his prose.
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Summary: More praise for Mark Spragg's Where Rivers Change Direction
Review: PUBLISHERS WEEKLY-Starred Review"Wyoming, land of wind and dust, of suicides, loneliness and fierce lovemaking, of uninterrupted vistas stretching 20 miles in every direction, of hard-drinking men and fighting women, forms the backdrop to Spragg's brave and beautiful coming-of-age memoir. Readers expecting a quaint, picturesque yarn will find instead an elemental, powerful confrontation with the naked realities of living and dying. Growing up on the high Yellowstone Plateau on the state's oldest dude ranch, a family business dating back to 1898, Spragg wrangles horses for his taciturn father, trying to win his respect and approval. At age 14, Spragg shoots and mercy-kills his beloved, aged, sickly steed, whose corpse will be used as bait for bears targeted by human hunters. The teenage Spragg joins his father on hunts, an experience he recalls ruefully (he no longer hunts, he reports, and became a vegetarian for five years). With self-deprecating wryness, the author, a screenwriter and essayist, re-creates adolescent crushes and hijinx. From quotidian events-communing with horses, attending a livestock auction-he fashions existential encounters with nature, self, fear, death, God. Composed in clean, crisp prose, his loping narrative is peopled with memorable characters, like his 40-ish mentor and bunkmate, John, a smiling, battle-scarred WWII veteran, or the mediumistic Greenwich Village waiter from India who tells Spragg, then 27, about his dead infant sister, reducing him to tears. Encompassing his marriage, divorce and remarriage, the book closes with Spragg's almost unbearably poignant account of caring for his mother, dying of emphysema and housebound on an oxygen inhalator. A piercing voice from the heartland, this resonant autobiography weds the venerable Western tradition of frontier exploration of self and nature with the masculine school of writing stretching from Hemingway to Mailer." LIBRARY JOURNAL-Starred Review "Enormously well written, Spragg's first book wraps the reader in the landscape, the life, and the essence of Wyoming, excelling as nonfiction literature. In 14 essays, Spragg, a screenwriter, essayist, and fiction writer, describes growing up on a dude ranch in the high Yellowstone Plateau, which straddles the Continental Divide in the northwest corner of Wyoming. Spragg straightforwardly documents his life among horses, wildlife, cowboys, wilderness, and his brother, father, and mother in a way that absorbs the reader right into the emotional center of each story. He draws us in with frank lines such as these: 'This place is violent, and it is raw. Wyoming is not a land that lends itself to nakedness, or leniency. There is an edge her; living is accomplished on that edge.' Highly recommended for both academic and public libraries."
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Summary: Wyoming, like no place on earth
Review: The book was given to me as a gift, little did I know that I was about to relive my child hood, my youth, my fifty plus years on the high plains of Wyoming. The smell of horse farts in the early dawn, cold feet, till there is no longer pain. Getting a case of 22 shells for Christmas, birthday, and wearing out the gun . Mark has finnaly writen a book of "how the west is" at least the last 50 years. To see death as an almost constant player, hunting, calving, blizzards, drunk driving, fast cars, all part of Wyoming. The country school, first love, almost social retardation. 60 miles from town is a long way, few people can stand the loneness. Twenty years behind the times, still is a good place to be in 2000, May Mark Spragg share more of his life with us , in many more books to come,as his works touch a nerve few authors today can.
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Summary: You'll feel like you live on a ranch!
Review: This book was extremely well written. I have always lived in big cities, but thanks to the wonderful writing by Spragg, this book made me feel like I grew up on a ranch in a small town out west! The book takes a serious of seemingly independent short stories and weaves together a picture of one boy - one man's - growth from a child to a man. It makes us grow with him, feel pain and joy with him, experience life with him. By the end you feel an intricate part of this boy's life, and you long to know more about him. We follow him as he grows up, does his chores, and learns about life. Read this book- you won't regret it.
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Summary: You'll feel like you live on a ranch!
Review: This book was extremely well written. I have always lived in big cities, but thanks to the wonderful writing by Spragg, this book made me feel like I grew up on a ranch in a small town out west! The book takes a serious of seemingly independent short stories and weaves together a picture of one boy - one man's - growth from a child to a man. It makes us grow with him, feel pain and joy with him, experience life with him. By the end you feel an intricate part of this boy's life, and you long to know more about him. We follow him as he grows up, does his chores, and learns about life. Read this book- you won't regret it.
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Summary: you.must.read.this.book.
