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roseleaf24's review against another edition
3.0
This had the feel of a collection of personal essays, more than a narrative memoir. Bell's story was interesting, but I found myself wanting to know more of the people and the stories. Her focus was instead on the land and the language she was using. It was an excellent example of that, if that's your thing. I enjoyed the descriptions of Wyoming and the insight into ranching life.
arielamandah's review against another edition
4.0
4.5 stars, pushing 5. I read a lot of “people outside in the wilderness, grappling with their demons” memoirs. This one stands out. The writing is beautiful. Free of cliche, it gets to the nut of a sentiment or emotion. The book is honest about people: their flaws and failings are not romanticized, but like the landscape and raw nature, they are complex and often unfair.
mobeanmt's review against another edition
4.0
I've seen this book lumped in with other recent lady memoirs like "Eat, Pray, Love" (which I did NOT LIKE, at all, really) and "Wild" (which I DID like), so I didn't know what to expect. I found Laura and her story to be less impressive but more relatable by far then either of the above for me. Hard work and honesty about a life of opportunities taken and those lost. A real and true reflection of loss and our inability to always handle it well. Raw and rivoting. Recommended.
liralen's review against another edition
5.0
Some people, at loose ends, crave stability. A good job, with room for advancement. A steady partner. The rhythms of the life one grew up with. Bell craved wide-open spaces, and she let the American West embrace her and pull her in.
Bell was in her early 20s when she set out to herd sheep and do whatever else might keep her outdoors, in the isolated expanse of the West. Don't do it, her intellectual, white-collar family said. You're wasting your time; if you're not where you want to be at 50 you'll have only yourself to blame. And it's true -- come 50, she is not where she wants to be. But not in the sense that her family expected, and not, I think, with many regrets about her choices.
There are losses here -- sometimes small, sometimes on a heartbreaking scale. There are also successes, big and small, and joys, and at some indistinguishable point along the line the West becomes not just a thruway for Bell but a home.
That might be my favourite thing about the book -- how sweeping, yet specific, it is. Bell spends little time on her pre-Wyoming life, and she picks and chooses which parts of which stories to tell, and how, and when. She's pulling not from a season or a few years but from half a lifetime, and that seems to give her the distance to tell hard stories beautifully. (Sometimes with a little too much restraint? Read this article, but preferably after reading the book.) I don't give very many books five stars, but this one just kept taking my breath away.
Bell was in her early 20s when she set out to herd sheep and do whatever else might keep her outdoors, in the isolated expanse of the West. Don't do it, her intellectual, white-collar family said. You're wasting your time; if you're not where you want to be at 50 you'll have only yourself to blame. And it's true -- come 50, she is not where she wants to be. But not in the sense that her family expected, and not, I think, with many regrets about her choices.
There are losses here -- sometimes small, sometimes on a heartbreaking scale. There are also successes, big and small, and joys, and at some indistinguishable point along the line the West becomes not just a thruway for Bell but a home.
That might be my favourite thing about the book -- how sweeping, yet specific, it is. Bell spends little time on her pre-Wyoming life, and she picks and chooses which parts of which stories to tell, and how, and when. She's pulling not from a season or a few years but from half a lifetime, and that seems to give her the distance to tell hard stories beautifully. (Sometimes with a little too much restraint? Read this article, but preferably after reading the book.) I don't give very many books five stars, but this one just kept taking my breath away.
jennyshank's review against another edition
5.0
In her remarkable memoir, Laura Bell offers up exquisite snapshots from her life spent working as a sheepherder, ranch hand, forest ranger, and masseuse. Bell's adventure began when she was a minister's daughter just out of college, back home in Kentucky, and couldn't think of what to do with herself but to pursue her "childhood's private world blown larger than life, with a horse, two dogs, a rifle, a wilderness. " In 1977, she came west with her sister, whose husband was a paleontologist working on a dig in Wyoming, and she never left.
Claiming Ground begins with an account of Bell's early days spent herding sheep in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin, where she was one of the only women in this occupation. At one point she and the sheep are restless in the heat, anxious to leave for the higher ground of their summer pasture. The man who tends Bell's camp tells her the road up to the pasture is a son-of-a-gun and it proves to be a difficult journey with her horse and sheep. Bell writes, "We'd made it, though not without false starts and backtracks to find the single spot of grace that might let us through."
