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| Author: Gretel Ehrlich
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 95331
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.5
ISBN: 0140081135
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.54
EAN: 9780140081138
ASIN: 0140081135
Publication Date: December 2, 1986
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| Customer Reviews:
 Well Written November 21, 2004
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I first read this book when i was a junior in college. It was my last block of the year. When i first though of Nature Writing i think of Transcendentalism with Thoreau and Emerson. Though this book among others changed my mind.
Ehrlich writes of living in Montana and during cattle drives. The details of life in the far west are great. The descriptions of what cow hands do with a years worth of money still, by blowing it on booze and fun it great. The book can be slow at times, yet I feel that this is deliberate in that cattle herding can be slow. In some ways the books is evenly paced. When she talks about the reasons for going to Montana to live there for a time one has to wonder if you, yourself, could do that. I know that for me the answer would be no.
This book is for anyone who likes reading about American Nature Writers.
A love affair with Wyoming September 22, 2003
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
Gretel Erlich was a poet and filmmaker when she first came to Wyoming in 1976. She was so taken with everything about the place that she became a cowherd, which gave her time to write about the American West. Reading her books, however, is very much like seeing a film, for her filmmaker's eye and awareness of nuance and gesture is evident in the way she chooses her words.
In The Solace of Open Spaces, Erlich presents us with an eclectic bunch of frontier characters that she met while working as a ranch hand. Almost unaware of what's been accomplished, we readers find ourselves shedding former stereotypes of these people in exchange for seeing them for what they are: unique, quirky, interesting, inexplicable men and women. The Weather (and the word deserves that capital letter, as you'll see upon reading the book) plays as large a role as the people in Ehrlich's book.
About the title: When she arrived in Wyoming, Erlich was grieving the death of someone important to her. As she works hard at physical labor, meets new people, falls in love with the land, and sheds her past like sweat running down her back, healing from grief occurs - although she doesn't exactly say this.
Altogether, a beautiful book and a wonderful read.
 Better Has Been Written October 25, 2002
19 out of 25 found this review helpful
I'm going to catch flak for this, if only because looking at others' reviews I realized that this is the lowest the book has gotten. This is mainly because the people who read it are a self-selected group, and so they like it, unless they're from Montana, in which case they like it but call it too one-dimensional.
The major problem with this book is that it takes a single theme and doesn't go anywhere with it. There is no progression or movement in its somewhat flimsy premise. To quote the opinion of a man I respect: "The book is in bits and pieces--some of these bits and pieces are good, others are just...bits and pieces. It feels all of her friends told her to write this book, she wrote some bits, showed them around, had somebody read and like them, and then a publisher gave her a check and said 'finish the book'."
The insight provided by this book is debatable, given that she approaches the reality of Wyoming with a desire to reshape this in literary form to fit her notions of theme. There is some good imagery. There is also some wasted space, some disjointed incompleteness, and a sense that the book, as thin as it is, is itself wasting space by refusing to allow for more complex and varied explorations.
The West seen through a filmmaker's eye August 2, 2002
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
In these essays about Wyoming, the imagery of mountain and plain and weather calls to mind the sweeping landscapes of John Ford movies. Ehrlich, born and raised in California, retains her outsider's eye for detail, and is able to translate the perspective of someone trained in documentary filmmaking very effectively into the medium of words.
Her portrayal of the men who work in this environment is very different from the stereotypes we know from Marlboro ads, "Bonanza," and movie westerns. She finds cowboys often tender-hearted, quirky, and curiously courtly. Not to be outdone by the men in this world of extremes and hard work, the women she meets and befriends are tough-minded and independent. Completing her picture are the Native Americans, whom she portrays respectfully and with an ironic appreciation for incongruity, as they both recover and reinvent a lost heritage. Hers is also a personal story. Beginning with the wrenching death of a close male friend, it recounts in her growing love for Wyoming and its people the discovery of a new life. And while her book is no heart-on-the-sleeve display of pain and recovery, one senses at almost every step the healing process that underlies the words. As slender as a book of poems, this volume of essays calls out to be read slowly and savored, word for word.
Complexity of modern western life December 9, 2001
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Ms. Ehrlich has a fine sense of detail for the west of modern times. Those of us in the east tend to view "The West" as a continuous film festival at Aspen or Telluride, or the majestic mountain landscape of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. What we don't see is that 99% of the people live as they always have, with modern tinges: raising animals, surviving the elements, maintaining human relationships and doing it one day at a time. The only difference, is that the pickup truck is handy, and town and clean sheets is never too far away. A good book; makes me want to move there and shut the door behind me!
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