|
The Solace of Open Spaces | 
| Author: Gretel Ehrlich
Publisher: Amazon Remainders Account
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $9.33
You Save: $4.67 (33%)
New (6) Used (16) Collectible (1) from $5.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 1003072
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.6
ASIN: B000GG4IL0
Publication Date: December 2, 1986
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still." Whether she's reflecting on nature's teachings, divulging her experiences as a cowpuncher, or painting vivid word portraits of the people she lives and works with, Gretel Ehrlich's observations are lyrical and funny, wise and authentic. After moving from the city to a vast new state, she writes of adjusting to cowboy life, boundless open spaces, and the almost incomprehensible harshness of a Wyoming winter:"When it's fifty below, the mercury bottoms out and jiggles there as if laughing at those of us still above ground. Once I caught myself on tiptoes, peering down into the thermometer as if there were an extension inside inscribed with higher and higher declarations of physical misery: ninety below to the power of ten and so on." After experiencing the isolated life of a sheep herder, she writes, "Keenly observed the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient." Ehrlich's gift is one of subtle precision. She writes beauty into the plainest of thoughts and meaning into the simplest of ideas: "True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere." --Kathryn True
Product Description
A stunning collection of personal observations that uses images of the American West to probe larger concerns in lyrical, evocative prose that is a true celebration of the region.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 The Solace of Open Spaces May 29, 2008
This was more a personal essay than anything and of course that was the intention of the author. But all in all I could not get through it. It was not that interesting and the writing style was lacking for my taste.
However, it was pretty good at times and being a writer my self I have to admit that just because I didn't like it to a 5 star extent doesn't mean it was bad.
Is there there there? November 7, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Not being a fan of travel books, my comments may be biased. Years ago when I wandered the globe, my desire was to live as a part of the places in which I found myself. I made a terrible tourist. I mostly wanted to go where I could speak the language of the natives and getting a letter home took weeks. The world isn't like that any more, nor maybe has it so been for a while for tourists and travel writers. The four books by Gretel Ehrlich I have read run the gauntlet. "This Cold Heaven", tells of her visits to Greenland between 1995 and 2001. It best conveys a feel of what life is like for, maybe the last generation of, Inuit hunters who use dogsleds. And out on the sled is where Ms Ehrlich most wants to be. It is a beautiful book interspersed with Rasmussen's, diaries and descriptions of his life in the north. The reader gets a sense of how the Inuit world is put together, its roots, some differences between various groups and the challenges it faces, at the edge of the internet age. The greatest changes, to a relatively remote First Nation in Canada I am familiar with, were brought about by television. A kind of passivity set in: no more making music and living by one's body became less central. When dogsled, hunting Greenlanders tell Ehrlich that they just want to give their children the experience of the hunt and that the children will decide in their turn whether they will live that way, I sense she is documenting the last of the dogsled hunts. In my First Nation, the elder who last used dogs is now too old, so four wheelers and snow mobiles are a way of life.
What I lose patience with in Ehrlich's writing is most manifest in her book, "Questions of Heaven." She goes to China in search of Buddhism during the early stages of "getting rich is good." I don't quite understand her purpose except relating the difficulties of travel, telling anecdotes about some Chinese and their experiences from "let a thousand flowers bloom" to the cultural revolution, and her frustrated search. She goes to decayed monasteries which are just beginning to be opened to tourists. She is overwhelmed by the density, filth, poverty, pollution, etc. of China. Had she done some homework, all this wouldn't be such a revelation. In the Tibetan areas, she mentions the existence of Tibetan speaking westerners but does not explore who they are and why they are there even though she says she practices Tibetan Buddhism. The most interesting part of the book are her descriptions of the old man who was tortured during the cultural revolution and survived to resurrect traditional forms of music with a rag tag bunch of people from his valley. She doesn't explain why where he lives is more prosperous and happy than other places she visits.
What I find difficult in many nature/travel writers she pours on in this book. Flowery language describing clouds, hills and landscape doesn't do much for me. I have spent much time out of doors. I could wax poetic about the blood red bark of an old manzanita in contrast to the peeling orange brown of a madrone, or the stages of a slime mold or a clown nudibranch grazing urchins. The silence of the redwoods, desiccated by summer dryness just before the coming rains, filled my yesterday's walk. No signs of animal life but a few dragonflies and a fleeting flock of bushtits. A few days earlier I had used "dead" to describe it to a walking companion, and she was a bit offended. A precontact California Indian would have known what I meant. Ehrlich evens makes mention of it during her recovery in California related in book four. But it takes more than poetic adjectives to convey a scene in nature. Reading lengthy passages of romantic descriptions of nature becomes tedious. I want to know why Ehrlich travels and writes, how the places she goes are assembled, the role landscape plays, their history, their challenges, the differences among their inhabitants, etc. If her book is the journey of an American Buddhist, there is very little critical relating to Buddhism except that either nobody she meets practices meditation, even chanting, or she doesn't inquire about it.
