The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.63 (561 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0670786047 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-10-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
She lives in Longmont, Colorado. Her essay collection, One Degree West, won several regional awards and was a finalist for the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. Julene Bair is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. She has taught at the University of Wyoming and the University of Iowa.
Threaded throughout each chapter are her travels along the Ogallala’s path as she puzzles out the changes the water table has suffered and challenges old agricultural traditions that continue to persist in defiance of logic. Book groups should find much to discuss here, from love to family to the big questions we all must face about how we live now. A woman facing midlife alone with a teenage son, she finds herself falling into an unexpected love affair at the same time her father’s death forces changes to the family farm. From Booklist *Starred Review* In this thoughtf
She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father’s wish and commandment, “Hang on to your land!” But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family—like other irrigators—pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. A love affair unfolds as crisis hits a family farm on the high plainsJulene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas’s beautiful Smoky Valley. As traditional ways of life collide with industrial realities, Bair must dramatically change course.Updating the territory mapped by Jane Smiley, Pam Houston, and Terry Tempest Williams, and with elements of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, The Ogallala Road tells a tale of the West today and points us toward a new way to love both the land and one
The Call of Land, Water, and Love Melanie I. Mulhall I drove through Kansas the first time in 1986. I was moving from Illinois to Colorado, full of vigor and excitement. I could easily have fallen asleep at the wheel during the four-hundred-mile drive through Kansas. I found it that barren and devoid of interest. I wondered what kind of people lived in such a state. I made that trip again in 2011, but this time, I didn't find Kansas to be quite so boring. I wasn't sure if I had changed or Kansas had, but I still wondered what kind of people lived in that state.Julene Bair has answered that question beautifully in The. Sometimes interesting, but needed more focus I have read, and enjoyed, a number of memoirs about farming and environmentalism. Because of that, I thought The Ogallala Road would be a book I would completely enjoy.To be fair, there were things I liked about this book. Bair has a beautiful style that well suits the landscape about which she writes. I was completely engrossed for about the first 3rd of the book, and then things started to fall apart for me.Up until that point, the book seemed to be a love story--a love story with the prairie and a love story with Ward, the rancher she meets on a visit home to Go. Searching for water and grace Story Circle Book Reviews "I found the pond lying still and innocent, a receptive, vulnerable reflection of the sky. This wasn't rainwater. It hadn't rained in weeks. My brother Bruce had been managing our farm since our father died--four years ago now, in 1997. He told me he was worried that the ground would be too parched to plant dryland winter wheat this September. No. This pond was what the pioneers and early settlers had called live water. It had found the surface by itself without the aid of rain, or today, a rancher's pump. It came from the aquifer, exhaling into the bed of the Litt