In some ways this statement characterizes every aspect of Bell's life, a search for that improbable single spot of grace that allows her to live as she wishes to. Her writing is like this too, a careful search for the spot of grace in how best to capture the events of her life in this memoir that conceals as often as it reveals.
Claiming Ground isn't written in a confessional mode. There are gaps in time. Bell doesn't discuss the relationship that results in a pregnancy she ends with an abortion, nor does she detail the procedure. There are several love affairs that she doesn't write much about. Bell may have grown up in the South, but she writes like a Wyoming native, reluctant to share too much of her private pain. Bell doesn't take writing a memoir an excuse to blather on about her problems. Rather, she makes it the opportunity to reveal the beauty that she has witnessed in a life spent closer to nature than most people of this century experience. Her passages about the open landscape are often arresting:
"Antelope nibble on sage leaves, waiting delicately for the storm. I've been watching it simmer in the western sky, steely gray closing in over Heart Mountain and swallowing the northern Absarokas. The air is still, the sheep stunned quiet by the heat. Then there's a puff of breath from the east, and another, the feel that something's happening. This must be what war is like, nights spent quietly waiting for bombs to release this tension in the air."
As a child Bell was a bookish loner, and she writes that among the sheepherders, with plenty of time alone, she finds where she belongs: "I had discovered a place where no one expected me to do or be much of anything. My fellow coworkers were tender alcoholics, muttering derelicts, societal rejects, and I had found a certain delicious comfort in their company."
Bell makes a natural semi-hermit, alone with her animals and books, attentive to the wilderness. She even lists the plants that sparsely vegetate the desert land with reverence: "Sagebrush, four-wing saltbush, greasewood, saltsage, spare clumps of slender wheatgrass, Indian ricegrass with its panicles sprung open like fireworks."
Eventually Bell comes down from the mountain, meets a man when she's working as a ranch hand, marries him, and in doing so makes herself a family. Her husband, Joe, lost his first wife to a horse-riding accident a little more than a year before he marries Bell, and so she helps raise his two girls, Amy and Jenny, who were four and one when they met her.
But Bell discovers Joe is plagued by the same disorder that beset many of the shepherds she worked with, who lived this reclusive life to save themselves from the raging alcoholism that pursued them in town. Among the herders, I would see it again and again. Someone fastidiously proud of his cooking or leatherwork one day could be barking like a dog or peeing in his pants the next.
Some awful things happen to Bell in Claiming Ground, the worst of which is revealed at the outset of the memoir in its dedication to Jennifer Nicole Little (1981-1999). Like the lives of all parents whose child dies, Bell's is more characterized by sorrow and loss than joy. But she writes of her pain with grace and flint, transmitting beauty and hard-won insights through her transfixing prose. Early in the book, Bell wonders of another woman, "when it was that the small disappointments began to gain on the joy," and we see this happen in turn to Bell as her life unfolds. But as some of Bell's relationships fall away, others grow stronger. Her portraits of her evolving devotion to her parents are tender and touching.
The 17th-century French theologian Nicolas Malenbranche wrote, "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul." If that is true, then the many hours Laura Bell passed in the wilderness have been a prayer, revealing her to be her preacher father's daughter, however much she felt her personality and choice to reinvent herself as a shepherd made her the black sheep of the family.
Claiming Ground begins with an account of Bell's early days spent herding sheep in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin, where she was one of the only women in this occupation. At one point she and the sheep are restless in the heat, anxious to leave for the higher ground of their summer pasture. The man who tends Bell's camp tells her the road up to the pasture is a son-of-a-gun and it proves to be a difficult journey with her horse and sheep. Bell writes, "We'd made it, though not without false starts and backtracks to find the single spot of grace that might let us through."
In some ways this statement characterizes every aspect of Bell's life, a search for that improbable single spot of grace that allows her to live as she wishes to. Her writing is like this too, a careful search for the spot of grace in how best to capture the events of her life in this memoir that conceals as often as it reveals.