The other two books, "Solace of Open Space," and "A Match to the Heart," fall somewhere in between. The former is good in the beginning, particularly in the descriptions of sheep herding, but becomes spotty after her marriage and life ranching. Ehrlich has really lived in Wyoming. She earned her spurs. But it would be great to know more about the strong, silent herders and ranchers: who are they; what is their inner landscape like; what are the tensions and rewards of working as they do? How does machinery effect their lives? During my brief stint as a cowboy, besides pushing cows between gigantic pastures, and sorting out the non-pregnant ones, I spent days building fences and hours in a four wheel drive pickup bouncing off-road. The chapters on the rodeo and Sun Dance give us far too little information on what these institutions are really like and what makes them tick. Ehrlich is also a tease when it comes to her personal life. We learn of the tragic death of her boyfriend which leads to her to stay in Wyoming, but the stuff of her one affair and her marriage are only hinted at. She is a beautiful woman in cowboy country. There has got to be more to it.
In the last of the foursome, "A Match to the Heart," she is truck by lightening and relates her torturous recovery. It is a touching book. I have a lot of empathy with her struggle. Her descriptions of the deep humanity of her cardiologist are beautiful. But the book also leaves me a bit unsatisfied. The husband who doesn't seem to care, her trip to London, which seemed so inappropriate given her physical condition, the people with whom she connects but also seems distant from---I want to know more about her inner processes, her meditation practice. "A Match to the Heart" has aspects of a travel book, a chapter about being on a boat in the Alaska Panhandle without any sense of why she is there: a paying tourist; a guest of scientists or friends? When Ehrlich is on the way to recovery she lays out a map of the world pondering where next. It is hard to fathom, that she runs off from her Wyoming ranch to far distant travels and undertakes similar jaunts during her absences from Greenland. When she casually mentions these, the style of life implicit in so bouncing around the world seems inconsistent with the sense of place she is trying to convey. I am deeply attracted to what she has to say when she really inhabits the places in which she spends, as they say, quality time. I guess I want more of that from her.
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
Drifter's Escape February 15, 2007
I have to confess that part of my enthusiasm for this volume resides in the fact that Erlich's poetic leanings summon similar images from my rural surrounds, unlikely as the thought may be of Central Australia's arid bush from Wyoming high country. Her slim volume, polished from journal observations, realises her hopes to make authentic art with parallel qualities of earth:'weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; winds would sweep away obtuse padding'. Her hold over this reader slackens after her marriage, as if the budding sexual tension gave to her writing, her observations, a newcomer's keeness of perception. Of course these don't suddenly disappear after consummation. Something in the rythym of the construction weakens; the warp and weft between perceptions of elements, the gossip, the events, the researched historical passages that inform the present. I haven't followed Erlich's career. Annie Proulx's,'Close Range', in the sense I'd prefer, has, assuming the deft observational writing with more expanded takes on her characters that the 'solace of open space' has ellicited. The Erlich book is a tonic for jaded urban spirits and confirmation that the elemntal life can regenerate a metaphoral attitude.
 A chiseled paean to the high plains of Wyoming February 16, 2006
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Outsiders (Easterners, city types) are generally disoriented by Wyoming upon first encountering it. 99% of them probably equate the place with the far side of the moon and hope they never have to return. Ehrlich is one of the remaining 1% who came to Wyoming from "outside" and fell in love with it enough to move there permanently (I put myself in the same category though I haven't moved there - yet). In this book, actually a series of short essays, she tries to capture the allure of the place for her readers. She writes about the land, of course, and the weather, but also about the people who "are strong on scruples but tenderhearted about quirky behavior." Much of her time is occupied with sheepherding, something she describes as "a slow, steady trot of keenness with no speed." Ranch life, living on land short of water, and winter, which "laminates the earth with white, then hardens the lacquer work with wind" - all come under her scrutiny. She describes a rodeo which she thinks must only make sense to a rancher. Like Wyoming itself, it's a tough though gentle book, unsentimental and honest. An excellent book.
Surprises December 17, 2004
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This little collection of prose is surprising. A reviewer who didn't care for this book mentioned that it didn't do much to develop or push its theme forward. I think that description is accurate, but misses the point: the book, like its subject matter (Wyoming, mostly, NOT Montana), defies being pushed in any direction. It has a way of imposing itself upon the reader. The vividness of phrase dominates the imagination, but the place it brings you to is an open space, where you're only supposed to linger, discovering and uncovering little surprises of detail as they arrive. It is a wonderful experience and highly recommended, though with a warning: you must be prepared to wander a bit and fall into a different rythm, with different rules, for at least a little while.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
