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jgintrovertedreader's review
2.0
William Kittredge, a famed author who is lauded in The Oregon Encyclopedia as a “preeminent voice of the American West,” reflects back on his life growing up on his family’s ranch in eastern Oregon.
I picked this up while my husband and I were staying in Oregon for six months with his job. I like to read books set in the state we’re currently in and Hole in the Sky showed up as a nonfiction pick on the lists I work from (Literary Hub and Book Riot, if you’re curious).
I just couldn’t click with this book.
Kittredge does write beautifully and he writes of a way of life that seems to be disappearing. He writes fondly of the hands who worked the ranch, some of them for years and years for little more than room and board. He describes the difficult land in the salt flats of eastern Oregon and northern Nevada. Readers share in the stark beauty of the harsh land even as his family is bending it to their will with irrigation pipes and heavy equipment.
The rest of this review doesn’t feel fair, but it’s how I feel. The toxic masculinity put me right off. Kittredge himself acknowledges that he grew up on a hard land that made the people hard. He recognizes that his own extended adolescence lasted at least into his 30s. He liked to throw his weight around when he had authority and he was unreasonably hard on his men even while he was trying to get away with his own drunken workdays. He neglected his children and cheated on his wife shamelessly. And he acknowledges in the book that none of this was right or good. I applaud him for admitting his own faults and putting them out there for anyone to read but I disliked the young man in these pages and, rightly or wrongly, that colored my perception of the entire book.
Readers who are better able to separate the author from the work and the older, wiser man from the younger, more foolish one will enjoy this more than I did. It is at its heart a reflection on a way of life that has all but disappeared.
I picked this up while my husband and I were staying in Oregon for six months with his job. I like to read books set in the state we’re currently in and Hole in the Sky showed up as a nonfiction pick on the lists I work from (Literary Hub and Book Riot, if you’re curious).
I just couldn’t click with this book.
Kittredge does write beautifully and he writes of a way of life that seems to be disappearing. He writes fondly of the hands who worked the ranch, some of them for years and years for little more than room and board. He describes the difficult land in the salt flats of eastern Oregon and northern Nevada. Readers share in the stark beauty of the harsh land even as his family is bending it to their will with irrigation pipes and heavy equipment.
The rest of this review doesn’t feel fair, but it’s how I feel. The toxic masculinity put me right off. Kittredge himself acknowledges that he grew up on a hard land that made the people hard. He recognizes that his own extended adolescence lasted at least into his 30s. He liked to throw his weight around when he had authority and he was unreasonably hard on his men even while he was trying to get away with his own drunken workdays. He neglected his children and cheated on his wife shamelessly. And he acknowledges in the book that none of this was right or good. I applaud him for admitting his own faults and putting them out there for anyone to read but I disliked the young man in these pages and, rightly or wrongly, that colored my perception of the entire book.
Readers who are better able to separate the author from the work and the older, wiser man from the younger, more foolish one will enjoy this more than I did. It is at its heart a reflection on a way of life that has all but disappeared.
zachkuhn's review
4.0
"In a family as unchurched as ours there was only one sacred story, and that was the one we told ourselves every day, the one about work and property and ownership, which is sad. We had lost track of stories like the one which tells us the world is to be cherished as if it exists inside our own skin. We were heedless people in a new country; we came and went in a couple of generations. But we plowed a lot of ground while we were there."
A beautiful book, but not one with any real sense of the reader. And that's fine. Sometimes reading someone else's notes to the world is fine enough reading.
A beautiful book, but not one with any real sense of the reader. And that's fine. Sometimes reading someone else's notes to the world is fine enough reading.
kathleenitpdx's review
4.0
A beautiful memoir. Kittredge tells the stories of his family and the land they occupied in southeast Oregon. He acknowledges the mistakes they made in "industrializing" the land and he acknowledges the mistakes he made in his own life. It took him a long time to outgrow his "little boy" stage and he left some wreckage in his wake. I got a little fed up with his alcohol fueled pity parties but he does salute the people in his life who nudged him in constructive paths. His odes to the land and to the tough people who worked it are wonderful. And his deep felt history of this land and his family had me setting my roots in it along with him.
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