Review: This is a high and wide western book that will disarm you. Spragg knocked the wind out of me with his tactile evocation of northwest Wyoming. Having lived in western Montana, and now living in the east, I was sharply reminded of every scent and turn of western landscape. True to American form, Spragg discovers identity and frailty in isolation. True to western form, his literary canvas is huge and his vocabulary winsome. Even though "nostalgia can be dangerous" (Sherman Alexie) I think Spragg earns this life, and the ultimate transcience of it, through his maturation. The main character lives true to the title: in a small life alone, all rivers change direction.
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Summary: Spragg could be a reincarnation of Hemingway
Review: This is one of the most beautiful, enlightening and transporting books I have ever read. I am a housewife in Iowa and a contemporary of the author. I have never lived in a part of our country where man finds himself in the middle of the food chain. Mr. Spragg's essay's take me to that place in a way that my very senses become sotted with the sting of the Wyoming wind, the piercing cry of a horse's pain, the chaffing of a new pair of cowboy boots on a young boy's feet. His observations about the people in his life are precise, penetrating and without apology. I came to know the people in his world more intimately than I know friends and family in my own. It is amazing to me that the author lived the incredible life he has--in such an unforgiving, brutal, and spectacular environment as the Wyoming wilderness-- and yet retains the sensitivity to write about it with such clear, powerful, and poetic prose. This book cast a spell over me. I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end.
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Summary: A very beautiful book.
Review: This memoir by Mark Spragg is one of the best books I've read in years. And I read a lot of books. His imagery and descriptive lines aren't just written. The words are sculpted into exquisite granite sentences like the mountains that surrounded him as he grew up on a dude ranch in Wyoming in the 1960s. I read the book two weeks ago and can still remember one or two, paraphrased here. He's shoeing a horse with John, one of the hands, and he gets put down a bit by a man he respects, perhaps, more than his father. He writes that he didn't mind being a boy, but didn't like being treated like one. Later, in describing his school, which had about 12 children, he says it was painted the color of an elk's eye. I mean, this is terrific stuff and there are lines like that on every page. The only other writers I've read who do this well are Barbara Kingsolver and Owen Parry. Sure, there may be others, but I've not read them yet. You have to read this book. It will make you laugh, perhaps cry, it will give you goose bumps and it will make you think. It is a gem.
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Summary: A Work of True Art
Review: To me, Mark Spragg is a truly gifted writer, with the feelings, insights and language skills that enable him to honestly and forthrightly communicate with the reader. His sincerity, the acuity of his vision, his recollections of a unique childhood, his growth toward manhood and the resolution of his relationship to his father, to horses and to an unforgiving but beautiful land are beautifully expressed. I have given copies of this book both to friends and to my adult children -- none of who have any real knowledge of the land and environment of which he writes, yet all were as impressed as I was by this book. Would that he continues to write, and further shares his soul with us. I feel blessed to have found and read Mark Spragg's book.
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Summary: The Child's Truth
Review: What makes this book extraordinary is the author's ability to reach back into his child self, to recreate for the reader what it was like to be a young boy growing up in the foothills of the Wyoming wilderness, intimately connected to his natural surroundings and the creatures that inhabit it. Horses, we discover, are much more than a means of making a living. They are part of this boy's blood, welded to his bone structure, and tuned to his thoughts. And it is through this fusion of boy and horse that we get our first glimpse of what it's like to live on the edge of wilderness, subject to the whims of high altitude weather, sharing the landscape with grizzlies, elk, coyotes and coons, and learning from an early age to deal with danger and pain. As the book unfolds in a series of episodes, each a self-contained story connected by the boy's evolving perspective, we learn about how this harsh country shapes and defines its inhabitants. We learn about knives and guns, gentling horses and hunting bears, drunken cooks and the reality of death. This is a world that leaves little room for daydreams, but fills the heart and mind nevertheless with the vibrancy of life. Rarely has a book touched me with such immediacy and precision. Anyone who has been out in the wilds as a child will immediately recognize and respond to the young boy's awareness of his place in the world, his connectedness to all things. If the book lacks anything, it is completion and resolution. The stories found later in the book are full of the author's adult dilemmas stemming from a childhood lived so far outside the norm. He struggles with cities and relationships, his need for isolation and the demands of family. Finally, he must come to terms with his mother's lingering death, which ends the book on a sad and frustrating note. This is an absolutely exquisite book, containing some of the finest writing I've ever read, but one that ultimately feels incomplete.
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