I ran into this book in the stacks and liked the title and the cover. I have a fantasy of going to work a summer on a dude ranch which is how this guy started so it sounded like a good fit.

Except he’s a whiner. Oh, life is so hard. Yeah, like we all haven’t gotten ourselves into a hard place where everything was bad and then we made some more wrong decisions but still we lived to tell about it.

He’s a Chicago city boy who thought two years of dude wrangling and a year on someone else’s cattle farm bought him enough smarts to have daddy buy him his own ranch in a climate he didn’t know shit about. Big surprise he failed. Anyone would. Especially anyone who found themselves incapable of asking questions of the surrounding ranchers who’s cattle weren’t all falling over dead. But really, you can’t expect someone who finds fish trapped in a shrinking puddle and doesn’t choose to eat them himself, or who faces a downer calf and chooses the slow death of suffocation rather than the quick one of a shot to the head, and who then takes it to the dump instead of puts it in his freezer as veal, to make it. The photo on the front of the cowboy in the grocery store was telling I guess.

Still, it was interesting enough. Not the story but looking at his writing and his life as an observer, musing over the choices he made (why document this exactly) and the way he chose to describe them.

I hope he is happier working for someone else than managing his own ranch (I can see why that would be for a lot of us), but really, I hate memoirs of failure. You can learn a lot from other people’s failures but really, I know enough of them in person already.

At first I found this book really irritating to read. Who CARES about your divorce, lady! But then I found it enjoyable enough. And there was one absolutely dynamite quote: “We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses - one foot is on the horse called “fate,” the other on the horse called “free will.” And the question you have to ask every day is - which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?”

And I’m with her on “any excuse for a party”.

This book was easy to read and it explores some interesting territory but it doesn’t ask the questions that its story longs to. Like, was his entire disease actually caused all along by all the drugs he was taking. That would be my take on it.

Still, it is heartening and strengthening to my own biases that he overcame such huge MH issues through nothing but his choices. We choose our minds.

Sad that the medical and industrial/school complex caused his suffering for so many years, along with his parents trusting the doctors more than the kid.

Terrific book. If I had the money, I’d take all his classes.

This is a fascinating and an infuriating book. First of all, the author doesn’t know how to tell and weave a story. But she documents thoroughly so at least you know when she is conjecturing herself and when she has evidence to back something up.

Second of all, the author is a total product of modern times, unable to imagine what life for Martha might have been like. I say this because the author states that Martha’s knowing what the various internal organs of a human were at an autopsy was evidence of her medical knowledge when any idiot who has ever killed a chicken for Sunday dinner knows what all the internal organs are, and when they don’t look right.

Second and a half, that is, a continuation of above, the author feels the need to insert her opinion that Martha strongly values her “career” but the author never feels the need to conjecture that Martha loves her family, or values her garden.

But despite the author’s shortcomings, the story and its insights into life and culture are compelling.

Like all of Maya’s writing, enjoyable and sometimes surprising, and supremely well written.

Very short, sweet vignettes, most some sort of morality tale. Lovely, easy, sweet read.

I have read this before. And I’m sure there are other Sun Bear books in my library—time for me to organize it so I can find them! It is time for me to read this again as I’ve met someone who for years worked with Sun Bear.

(Spirits, many thanks.)

Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberland is a classic. This one not so much. It probably doesn’t help that I remember all these years that he writes about in this book, knew the characters. His predictions of things such as silt filled lakes simply haven’t come true. Etc.

Still, he can capture a vignette, like the 18 yo guy getting on the dole of “complete and total disability”.

The problem here is as it is everywhere: Caudill is a liberal and the answer is not a liberal answer (and the answer is not a conservative one either). The answer is freedom. Not an advantage to the coal companies OR to a dole to the hillbillies. ARC and Appalshop and ASD and Pittston are ALL one and the same thing: crooked and exploitative. The answer is to respect an honest poverty and to not demean our diet as “dismal cornbread and beans and potatoes” (Really, only an idiot could have said that, and he did) and to not think the answer lies anywhere at all outside of us.

I first read it in 9th grade maybe. I loved it then. I thoroughly enjoyed this re-reading of it too. I can’t believe I’ve never read My Friend Flicka and I’m hoping the library has it soon so that I can make up for that. And Green Grass of Wyoming.

Also re-reading this book sort of strengthens my desire to maybe go out to Wyoming or somewhere one summer and work on a dude ranch! The kids aren’t grown enough yet, but I don’t think I’ll be too old to do it.

Very helpful in being able to look at Jesus without all the power trappings of Christianity.

With this exception: Chopra acknowledges the aspect of Jesus angry at the temple, angry at the Pharisees, but he doesn’t address how to incorporate that part of Jesus and his teachings into your life, focusing instead on the meek and mild aspects.

There’s more to it, at least there is for me.