Claiming Ground isn't written in a confessional mode. There are gaps in time. Bell doesn't discuss the relationship that results in a pregnancy she ends with an abortion, nor does she detail the procedure. There are several love affairs that she doesn't write much about. Bell may have grown up in the South, but she writes like a Wyoming native, reluctant to share too much of her private pain. Bell doesn't take writing a memoir an excuse to blather on about her problems. Rather, she makes it the opportunity to reveal the beauty that she has witnessed in a life spent closer to nature than most people of this century experience. Her passages about the open landscape are often arresting:
"Antelope nibble on sage leaves, waiting delicately for the storm. I've been watching it simmer in the western sky, steely gray closing in over Heart Mountain and swallowing the northern Absarokas. The air is still, the sheep stunned quiet by the heat. Then there's a puff of breath from the east, and another, the feel that something's happening. This must be what war is like, nights spent quietly waiting for bombs to release this tension in the air."
As a child Bell was a bookish loner, and she writes that among the sheepherders, with plenty of time alone, she finds where she belongs: "I had discovered a place where no one expected me to do or be much of anything. My fellow coworkers were tender alcoholics, muttering derelicts, societal rejects, and I had found a certain delicious comfort in their company."
Bell makes a natural semi-hermit, alone with her animals and books, attentive to the wilderness. She even lists the plants that sparsely vegetate the desert land with reverence: "Sagebrush, four-wing saltbush, greasewood, saltsage, spare clumps of slender wheatgrass, Indian ricegrass with its panicles sprung open like fireworks."
Eventually Bell comes down from the mountain, meets a man when she's working as a ranch hand, marries him, and in doing so makes herself a family. Her husband, Joe, lost his first wife to a horse-riding accident a little more than a year before he marries Bell, and so she helps raise his two girls, Amy and Jenny, who were four and one when they met her.
But Bell discovers Joe is plagued by the same disorder that beset many of the shepherds she worked with, who lived this reclusive life to save themselves from the raging alcoholism that pursued them in town. Among the herders, I would see it again and again. Someone fastidiously proud of his cooking or leatherwork one day could be barking like a dog or peeing in his pants the next.
Some awful things happen to Bell in Claiming Ground, the worst of which is revealed at the outset of the memoir in its dedication to Jennifer Nicole Little (1981-1999). Like the lives of all parents whose child dies, Bell's is more characterized by sorrow and loss than joy. But she writes of her pain with grace and flint, transmitting beauty and hard-won insights through her transfixing prose. Early in the book, Bell wonders of another woman, "when it was that the small disappointments began to gain on the joy," and we see this happen in turn to Bell as her life unfolds. But as some of Bell's relationships fall away, others grow stronger. Her portraits of her evolving devotion to her parents are tender and touching.
The 17th-century French theologian Nicolas Malenbranche wrote, "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul." If that is true, then the many hours Laura Bell passed in the wilderness have been a prayer, revealing her to be her preacher father's daughter, however much she felt her personality and choice to reinvent herself as a shepherd made her the black sheep of the family.
whitewolfofrivia's review against another edition
4.0
Peaceful, as a country woman I loved it. I did not love the plot jumping back and forth, particularly when introducing people Laura would meet years later. Lots of people show up in this book and I forgot who was who, because I couldn’t keep track of the names. But an excellent book for someone who loves the country, and it is all written with beautiful prose. A city person might find this book boring; after all there is an inherent understanding and love one must have to truly understand and enjoy the peace of wide open spaces peppered with flora and fauna, watched over by towering mountains that contain hidden secrets.
ngerharter's review against another edition
5.0
(2nd read, still 5 stars)
2019 Extreme Book Nerd Challenge - Book you love - read it again
2019 Extreme Book Nerd Challenge - Book you love - read it again
jj24's review against another edition
5.0
With a heart as large as the "big sky" country she writes of, Laura Bell writes a memoir that intertwines a sense of place and the sense of what it means to be alive.
Bell recounts her years working with sheep and cows in Wyoming, living a spartan life from a material standpoint, but having a deeply rich inner life. Her beautiful prose captures the wonder of the landscape, and the aches and joys of her heart.
While the first part of the book felt somewhat disjoined to me (I'll dock her half a star), the last few chapters are tenderly poignant.
4.5 stars rounded up to 5. A special thank you to Cathrine for recommending such a great book.
Bell recounts her years working with sheep and cows in Wyoming, living a spartan life from a material standpoint, but having a deeply rich inner life. Her beautiful prose captures the wonder of the landscape, and the aches and joys of her heart.
While the first part of the book felt somewhat disjoined to me (I'll dock her half a star), the last few chapters are tenderly poignant.
4.5 stars rounded up to 5. A special thank you to Cathrine for recommending such a great book.
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