Rating: 
Summary: Deeply insightful look at our culture via another culture.
Review: This book has been very important to me. It presents a way of living which is far more human, and more respectful of the Earth (and the rest of the universe, for that matter) than that presented by contemporary culture.
Rating:
Summary: So pleased it's back in print!
Review: This book is a marvelous collection of "an anthropology of the future." LeGuin excavates stories, songs, beliefs, myths, traditions, and more of the people who "will be might have been" someday living in what is now Northern California. At once Utopian and Dystopian, the culture that LeGuin shares with us is beautiful and complex. I read this book when it was first published in paperback in the mid-80's. It planted and nurtured in me a seed of hope that humans are capable of someday living in community in different ways than we do now. It opened in my imagination doors that I had never before noticed. Here is an example of a new narrative structure, or anti-structure. Here, too, is an example of a new-old social structure, a post-modern tribalism that has returned to "traditional" values such as living in harmony with oneself and one's environment, and recognizing the strength and beauty in ritual and tradition. Though others (including she) may disagree, I personally have always considered this work Mrs. LeGuin's crowning achievement. As Tolkien did in his Middle Earth stories, LeGuin in "Always Coming Home" creates a new-old world that is unfamiliar yet recognizable, someplace we want to go back to again and again. We are lucky indeed that this book is now back in print!
Rating:
Summary: So pleased it's back in print!
Review: This book is a marvelous collection of "an anthropology of the future." LeGuin excavates stories, songs, beliefs, myths, traditions, and more of the people who "will be might have been" someday living in what is now Northern California. At once Utopian and Dystopian, the culture that LeGuin shares with us is beautiful and complex. I read this book when it was first published in paperback in the mid-80's. It planted and nurtured in me a seed of hope that humans are capable of someday living in community in different ways than we do now. It opened in my imagination doors that I had never before noticed. Here is an example of a new narrative structure, or anti-structure. Here, too, is an example of a new-old social structure, a post-modern tribalism that has returned to "traditional" values such as living in harmony with oneself and one's environment, and recognizing the strength and beauty in ritual and tradition. Though others (including she) may disagree, I personally have always considered this work Mrs. LeGuin's crowning achievement. As Tolkien did in his Middle Earth stories, LeGuin in "Always Coming Home" creates a new-old world that is unfamiliar yet recognizable, someplace we want to go back to again and again. We are lucky indeed that this book is now back in print!
Rating:
Summary: Spiritual balm for a homesick Californian
Review: Though set in a post-apocalyptic future, this book transcends the SF&F genre with its multilayered interweaving of fantasy, myth, poetry, and narrative. For anyone familiar with the landscape and history of Northern California, this book is truly a homecoming.
Rating:
Summary: Spiritual balm for a homesick Californian
Review: Though set in a post-apocalyptic future, this book transcends the SF&F genre with its multilayered interweaving of fantasy, myth, poetry, and narrative. For anyone familiar with the landscape and history of Northern California, this book is truly a homecoming.
Rating: 
Summary: An Homage to Her Parents
Review: To understand this book (other than simply enjoying it), the reader needs to know that Ursula LeGuin's parents were Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. While neither of these names come immediately to most people's minds, another name might -- Ishi. Alfred Kroeber, as a professor of anthropology at Berkeley, was the man who wrote about Ishi, the last member of his native tribe. While by some modern sensibilities Ishi was seen as mistreated, Alfred Kroeber's work with him allowed a vast store of native lore and knowledge to be preserved. Alfred also worked very hard to bring a respect, knowledge and even admiration to the first peoples of California, a group often ignored because they fought no major wars and had, compared to the Plains, Mesa, Northwest Coast, and Woodland tribes, a very simple material culture; Alfred Kroeber tried to show that simple did not mean non-existent, and certainly not unimportant. Theodora Kroeber worked in an area her husband, but not her daughter, overlooked -- the stories. Her collection "The Inland Whale" is a wonderful and charming preservations of Pomo, Noyo, Nolo and other northern California tales. Combine these influences with Ms. LeGuin's known stands on the environment, feminism, and the like, stir very, very gently, add people willing to work on music, language, and art and the result is "Always Coming Home". The book is part anthropological/archaeological report, part recording of stories, and part cycle of life. There is a strange and beautiful poetry to this work. Consider the very first sentence: "The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." I'm not sure how I would even begin to parse that sentence for translation, but there is something about the use of multiple tenses that sets the tone for the entire book. Are there faults with this book? Yes, certainly. There are strong diatribes against machines and industrialization, yet the way of life of the Kesh is at least partially possible because of this technology, especially in communications (a standard trope in LeGuin's works -- ease of communications). There is also a heavy handed way to pointing out males as the source of all conflict; I do find this annoying. But these are comparatively small points in the book. Read it first and foremost as a love letter to the land and her parents and you will find the joy, the hope and the heart of it all.
