Rating: 
Summary: An experience for the winter lover
Review: In Rick Bass' Winter: Notes From Montana, Bass describes what it is like to truly experience the winter season. For one who has never seen snow or experienced cold, Bass puts his thoughts into words better than a true northerner ever could. He describes his story perfectly throughout this book and doesn't hold any of his thoughts back. We often wonder, "Will he have enough wood?" or "Will he make it through the winter?" The book is true honesty and represents what someone could experience when living through winter for the first time. I don't typically read these kinds of books, but I found this one very enjoyable, entertaining, and very hard to put down. Bass's journal like writing gives us an almost day by day detail of what he goes through getting ready for a place where the winter is one of the harshest around. In the end Bass can not leave this place where he has spent much blood and sweat. Overall I think this book is a must read for anyone who likes outdoor settings, and a good true story. Winter is something that some of us never experience, but Bass let's you know exactly what everyone has been raving about.
Rating:
Summary: A Look at Winter
Review: Julie Parsons Review Winter Notes from Montana Fantastic! Five thumbs up. Rick Bass brings to us city dwellers a love for open spaces, wilderness, and the untamed north country. The simple common outdoor sights become unique through Bass's writing. The wait for snow becomes an adventure in suspense. A walk in the snow brings a new awareness of what silence is all about. Through Rick Bass's easy flowing style of writing you experience the excitement of seeing tracks of wolves, deer, and bear it grabs at your imagination. You want to pack your bags get in the car and head for the north land.To drive until the road ends, to blaze a new trail. Rick Bass takes nature seriously, he sees nature and our relationship to it as the most important purpose on earth. He write of a romance with the open spaces. Trees are sacred for their splendor, yet necessary for those who chose to be apart of the Yaak valley. Throughout Winter you feel a sense of purpose, A desire to communicate with nature, to build a relationship bound on unspoken trust, to realize your place in the scheme of nature. Rick Bass takes you on a journey while telling us how to relate to the elements. Rick Bass portrays his love of nature, simple pleasures and man in a powerful, complex and compelling way. If you love nature want to feel the freedom of the wild while sitting in a comfortable chair Rick Bass has a way of making you feel you are there.
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Summary: Solitude, Snow & Natural Beauty Prevail!
Review: Rick Bass is a gifted author with an amazing ability to make simple pleasures (like watching the snow fall) sound irresistible to even the most restless souls. "Winter" is effortlessly my favorite book of all time; a masterpiece of time and solitude. Often while reading the book, I almost want to sell everything and go off to Montana, cut wood, take great adventurous hikes and happily watch the snow fall for an entire day. We're missing the point of life - Rick Bass has captured it in this important book. Anyone who enjoyed Bryson's "A Walk In The Woods" should not miss this superior classic.
Rating: 
Summary: Cleanse Yourself in Winter
Review: Rick Bass is one of my favorite writers and in my opinion deserves much more attention. This book is a memoir of his first years in Yaak, Montana with his wife Elizabeth. They move from the city to a small cabin in the Montana wilderness. It is a beautifully written tribute to a world no longer in demand where the sound of silence feels too loud. Bass finds out just how little he actually knows, a marvelous experience in humility, once he encounters the harshness of winter. He writes about snow being strong and silent in the same breath. He discovers a new life where he only needs bare essentials to survive and soon finds that all other existence seems superficial. He writes in a style like no other man I have ever read almost poetic but not overdone, and like Walden, he suggests that tremendous value exists in the wilderness away from a roaring crowd. If you love nature and the idea of healing such as that found in solitude this book is for you. Bass writes so wonderfully that your senses are taken along with him on his various wilderness excursions for life's rations. My favorite passage is on page 81, on which he describes a lone male moose, "He broke into the smoothest of gallops, a lazy, long legged floating. His wide antlers could have held a tea service without spilling a drop, so smooth and level was his gait." How many men do you know who would think of a tea service and not a loaded gun upon seeing a magnificent male moose? This is where I find Rick Bass so appealing; in all his male machismo he finds the subtle intricacies of art in nature and has the ability to describe it all magically.
