Why I Came West: A Memoir | 
| Author: Rick Bass
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 153930
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1
ISBN: 0618596755
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.782092
EAN: 9780618596751
Publication Date: July 3, 2008
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Product Description
In this poignant look at the thirty-year journey of one of our country's great naturalist writers, Rick Bass describes how he fell in love with the mystique of the West--as a dramatic landscape, as an idea, and as a way of life. Bass grew up in the suburban sprawl of Houston, and after attending college in Utah he spent eight years working in Mississippi as a geologist, until one day he packed up and went in search of something visceral, true, and real. He found it in the remote Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, where despite extensive logging not a single species has gone extinct since the last Ice Age.
Bass has lived in "the Yaak" ever since, and in Why I Came West he chronicles his transformation into the writer, hunter, and environmental activist that he is today. He explains how the rugged, wild landscape smoothed out his own rough edges; attempts to define the appeal of the West that so transfixed him as a boy, a place of mountains and outlaws and continual rebirth; and tells of his own role as a reluctant activist?sometimes at odds with his own neighbors?unwilling to stand idly by and watch this treasured place disappear.
Rick Bass is the author of many acclaimed books of nonfiction and fiction, including The Lives of Rocks, The Diezmo, and Winter.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Metaphors abounds November 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you wanted to learn anything about why Rick Bass went west, you'll hardly find anything here. Most of the content becomes very repititious, and at about the 100 page mark you have read through most of the content. Bass attempted to organize his book with chapters like the one titled 'Oil', but after writing about oil for maybe two pages he returns to his thick metaphors which actually make his story harder to understand. Half the book is philosophy/metaphor, but meaningless philosophy. For example, he wonders a lot about whether he was destined to find the Yaak, as if somehow the forces of nature brought him there to protect it. Such an argument may sound poignant, something that a yuppy who moves to northern Idaho says, but it doesn't really have a place in a book that's supposed to be serious. His often spiritual reasons detract from sections where he wants to get a point across.
Later on he discusses policy which is more intersting and a break from his typical writing. He has made a compromise in his community between everyone, even ATV and snowmobile drivers who destroy tracts of land with their tires or belts. In that respect, the book is useful; learning how to join a small community in a venture is helpful for everybody to know, but I wouldn't buy this book again.
 bass at his worst October 6, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I'll keep this short, Rick Bass is one of my favorite authors, but this book is his worst. I have no Idea why he bothered to write it, but it is a waste of a great talent. I gave up after 60 pages.
 Good old Yaak - but same old Yaak August 3, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
I have been a big Rick Bass fan for many years. I enjoy his non-fiction and I revere his efforts to preserve the wilderness areas of his adopted corner of Montana. However, I simply take issue with this book about how misleading the title and liner notes are about its major content. Why I Came West? There is a little about that. And there is some solid thought and writing here. Good writing. But the vast majority of this book is an update (and revision) of his efforts to obtain Wilderness designation for the Yaak since he moved West. It could more correctly be titled Book of Yaak II, or better yet, Book of Yaak Revised. There are large portions of this book that seem to be a letter to his neighbors correcting or updating his true views on Wilderness and logging and even a weak attempt to discourage outsiders from wanting to see the Yaak as a destination, as if he has drawn ire from fellow Yaakians for the notoriety he has brought the area. But his love for the area easily diminishes any intended effect.
As a reader, I want a fair chance to choose what I am reading. I couldn't help feel throughout most of this read, that I was erroneously lured into the prospect of some new and different writing by Mr. Bass - but instead was being given the same whine in a different bottle.
Having said that, I will still look forward to his new efforts both in regard to conservation as well as writing.
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