Rating:
Summary: An Homage to Her Parents
Review: To understand this book (other than simply enjoying it), the reader needs to know that Ursula LeGuin's parents were Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. While neither of these names come immediately to most people's minds, another name might -- Ishi. Alfred Kroeber, as a professor of anthropology at Berkeley, was the man who wrote about Ishi, the last member of his native tribe. While by some modern sensibilities Ishi was seen as mistreated, Alfred Kroeber's work with him allowed a vast store of native lore and knowledge to be preserved. Alfred also worked very hard to bring a respect, knowledge and even admiration to the first peoples of California, a group often ignored because they fought no major wars and had, compared to the Plains, Mesa, Northwest Coast, and Woodland tribes, a very simple material culture; Alfred Kroeber tried to show that simple did not mean non-existent, and certainly not unimportant. Theodora Kroeber worked in an area her husband, but not her daughter, overlooked -- the stories. Her collection "The Inland Whale" is a wonderful and charming preservations of Pomo, Noyo, Nolo and other northern California tales. Combine these influences with Ms. LeGuin's known stands on the environment, feminism, and the like, stir very, very gently, add people willing to work on music, language, and art and the result is "Always Coming Home". The book is part anthropological/archaeological report, part recording of stories, and part cycle of life. There is a strange and beautiful poetry to this work. Consider the very first sentence: "The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." I'm not sure how I would even begin to parse that sentence for translation, but there is something about the use of multiple tenses that sets the tone for the entire book. Are there faults with this book? Yes, certainly. There are strong diatribes against machines and industrialization, yet the way of life of the Kesh is at least partially possible because of this technology, especially in communications (a standard trope in LeGuin's works -- ease of communications). There is also a heavy handed way to pointing out males as the source of all conflict; I do find this annoying. But these are comparatively small points in the book. Read it first and foremost as a love letter to the land and her parents and you will find the joy, the hope and the heart of it all.
Rating:
Summary: A woman's life-journey in a distant time, familiar place
Review: Ursula K. LeGuin's novel Always Coming Home, published in 1985, is a story of our own earth in the distant future. Ms. le Guin has set her novel in what is today the small community of Rutherford , in the western Napa Valley of Northern California. Nothing remains of twentieth-century civilization except an occasional piece of rubble and some areas poisoned by residual pesticide. Much of our present-day land is under water, including California's Central Valley and some of the coastal region, and the human population is sparse. However, the tone of the book is neither cautionary nor obtrusively alien; the topography, plants and animals of Northern California are easily recognizable, and the human culture--the people are the Kesh, or "Valley People"--although different from our own, is not jarringly so. The book is the story of one woman's life, from childhood to old age. North Owl is born in Sinshan, one of the nine small communities in the Valley of the Na (our Napa River
Rating:
Summary: It's the best!
Review: Ursula Le Guin always gives you a wonderful story, but here the "story" occupies only a fraction of the book. Not getting what I expected, I got irritated, frustrated, like some other reviewers, and I skipped great chunks to stay with the narrative, which of course is beautiful and moving. But once I'd finished that I found I needed to go back, and, much more slowly, to pay attention properly to the non-narrative, which is a picture of a whole world. I realized that in this book the energy, the imagination, and the love has gone into painting that future world. It's funny, vulgar, humane and wise. I think it's her greatest achievement, which is saying a lot. Do try it, but be patient, and trust the author. She knows what she's doing.
Rating:
Summary: Predicting, or observing?