Rating:
Summary: A simple and eloquent celebration of all things natural
Review: Rick Bass transports the reader to a remote valley in Montana and convincingly portrays his love and affection for all things wild and natural. This testament to the environment never preaches yet may be one of the most powerful arguments to preserve that which is still wild. It calms the mind and stirs the spirit.
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Summary: A Self Discovery
Review: Rick Bass's, Winter[Notes from Montana], is a wonderfully depicted book of journal entries compiled during a man's journey into the wilderness and into oneself. Bass and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hughes, make an epic move to the most northern part of the United States in Montana, a remote country called Yaak Valley. He finds his calling and embraces a more simplistic, primitive life where reliance on self-sufficiency and self-dependency is critical to basic survival. Living in Yaak puts a brand new spin on survival for Bass, but more importantly spawns a revelation about himself in respect to everything else in nature, including man. For the first time he identifies his oneness with nature. "We re all close, we're all tied together." (p.36). This secluded lifestyle heightens an awareness in Bass of his own instincts; instincts that are dampened by the interdependency created within a society. He gains a true appreciation for the graces of nature that living in modern society tends to neglect and lose sight of. His admiration for the virtues of nature generates resentment towards society's self-righteousness and its false perception of superiority over all other species on earth. While facing the challenges of survival in the wild, life's rudimentary lessons lends him essential survival skills unlike the customary skills he grew up with. He discovers that the finer aspects of life, which are priceless, are obtained within nature itself. Survival in a pretentious society stems from material wealth where happiness and success are measured by the size of one's pocket book. Bass finds his own meaning of wealth in Yaak Valley; a true sense of belonging with nature. Bass's move into the wilderness not only granted him the opportunity to witness the essence of nature and the discovery of himself, but also spawns the epiphany to the dynamics of life itself. He draws the reader into his own experiences leaving you with a sense of triumph from passing the test. A test to whether the soul has the endurance, strength, and perseverance, both emotionally and physically to flourish in God's country.
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Summary: Finding Himself in the Woods
Review: Somewhere in Montana Bass finds himself. An engaging tale of becoming the man he always hoped to be, Winter is moving and an easy read. Readers will want to hide in the trees, chop some wood, and fall in love with chainsaws after this one. Wish he talked more about Elizabeth, his partner, instead of relegating her to the background. Otherwise, great read!
Rating: 
Summary: Short Book
Review: Summary: Chops wood. Sharpens saw. Chops more wood. I was hoping to learn about Montana winters.
Rating:
Summary: A winter in the Yaak
Review: The book is structured like a journal, with entries beginning on September 13 and ending on March 14. Bass writes about anxiously anticipating and then experiencing winter in remote northwest Montana. In addition, the reader feels Bass growing to love his new home. These two themes may sound simple but Bass writes so well that you, too, may feel like a southerner experiencing a *real* winter for the first time and you may also feel drawn to the Yaak. Bass really captures the experience of loving a place. Good humor in the book, too, and evocative sketches by his wife. Read his "Book of the Yaak" and especially "Lost Grizzlies", both excellent books. And while I'm on recommendations if you liked "Winter", try Jack Nisbett's "Purple Flat Top". This book is set not far from the Yaak in rural Washington state. It's just as well written and is another book about moving to and living in a place by someone who loves his homelands.
Rating:
Summary: A winter in the Yaak
Review: The book is structured like a journal, with entries beginning on September 13 and ending on March 14. Bass writes about anxiously anticipating and then experiencing winter in remote northwest Montana. In addition, the reader feels Bass growing to love his new home. These two themes may sound simple but Bass writes so well that you, too, may feel like a southerner experiencing a *real* winter for the first time and you may also feel drawn to the Yaak. Bass really captures the experience of loving a place. Good humor in the book, too, and evocative sketches by his wife. Read his "Book of the Yaak" and especially "Lost Grizzlies", both excellent books. And while I'm on recommendations if you liked "Winter", try Jack Nisbett's "Purple Flat Top". This book is set not far from the Yaak in rural Washington state. It's just as well written and is another book about moving to and living in a place by someone who loves his homelands.
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