Review: Ursula Le Guin is my favorite living author, and this is my favorite of her novels. If you don't want a review that comes from that position, which has developed over thirty years and uncountable books and is not (quite) as facile as it sounds, stop now.
This book, though, received a lot of criticism, some of it, perhaps, just. It was criticized for appropriating Native American culture, and although Le Guin is explicit in denying that as her intent, it's an issue worth discussing. Because Le Guin is the daughter of anthropologists specializing in deep study of native cultures, it might be truer to say that those visions of the world have appropriated and influenced her. Nonetheless, this is something to discuss if you teach the book, or recommend it to a friend.
Le Guin's also been variously accused of predicting the future with that least forgivable sin, earnestness, and of creating a prescriptive utopia in which no reasonable reader can believe. These charges, though, I find less worthy of discussion. Those who say it's unbelievable cite
a) the Kesh's success in dealing with the military-industrial Condor through nonviolent resistance (nonviolent resistance actually work? Ridiculous! Oh, wait a minute...),
b) the improbability of the Condor getting so caught up in their exploding toys that they don't make good use of them (also ridiculous! no one would build more and more bombers while failing to provide body armor for their troops, and the Afghanis never drove out the techno-heavy USSR with flintlock rifles), and
c) the belief that the culture of the Kesh "really" wouldn't be anything like this.
If we're talking of earnestness and prescriptive prediction, though, I think such critics undermine their own position. It doesn't get much more earnest, or much more prescriptive, than saying that someone else's imaginary culture "would" "really" have done thus-and-such. One of Le Guin's points is that the world doesn't *have* to go the way that some military-industrial-consumer Americans are prone to believe it must; there are other choices, though perhaps only after some very regrettable ecological catastrophes. She's also mildly famous for pointing out that SF authors don't predict the future; they observe the present. By that standard, ACH doesn't say that people will live in Kesh-like valleys, or that they should live in Kesh-like valleys, but that some people, right now, do in some sort live this way. And that, in my experience, is the literal truth. Those people are silenced and ignored and sneered at and mocked, but they exist, and not just in straw-bale solar houses.
In terms of Utopia, Le Guin explicitly rejects it(in the passage "Pandora Converses with the Archivist.") Now maybe she needs more than a single rejection to prove that this doesn't function as an improbable utopia; but it doesn't hurt to actually read the thing before dismissing it, and see what she does say.
I tend to think that it avoids utopianism by what IS included: for instance, people in the Valley routinely and slowly die of mercury poisoning (or something very like it, "sevai".) Not so Utopian, really. Again, rather than having machines which make all manual labor obsolete, we see two women digging a garden in soil that's "like wet concrete when it's wet, and like dry concrete when it's dry." They do this by digging a shovelful and then handing it to the other woman to clean off the concrete-like mud while digging a second shovelful with a second spade, and so on. If that's your idea of utopia, I can only say it's not mine: people suffer, people die, people work, sometimes, very hard. The fact that they aren't doing it in Wal-Mart, or in a cubicle, doesn't mean that hard work isn't, well, hard work. Thirdly, living "in harmony" in this valley (or anywhere else) isn't just a matter of the warm fuzzies: it requires some knowledge of ecology, and some brutal adjustments to it. These people can have two children per person, no exceptions. If you marry someone who's got two, you won't have any children of your body. If you want six, you're out of luck, that's all, and it's not such an easy proposition. "Living in balance" is a term easy to scoff at; but balance, as those know who've tried it, requires work and thought, both routinely thought to be unnecessary in a well-maintained utopia. And, finally, this "utopia" spans one valley in one mountain range: the Kesh's "goodness" hasn't convinced the rest of the world to change its ways, not even the Pig People next door. If picturing a world in which one insular society is allowed to live sustainably and peacefully is Utopian, then, yes, it's Utopian; but viewing this as so improbable as to be not worth contemplating says more about the reader than about the author.
Still with me? needless to say, I recommend it very highly indeed. Maybe it's not fair in its use of indigenous elements; I don't feel qualified to say. Maybe it is a Utopia, if people can die and suffer and sweat and fart in Utopia. But whether or no, it's a beautiful and entertaining and thought-provoking book.
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